HOW TO SAVE LIVES
Hamilton RIDE checks snag 30 impaired drivers. Hamilton chapter president for Mothers Against Drunk Driving says RIDE program is 'worthwhile and justified' - CBC News
In the title of this newspaper article Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (MADD) is defending a program aimed at catching impaired drivers. But why? This is immediately what came to mind when I saw this piece. Has anybody ever questioned the validity of pulling drunk drivers off the road? Is anyone out there claiming that, no, in fact, we should be able to drive drunk?
I had to read the piece and learn more details. In the article we're told the police roadside program is made possible by a grant of $44,000 from Ontario's Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services and that over a five week period, from the end of November to the beginning of January, the roadside checks stopped 42,000 vehicles. Of that total, police tested 68 drivers and charged 30 of them with impaired driving.
It turns out the Hamilton region has a population of around 720,000 and roughly 60% of them, or 430,000, drive a vehicle. This means the roadside checks stopped about 10% of local drivers, 0.1% were tested and 0.07% shouldn't have been driving. (That's 0.07% of 60%, or 0.04% of the total population.) This translates to a rate of roughly one incidence of impaired driving per day of their checks.
To put these numbers in perspective let’s use another population as a model. The largest high school in Hamilton has about 1,200 students. In a population that size, 0.04% is a number so small that it wouldn’t even represent one individual. In fact, a school population twice the size would still not register even one incidence of impaired driving – if the student body was representative of the larger population. To me it seems fair to say that if you can go and look at a population twice the size of the largest school in your city and not find something statistically represented there then that thing is a very extreme outlier. What do you think about that?
Maybe this is why MADD feels the need to justify the program: because drunk driving is essentially non-existent in the Hamilton context. Notice that these folks were not stopped the moment they entered their car and, while driving impaired, apparently had no trouble driving up until the point they met the police. That being so I think it's safe to say you have all your work ahead of you if you're going to claim these 30 impaired drivers, were it not for the police, would have mowed down a pedestrian or your cat, ended up in a ditch or crashing through your living room wall. No? The Ontario Provincial Police tell us that there have been 900 people killed by impaired drivers over the last 15 years. Look at that number again. 900 is undoubtedly too many deaths, yes, but what are we talking about? There have been 900 deaths in 15 years: that's 60 per year across a driving population of something like 7 million. And those same stats from the OPP show us that most of those deaths are not innocent pedestrians or passengers of other vehicles but solely the impaired driver themself. So what I think we're talking about is really 0.000006% of drivers committing suicide.
Of course, if this $44,000 saves one life we could argue this was money well-spent. But was it? The police do traffic stops already, without need for a special program and additional funding. In addition, drunk driving appears uncommon even during the cold festive season, when drunk driving is most probable. So could this same money save many more lives put to use elsewhere? That seems worth asking.
What if the funds were put into developing or promoting driverless cars? Driverless cars would seem a perfect solution. No? Or what about if these same resources went to stopping speeders. Seems a much greater and more common harm would be reduced there. To be specific, And the OPP say speed is the leading cause of deaths on local and regional roads. In Ontario alone there are approximately 46,000 speeding tickets issues each month, or 1,500 per day. And many very serious charges. So there are many orders of magnitude more illegal speeders than drunk drivers on our roads. Or what if that money went into changing our laws, incurring a small one-time cost, but creating some form of meaningful disincentive for drivers? Maybe then people would think twice about speeding or driving impaired. I mean, surely what we don't want is to catch people driving drunk but for them instead to stay out of the driver's seat when impaired. No? Shouldn't that be the aim? Well, what do you think the consequences are for drunk driving in Ontario today? They're almost non-existent. According to the Ministry of Transportation website, Ontario has some of the most aggressive driving impairment laws in North America. Here's what that looks like: failing a Standard Field Sobriety Test, being drunk, with a blood alcohol level between 0.05 and 0.08 (50-80 milligrams per 100 millilitres of blood), will get you a three-day license suspension and you'll be asked to pay a $198 administrative fee. At the other end of the spectrum, being found with a blood alcohol reading above 0.08, will net you a criminal conviction of impaired driving, a $1,000 fine, a mandatory education program, and a one year license suspension (with no jail sentence.) What if we simply changed our laws so that the cost for impaired driving (having a blood alcohol level of 0.05 or above) was a $10,000 fine and a lifetime driving ban? Or maybe this after second failure? After all, what is the purpose of a penalty if it doesn't act as a deterrent or even cover the real costs associated with the infraction? It seems like it's just publicly-funded public relations otherwise.
If you don't like this and think our laws are fine just how they are, that same money would still be better spent, have greater impact saving lives, if that's your aim, in almost any other situation. The Spread the Net program, for instance, which sends mosquito nets to Africa, could use this same sum to provide mosquito-borne disease protection for many thousands of people and for years. With only $1,000 Médecins Sans Frontières is able to treat thousands of patients with disease or malnutrition all over the world and for months. That seems like a much more worthwhile commitment to me. What do you think?
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