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Ride-hailing apps may help to curb drunk driving

economist.com

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

#341

Post by ythn »

elliotec wrote: post #329
ythn wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

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

Do you have a source? Wikipedia seems to still support the "same old statistic" in a lot of ways and indicates by all accounts an LDS majority in Utah.

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

#342

Post by pluma »

adrianN wrote: post #246
pluma wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Directly? Yes. Indirectly? No. You're still posing a traffic hazard.

I guess if you're drunk driving at ~10mph the reduced reaction time isn't as important as when you're doing forty.

Except when you're driving at night without lights and are too buzzed to pay attention to traffic.

Road traffic relies on cooperation between the participants. If you can't pull your own weight (i.e. follow traffic laws, control your vehicle, etc), you don't belong on the road.

Also it's not about yourself. Sure, if you kill yourself in an accident on a bicycle you're less likely to injure somebody else but you're still inflicting all kinds of harm on others.

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

#343

Post by andrewfong »

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.

It may be wrong to drink and drive, but it happens pretty regularly (especially the "I've only had one beer" variety). From a policy (not a moral) perspective though, encouraging ride-sharing makes total sense here. It's a bit like teaching kids about birth control vs. abstinence. I don't condone minors having sex but a lot of them are going to regardless of what I think, so might as well make sure they're protected.

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

#344

Post by webkike »

Kiro wrote: post #325
webkike wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not saying you don't have big issues if you drive drunk but that statement is obvious and does nothing to solve the problem. No one is going to start accepting drunk drivers as good people. But maybe we can understand why people drive drunk and can fix that underlying cause. After all, all I want is for fewer people to drive drunk.

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

#345

Post by dnadler »

ythn wrote: post #335
elliotec wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 41% is never a majority In my country, 41% of people are red party, 38% are blue party, and 21% are green party. Which party has the majority share of voters?

I think you're confusing 'majority' and 'plurality'.

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

#347

Post by dsfyu404ed »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #239
arnsholt wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, the legal limit in Norway us basically the measurement error of the BAC tests; basically you should fail if you've had anything at all to drink.

That was one of those things my Norwegian spouse made sure I knew beforehand. It is .02 or something like that, and I believe it is measured slightly differently. He's also said that I can get penalized - through loss of license and other means - just by being a sober passenger with a drunk driver. It benefits me to make sure the other person is sober.

This makes me very uneasy.

If their field equipment is anything like SCRAM bracelets (same basic technology as a Breathalyzer) they're cutting all sorts of corners (demanding precise readings out of sensors that are running well outside their recommended operating environment with less calibration than recommended) and throwing false positives left and right.

Drunk driving penalties are too stiff to play fast and loose like that.

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

#348

Post by ythn »

dnadler wrote: post #345
ythn wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 41% is never a majority In my country, 41% of people are red party, 38% are blue party, and 21% are green party. Which party has the majority share of voters?

I think you're confusing 'majority' and 'plurality'.

My mistake, you are correct - plurality is the correct word here.

In my example the party with plurality can capture the majority of the vote, but that doesn't necessarily mean the party itself is a majority.

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

#349

Post by papabrown »

Let me start off by saying that I don't approve of drunk driving. That said, the laws and how law enforcement treats drunk driving and how alcohol related accidents are reported tell a very distorted picture. After the MADD campaigns picked up sufficient steam and states began taking drunk driving more seriously, numbers dropped. But then they quit dropping. So many states lowered BAC limits from .10 to .08 in order to include more drivers in the impaired category even though there was no evidence to support it. With numbers stagnating again, you see another push for states to lower BAC levels to .05 even though there is zero evidence that this will lead to fewer accidents. All it does is create more criminals on the road which the police can then catch, fine, and profit from.

In the US, more people are arrested for drunk driving than for any other crime. Nearly 1% of all licensed drivers has received a DUI in the last 3 years.

As all of this was happening, the definition of what was alcohol related began to expand. Currently if any party in an accident is under the influence, even if they were not operating a vehicle, it's alcohol related. These inflated statistics then fuel calls for more oppressive crackdowns on drunk driving.

Again, I'm not advocating drunk driving but we have to focus on the right problems. Like, how do you keep the people who are the most dangerous off the road? While the police are out spending resources racking up arrests for people who had a couple of glasses of wine with their meal, a large percentage of accidents are caused by repeat offenders. Nationally, over 33% of people arrested for DUI get another DUI. And people with multiple DUIs are overrepresented in fatal car accidents (4.1x more likely).

Considering the fact that the most common BAC of someone who has been pulled over for suspicion of DUI is .16, continuously lowering the BAC threshold in order to snare more people in DUI convictions is not the answer. They're not the ones getting into accidents.

Believe me, if they changed the laws and made it a crime to serve more than two drinks to someone unless they could prove they had a ride home (other than them driving, of course), the alcohol companies would quickly come up with solutions.

Clearly the government's interests are not aligned with lowering drunk driving. Lowering drunk driving costs money (public transportation options, better city planning, etc). Arresting people for drunk driving generates revenue from fines. If they were successful in lowering drunk drivers on the road they would be decreasing their budgets.

Until you can align motives with profits, you'll never fix the problem. You'll just keep increasing the base of people who are considered criminals.

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