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Comment by voidz | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, drunks in public transportation never cause any problems. There are of course no drunk train drivers ever, either.

Excuse my sarcasm. It's caused by how I think you're ignoring the actual problem: alcohol. You're suggesting a workaround that doesn't even make sense. Alcohol abuse causes behavioural problems that go much further than public transportation can ever solve. We should address the core of the issue ranher than fighting its symptoms. I'm not for a ban on alcohol, I am however for ending the taboo around talking about it.

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It's about killing two birds with one stone. Yes, it won't solve the problem of alcohol abuse, but it may make a dent in drunk driving (especially if investments in public transportation are also matched with disincentivizing people from driving cars in cities). It would be interesting to find some studies, but I doubt that drunk driving is a common problem in public transportation, because drivers there are at work. They have stronger incentives to behave.

If you're speaking of America specifically: the experiment of banning alcohol was tried and failed. It's not so much that there's a taboo around talking about it as that the conversation almost immediately ends with "Why would it work now, when it didn't work in the Prohibition era?"

In Italy, for example, it is socially unacceptable to be drunk.

Social stigma will change people's habits? How do we make lack of control with alcohol a social no-no?

> In Italy, for example, it is socially unacceptable to be drunk.

I think you and I have different definitions of drunk.

Whenever I visit my family in Italy, we all get drunk. Not falling down drunk—we still carry on conversations and navigate the city with ease, but I also wouldn't trust us to drive in that state.

Eh? Where in Italy because besides falling down drunk which is socially unaccepted mostly everywhere I do not think this is true?

Did I imagine those drunk Italian dinner parties?

It's a lot harder for a drunk train rider to kill someone than a drunk driver. You also seem to conflate any use of alcohol with abuse of alcohol, which is at the very least kind of odd. Sure, some people act like assholes when they're drunk. Some people, often the same people, also act like assholes when they're sober. I'm not sure it makes sense to identify the problem as drunkenness, instead of assholishness.

It does make sense to say the problem is drunkenness, because, well, science says that there are very clear links between drink driving and accidents: e.g. http://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impai...

An arsehole-driver is a dangerous driver when sober, but everyone is a dangerous driver when drunk.

We define drunkenness by blood alcohol content without adjusting for tolerance. I'm sure there are alcoholics out there whose tolerance is so high that they're perfectly sober at 0.08.

Then there are people like Michael Schumacher or whatever who I'm sure drive better 'drunk' than 99% of sober people.

I wish the police focussed more on the generally shitty soccer mom sub drivers and taxis that try to kill me every day instead of some guy who had two glasses of wine and crossed some arbitrary threshold which may or may not have made him a dangerous driver.

It's usually safe to break safety laws, on the road or off it. Consider seatbelts. A wide net is cast to catch the exceptions. Nevertheless I agree that egregious unimpaired bad driving should be targeted too.

I've met plenty of people where I grew up (Long Island, NY) that have gotten arrested for DWI that are not alcoholics. The fact of the matter is that, in the suburbs, you drive to the bar. And that's how you're probably going to get home. I've done it. . I'm not proud of it. People drink, and thinking people are going to stop is not realistic. People do all sorts of silly things in the name of fun or escape.

Now that I live in NYC it is infinitely easier and safer to go out for a night of drinking, knowing there's busses, subways, taxis or Uber to take me home, far safer than if I were back in the 'burbs with almost no good options.

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