It’s a scene that happens in Washington, D.C. every day. A government worker jumps in a cab, gives his destination, and sets off with a hack who weaves in and out of traffic, shooting the gas, jamming on the brakes, and swerving around pedestrians. Our anonymous, suited passenger watches in terror as the man, mumbling to himself, drives like a maniac through our nation’s capital.
Is the cabbie in this horror show a drunken menace? Nope. He’s just on his hands-free cell phone — an activity that studies have shown impairs drivers as much as a blood alcohol concentration of .08, the legal limit.
Yet government regulators aren’t spending their time cracking down on distracted drivers like talkers, texters, drive-thru snackers or radio fiddlers.
Instead legislators are pushing for more money to develop in-car alcohol detection devices that will stop a car from starting if the driver has been drinking — as much as $60 million over the next five years.
Regulators and activists like those at Mothers Against Drunk Driving want these Driver Alcohol Detection Systems for Safety to be standard equipment on every car, the 21st century equivalent of air bags or seat belts.
DADSS won’t be nearly as benign, however. For starters, a malfunctioning seat belt or airbag won’t stop your car from driving. A malfunctioning alcohol detection device, however, means you aren’t going anywhere.
Even if these DADSS are certified as Six Sigma (meaning they contain only 3.4 faulty parts per million, or an effectiveness rate of 99.99966 percent) there would be something like 4,000 misreadings a day.
And if they’re the less-strict Three Sigma (i.e., 2,700 faulty parts per million, or an effectiveness rate of 99.7%)? That would be more than 3 million misreadings every day.
In addition, they’ll have to be set well below the legal limit of .08 for physiological and legal reasons — since BAC can increase after drinking ceases, they’ll be set as low as .02 or .03, the level most individuals reach after a single drink. Say goodbye to champagne toasts at weddings and beer at baseball games.
Other regulators are more modest in their aims. They argue that highway funding should be withheld from states that refuse to require ignition interlocks be installed in the car of any driver who is convicted of a DUI, regardless of the driver’s BAC.
The average BAC of a driver in an alcohol-involved fatality is .19 — to reach that level, an average-size man would have to consume about 10 drinks of beer, wine or liquor in two hours.
Does it make sense to punish this person and a 120-pound woman who reached .08 BAC by consuming two glasses of wine with dinner the same way?
Remember when Washington, D.C., police were arresting drivers with BACs at .03 and below? Would it have made sense to require those who drove after consuming a single drink to have interlocks installed on their cars?
Let’s consider the practicality of such a requirement. Mandating everyone convicted of drunken driving to get an ignition interlock is expensive, hard to enforce, and distracts attention from ensuring that repeat, hard-core drunk drivers maintain the interlocks on their car.
Consider what happened in California when the state created a pilot program requiring all drunk drivers in Los Angeles, Alameda, Sacramento and Tulare to install interlocks.
Despite warnings from the American Probation and Parole Association that the initiative would cost at least $22.5 million to ensure compliance, the state failed to provide localities with funding to enforce the new law.
The result? Only one of every 10 of those convicted complied. Who knows how many hard-core, repeat offenders — the type who tend to commit deadly offenses — failed to install interlocks and continued to drive while heavily intoxicated because of the mandate for all drunk drivers to install interlocks?
In a world of finite resources, we have to pick and choose which initiatives we will fund. Instead of forcing obtrusive new devices into the cars of every driver, we should focus on the true menaces — dangerous high-BAC and repeat DUI offenders, distracted drivers, and others who put us at risk.
Sarah Longwell is managing director of the American Beverage Institute.
