Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ride-hailing apps may help to curb drunk driving

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 383 posts

Re: Ride-hailing apps may help to curb drunk driving

#321

Post by ythn »

jhpaul wrote: post #65

Based on personal experiences this isn't surprising. When I was in college in a small town in the late 00's, many friends and acquaintances would drive across town after heavy drinking. 10-15 minutes, straight roads, little traffic. Other than not going out, or not getting home, you didn't have many options. It was a hour long walk or a $20-40 cab ride, if you could get one. I was recently back in town for a wedding…

People that drive drunk should be charged with attempted homicide because apparently the current penalties are not enough. Drunk drivers are just as deadly as your average mass shooting. Ram head first into a van and kill a family of 5 in one swoop. Nobody talks about it. The president doesn't address the nation if drunk drivers kill too many people in one year. Nobody seems to care. It's just "the price to be paid" for legal booze.

Re: Ride-hailing apps may help to curb drunk driving

#322

Post by greenshackle2 »

cmdrfred wrote: post #218
posguy wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go to Idaho or Montana then, you'd be surprised what people will work for when there are no alternatives.

I think the issue is I and my peers never really received any education about how to make it in the world (outside of simply "go to college"). If you are working a minimum wage or low paying job you really have two jobs the second being constantly searching for and applying to better opportunities. Also I suspect another issue is the cliffs for government benefits. If you work between 45 - 60 hours a week for $12 - $…

See: http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/im...

IMO that's the strongest argument for replacing welfare programs by a negative income tax, or universal basic income.

Re: Ride-hailing apps may help to curb drunk driving

#323

Post by greenshackle2 »

MrFantastic wrote: post #288
toomanybeersies wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with that number. You're saying that 1 in 100,000 people don't get home safely while drink driving. That's 10 times lower than the yearly death rate from simply driving. And 1/3 road deaths are caused by drink driving.

My number is wrong, I just made it up. I think that actually number is more like 99.95% for a person with a .08. My point is that if you didn't care about moral hazard, the odds are overwhelming that you will make it home safe even if you drive drunk. I'm not condoning, just explaining drunk driving logic. That 1/3 road deaths is artificially inflated because if you had 1 drink and well under the legal limit it still…

> That 1/3 road deaths is artificially inflated because if you had 1 drink and well under the legal limit it still counts as alcohol related fatality.

As it should. 1 drink is enough to impair your ability to drive.

EDIT: I'm probably wrong, someone else in the comments posted data showing risk only increases after .03 BAC.

Re: Ride-hailing apps may help to curb drunk driving

#324

Post by ythn »

elliotec wrote: post #315
dmoy wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually still .08, not .05 (yet). It will be in about 1.75 years from now if there's no successful repeal before then. Given the LDS majority in the state, good chance it will stand in some form.

This is the least important issue of all time but somehow it is getting the most press. It should just pass and be done with. By the way I get annoyed when people say LDS is the majority here - LDS only makes up 41% of the entire state, and closer to 30% in SLC. The citizens aren't voting on this bill anyway.

> By the way I get annoyed when people say LDS is the majority here

Are you annoyed that the entire state was founded by LDS pioneers? Without the mormons, Utah would be west colorado wasteland or another desolate, sparsely populated state like Wyoming.

And 41% can be a majority depending on how you break down the remaining 59%

Re: Ride-hailing apps may help to curb drunk driving

#325

Post by Kiro »

webkike wrote: post #314
Kiro wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People downvoting me obviously haven't had anyone close killed by a drunk driver. Disgusting. Simple solution if you can't get home without driving: don't drink.

Your comment just isn't very constructive. Everyone knows that driving drunk is moral reprehensible. That's not the point. I'm sorry for your loss but I could just as easily say something along the lines of "Driving in general is not an excuse. People downvoting me obviously haven't had anyone close killed by a distracted driver. Simple solution: don't be distracted and drive." You're not wrong, but as long as we con…

The post I replied to sounded like it tried to justify it, like there was no other choice than to drive drunk. I also don't agree with you at all. You speak like it's some kind of technical problem that needs to be disrupted. If you drink and drive you're messed up and have big issues. Of course we should try to find ways to reduce it but you can never blame the system.

Re: Ride-hailing apps may help to curb drunk driving

#326

Post by nommm-nommm »

utexaspunk wrote: post #259
posguy wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cities could easily dezone. Most areas have only had zoning for 60 to 80 years, prior to that there was just fire & building code constraining you. What was added by zoning was height restrictions, parking minimums, building type eg. single family detached, and lot/building size minimums. The value that zoning provides is to segregate and disenfranchise the bulk of the populace, while spreading them out during the Co…

I dunno- Houston is notorious for its lack of zoning, yet it still grew the same sprawling manner. The fact is most of our cities did most of their growth after WWII. A baby boom, affordable automobiles, the interstate highway system, advertising, and FHA subsidies made mass suburban developments like Levittown profitable and desirable.

Houston pretty much has zoning they just don't call it zoning.

https://urbanedge.blogs.rice.edu/2015/09/08/forget-what-youv...

>Matthew Festa [is] a land use professor in Houston...

>For all that’s been made of Houston’s infamous lack of zoning, Festa said it increasingly seems that reputation isn’t deserved or even accurate.

