The Truth About DUI Laws

10,311 LIVES PER YEAR LOST TO WOMEN DRIVING PASSENGER CARS

75,639,000 men drive passenger cars an average of 13,962 miles per year, for a total of 1,056 billion miles, and 71,376,000 women drive an average of 6,382 miles for a total of 455 billion miles.  24,087 men and 17,729 women are involved in fatal accidents of passenger cars each year.  Men have 22.8 accidents per billion miles driven, and women have 39 accidents per billion miles.  Women have 71% more accidents than men per mile driven.  If only men drove all of these 1,511 billion passenger car miles which are currently by both men and women, and if their accident rate remained the same, the number of drivers involved in fatal traffic accidents would decrease by 7,365 per year to 34,451, a reduction of 17.6%.   But the accident rate for men would decrease as well, which would result in a total of 10,311 lives saved per year.

POLICE REPORTS: 4% OF ACCIDENTS ARE "ALCOHOL INVOLVED"

Police reports show that four percent of traffic accidents are "alcohol related".   However, by the time advocacy groups like the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (which is an advocacy group for ever larger government)  filter the accident data through some extremely questionable assumptions, the percentage of men involved in fatal traffic accidents increases to 12.7% and of women to 4.4%.  Ignoring this disparity and  instead accepting the NHTSA data at face value, what is the very best we could expect if this program were a 100% success?  If it were possible to completely eliminate drinking and driving (which in reality is an impossibility), and if the elimination of drinking and driving reduced traffic fatalities by an amount proportionate to the reduction in drinking and driving (an extremely liberal, and unfounded, assumption), then the very best we could hope for with the current DUI laws is a 9.7% reduction in drivers involved in traffic fatalities.  Of course if the police reports are accurate and the assumptions made by NHTSA flawed (which they are), then the reduction would be only 4%.

NHTSA: 42% OF FATALITIES ARE "ALCOHOL INVOLVED"

When broken down by the number of persons involved in fatal accidents in 1998, 9,925 of the 102,382  people, of whom 42,503 were killed, were categorized as "alcohol involved".  This is after the NHTSA embellishes the police reported data with its "statistical model". This is only 9.7% of the total people involved, which should make anyone curious about where the headlines that proclaim "half of all traffic fatalities are caused by alcohol" come from.

NHTSA PADS THE DATA 10X

1,514 of those who were "alcohol involved" were PASSENGERS, not drivers, yet these accidents were still listed as "alcohol involved".  1,474 were PEDESTRIANS, 118 were bicyclists, 63 "others" who weren't even the drivers of the cars involved, who were all categorized as "alcohol involved".

Of the DRIVERS who were listed as "alcohol involved", 456 had a measured bac OF ZERO. Even though they had NO alcohol in their blood, they were still counted as "alcohol involved", presumably because of other dui laws like open container laws which have nothing to do with driver safety. 39 of them refused the test, which you MIGHT view as proof that they had a high bac--BUT THIS IS NOT PROOF. Another 599 were considered "alcohol involved" even though they were never given the test. Another 815 were given the test but the results were nonconclusive. Another 609 were listed as "alcohol involved"--even though it was unknown how this was even established. Another 1,155 had a bac between .1 and .9, which even MADD admits is a NON-FACTOR in vehicle accidents.

A grand total of 3,083 drivers actually had a bac greater than .10, which is 5.4% of all the drivers.  69% of those who were the reason for the accident being listed as "alcohol involved" were everything but drivers who may have had  an accident in which alcohol was a factor.  It's extremely easy for scientists in Washington, D.C. who have all the data to make the above calculation.  It's also very easy for them to make a final determination about what percentage of the accidents were caused by a driver who was drinking alcohol

POLICE REPORTS PAD THE DATA 3.2X

The police reported data included a similar proportion of non-drivers, thus only 1.25% of the "alcohol related" accidents included drivers with a bac greater than .10.   With such a low percentage of accidents and fatalities involving drivers with a bac greater than .10, the case cannot be made that alcohol is even a factor in these accidents.  Clearly there other reasons responsible for at least 98.75% of all accidents.  How could those other reasons possibly be absent from the 1.25% of accidents which involve a bac greater than .10?  The very best you could argue is that those other factors in combination with a high bac is what caused the majority of those accidents--but then why were those factors responsible for 79 times as many accidents which did not include a bac greater than .10?  A strict statistical analysis could demonstrate that this program actually increased traffic fatalities, but just for argument's sake, let's assume that the program has the potential to reduce fatalities by 1.25% and save 400 lives per year.

Even with this most liberal assumption in favor of the DUI campaign, and even if this program could be 100% successful, outlawing women drivers, as Saudia Arabia has done, would save 25 times as many lives.  But not only has it not even been remotely successful--it destroyed a fundamental freedom to travel, it put more Americans per capita in prison than Japan has in prison for all crimes combined, and it costs more than $20 billion per year to operate.  Even if you assumed that the program already saves 400 lives per year, and that there would have been 41,901 lives lost to traffic accidents instead of 41,501, where is the benefit?  Who wants to give up the US Constitution for the sake of 400 lives?   We were willing to sacrifice 125 times as many lives in Vietnam to "defend" that Constitution, so why give it up so easily now?  And why spend $50 million per life saved when we spend only $200 per life lost to cancer for cancer research?  And why implement such a questionable program--when Saudi Arabia is proof that there is a far more effective and less costly way to save more than 10,311 lives per year from unsafe women drivers, 70,000 lives per year from heart disease, and $20 billion per year in the costs of operating this program?

http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/queryReport.cfm?stateid=0&year=1999

YEAR: 1998 STATE: (All)

According to the National Personal Transportation Survey conducted by the US Department of Transportation (a 3 MB Adobe file which can be downloaded here) women drive 30% of personal transportation miles and men drive 70%. 

Copyright @ 2007 by Fathers' Manifesto & Christian Party