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
Right in the title of this newspaper article, Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (MADD) appears to be defending a program aimed at catching impaired drivers. "But why?" That's what immediately 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, in fact, we should be able to drive impaired? I've never heard either claim, so 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. They also explain that, of that total, police tested 68 drivers and charged 30 of them with impaired driving.
Well, it turns out the Hamilton region has a population of around 720,000. Toughly 60% of those people, or 430,000, drive a vehicle. This means the roadside checks stopped about 10% of local drivers, 0.1% were tested, and 0.07% found in a poor state for driving. So discovered drunk drivers amounted to 0.04% of the total population. And this translates to a rate of roughly one incidence of impaired driving found per day of their checks.
Is this why MADD feels the need to justify the program: because drunk driving is essentially non-existent in the Hamilton context? You'll notice that these folks were not prevented from getting in and turning on their cars, obviously. And, presumably, they weren't intercepted when they pulled out of a parking lot or at the first light they stopped at. And you'll notice that, while driving impaired, apparently these folks had no trouble navigating the world, maybe all the way across town and back, up until the point they met the police. Right. That being so, I think it's safe to say that, despite us all agreeing they shouldn't be on the road, you have all your work ahead of you if you're going to claim these 30 impaired drivers who were charged, were it not for the police, would have mowed down a pedestrian or flattened your cat, crashed through your living room wall or ended up in a ditch had they not been stopped when they were. Right? Or is it silly to spell this out? Well, we have a lot more data about the dire consequences of impaired driving to help understand all this.
Even more seriously, the Ontario Provincial Police tell us 900 people were killed by impaired drivers over the last 15 years. Look at that number again. 900 is undoubtedly way too many deaths, for sure, but what are we talking about? That's an average of 60 impaired driving fatalities per year across one of the most driving-prone populations on earth (a population of something like seven million) who drive everywhere all of the time and often over great distances compared to most other places. But those deaths, as few as they are, are also not the people you might assume.
The same stats from the OPP show us that most of those 900 deaths are not innocent pedestrians or the passengers of oncoming vehicles but solely the impaired driver himself (yes, virtually all drunk driving deaths are younger and middle-aged males.) And the rate of impaired driving and related fatalities, they tell us, is far higher in rural and suburban areas than in metropolitan ones. Interestingly too, men who participate in sports are more likely to drive impaired than those who do not, according to Statistics Canada (but not because those folks are more aggressive or risk-taking, as fishermen, bowlers, and golfers are as likely to drink and drive as those who play team sports.)
So, given some of this basic context, it seems to me actions against drunk driving are far less about addressing something like "chronic impaired driving fatalities plaguing our cities" and far more along the lines of an intervention to prevent men (though virtually none of them, what 0.00001%?) from committing suicide around Christmas and New Years. But that's most definitely not how it's framed, is it?
Given that the punishment for impaired driving, like all traffic infractions, is effectively a slap on the wrist, and in light of all the above, I'm actually starting to question the value and necessity of these seasonal, MADD-endorsed roadway interventions. Despite the outlandish assertion that penalties for impairment are "severe", here's what that actually looks like: failing a Standard Field Sobriety Test with a low blood alcohol level, between 0.05 and 0.08, will get you a three-day license suspension and you'll be asked to pay a $198 administrative fee. That, if only to me, seems like a joke. Unless you're a kid working part-time that, of course, this is closer to a parking ticket than a meaningful penalty for what is said to be risking people's lives (or, given the facts of the matter, your own.) I mean, for context, it is a $200 fine for stopping a vehicle, at any time for any reason, in a bike lane. Drunk driving, you see, carries all the seriousness of temporary bike lane obstruction.
Of course, if this $44,000 saves one life we could argue this was money well-spent. But wait, is it? The police do traffic stops already, without need for a special program and additional funding. More than that, drunk driving appears uncommon even during the cold festive season, when drunk driving is most likely. So could this same money save many more lives were it put to use elsewhere? That seems worth asking.
What if these same resources went to stopping speeders. Seems a much greater and more common harm would be reduced with such an effort. To be clear, the OPP says speed is actually the leading cause of deaths on local and regional roads. In Ontario alone there are approximately 46,000 speeding tickets issued each month, or 1,500 per day, many with very serious charges, too. So there are many orders of magnitude more reckless, life-threatening speeders than dangerous drunk drivers on our roads.
If you don't like more actions against speeders, wouldn't that same money 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. $44,000, then, could have a significant impact. Either of those, to my mind, seem like much more worthwhile commitments. What do you think?
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