>“We do have a lot of land-use regulations,” Festa said. “We still have a lot of stuff that looks and smells like zoning.”

>To be more precise, Houston doesn’t exactly have official zoning. But it has what Festa calls “de facto zoning,” which closely resembles the real thing. “We’ve got a lot of regulations that in other cities would be in the zoning code,” Festa said. “When we use it here, we just don’t use the ‘z’ word.”

Re: Ride-hailing apps may help to curb drunk driving

#327

Post by dbg31415 »

* Without Uber or Lyft, Austin Experiences Skyrocketing DUI Rates - Foundation for Economic Education - Working for a free and prosperous world || https://fee.org/articles/without-uber-or-lyft-austin-experie...

> Before Uber came to town in 2014, Austin Police Department’s data showed that the city had an average of 525 drunk driving arrests per month. When these numbers were revisited a year after ridesharing came to Austin, drunk driving arrests had dropped by five percent. This trend continued the following year when the number of drunk driving arrests dropped by an additional 12 percent, bringing the average number of arrests to about 438 per month.

> In May of 2016, the same month Uber and Lyft made the decision to leave Austin, the monthly rate of drunk driving incidents was down to an average of 358. However, within the first few months of Uber and Lyft’s absence, the number of DUI arrests increased by 7.5 percent from the previous year. In the month of July alone, the city had 476 drunk driving arrests.

Re: Ride-hailing apps may help to curb drunk driving

#328

Post by derefr »

metafunctor wrote: post #92
jhpaul wrote: post #65

Based on personal experiences this isn't surprising. When I was in college in a small town in the late 00's, many friends and acquaintances would drive across town after heavy drinking. 10-15 minutes, straight roads, little traffic. Other than not going out, or not getting home, you didn't have many options. It was a hour long walk or a $20-40 cab ride, if you could get one. I was recently back in town for a wedding…

It has always amazed me how casually people drink and drive in some countries; the US especially springs to mind. Over here, drinking and driving is an extremely shameful and embarrassing thing to do. I would say it's on par with hitting a child. You just don't do it, not to save 20 bucks, or to save you from walking an hour.

The [rural] US is much, much more spread out than most countries. This means that people in the rural US think of driving as a necessary and basic component of life; driving is just "how you get places", if there are places you need to get. So drinking and driving, though shameful, is necessarily normalized (not wholly, but somewhat) by people who are drunk, and yet need to go places.

That, and by the fact that in a lot of the very rural areas, drunk driving has a rather low fatality rate, given that there are no other cars on the road and no obstacles to crash into. If you run off the road, you just drive into some corn or wheat or alfalfa, or at worst hit somebody's cows. (These are the same places you'll see people e.g. allowing their young children to drive trucks or motorcycles—even by themselves, at night. There's just nothing much that can go wrong.)

(I think this is all also true of rural Russia, which is a large part of where the American stereotype of Russians as constantly drinking comes from.)

Re: Ride-hailing apps may help to curb drunk driving

#329

Post by elliotec »

ythn wrote: post #324
elliotec wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the least important issue of all time but somehow it is getting the most press. It should just pass and be done with. By the way I get annoyed when people say LDS is the majority here - LDS only makes up 41% of the entire state, and closer to 30% in SLC. The citizens aren't voting on this bill anyway.

> By the way I get annoyed when people say LDS is the majority here Are you annoyed that the entire state was founded by LDS pioneers? Without the mormons, Utah would be west colorado wasteland or another desolate, sparsely populated state like Wyoming. And 41% can be a majority depending on how you break down the remaining 59%

No, why would I be annoyed about the history of the founding of the west? I am very very familiar with it.

I'm only annoyed that people have been stating that same old statistic which hasn't been true for at least a decade.

41% is never a majority. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority

Re: Ride-hailing apps may help to curb drunk driving

#330

Post by lend000 »

Dotnaught wrote: post #232
lend000 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a strangely bitter way of looking at things. Ride sharing companies, including Uber, have brought tremendous benefits to society, and drunk driving prevention is probably at the top of the list. Uber has made the largest difference of all these companies because it has been the most aggressive in disrupting rent-seekers like taxi companies. The drivers and the general willingness of people to embrace the gig e…

"Bitter" is a strangely ad hominem argument. The thing is that Uber explicitly disclaims responsibility for its drivers in its terms of service. And in court, when an Uber driver is accused of a crime, Uber maintains it's not responsible. Eg.: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/a242e2ad2fab4f57805aa047f8c06... It's inconsistent to credit Uber with positive outcomes and not negative ones.

> It's inconsistent to credit Uber with positive outcomes and not negative ones.

The world is not so black and white my friend. Uber is most definitely credited with both negative and positive outcomes; however, 'an Uber driver is accused of a crime' is not a good example, as such an accusation does not reflect on Uber anymore than you being accused of committing a crime reflects on your employer, assuming you work for a large company. If, however, there was an example that read 'Uber drivers commit crimes on the job at a statistically significant rate compared to taxis, Lyft, etc.,' then we have a means to blame the platform itself.

Or in the case of the sexual harassment allegations, if this is a systemic problem at high levels of leadership, then that's a major, blameworthy issue.

Post reply on HN