Don't drink and bike

If you're looking to minimize injuries or deaths (which is the ostensible reason for drunk driving laws) it makes sense to provide an incentive for people to not drive drunk. A cyclist is extremely unlikely to kill or injure a pedestrian or another cyclist--and probably incapable of injuring a driver--while drivers kill tens of thousands of other drivers and thousands of pedestrians every year. Cars are incredibly dangerous.

If someone wants to ride a bicycle drunk, they are realistically only endangering themselves. If people are going to get drunk anyway--and they will--allowing them an additional relatively safe, legal method to get home would make the streets much safer for everyone.

In Portland, people bike drunk all the time. There are extremely few arrests. Cops drove by my obviously drunk friend the other night and chose to do nothing. I guess it's not an enforcement priority here.

In this case, it sounds like the guy probably deserved it. Pedestrian-bicycle collisions do occur and people are occasionally injured or killed. But it's not common.

I got these stats from http://bicycleuniverse.info/transpo/almanac-safety.html. Not the most unbiased, I know, so if someone wants to take issue with them let me know.

I hope that the courts find a way to treat it as a lesser offense than driving drunk, though. I'm not saying it's good, I'm, just saying that if a drunk guy wants to get home and is looking at his bike and his six ton SUV, I would hope that the law would say "both are illegal, so call a cab or use your feet - that said, we'll punish you much more severely if you drive the six ton SUV."

ORS814.400 states "bicycle is a vehicle for purposes of the vehicle code"

I've known plenty of people who have gotten BUI's. On the up side of that it also means bikes are allowed the full lane! which as a biker, is really great and necessary sometimes.

here is the full law: http://www.leg.state.or.us/ors/814.html