Driving drunk 100 miles an hour the wrong way when kids are going to school in the morning is different than driving 40 on major roads after having a cocktail or two with dinner. Yet the law basically treats the latter like the former.
Ideally, urban streets should be limited to 20 miles/hour, and should not have drivers impaired by alcohol. (This is obviously unrealistic in the foreseeable future in most of the USA, where automobiles are treated like royalty.)
The former doesn't follow from the latter. I mean, by leaving your house, you might slip and fall and die; that does not mean leaving your house is incredibly dangerous, because we have to account for both the severity of the outcome and the probability of it.
Pedestrian deaths are on the rise. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/us/pedestrian-deaths.html
People who are drunk should not be thinking “Oh I am only driving 40 miles/hour on an arterial road. I am not doing anything dangerous.” Driving a car is inherently one of the most dangerous things most of us do on a daily basis, and should be treated carefully and respectfully.
Edit: I'm not a molecular biologist. Let's edit this to say "If someone has ingested alcohol and it's not yet metabolized to the extent that it is unable to create a discernable impairment I don't want them driving."
Edit 2: It sounds like an objective test for reflexes and response time would be a better test of impairment (of any type) rather than using blood/breath alcohol measurements as a proxy for impairment.
See _Why we Sleep_ by Matthew Walker.
So we have to look at why cities are considered unsuitable for children. This quickly gets into uncomfortable territory about respecting the rights of the other demographics (for example homeless people and less affluent children with lower academic performance) that middle-class families are fleeing when they move to the suburbs.
As someone who lives in a major metropolitan area, I have read this argument a few times in the Internet, but this doesn't match my experience; of all young couples who became parents that I know, none did "seek car-oriented housing", at most they moved to a bigger apartment (with more rooms).
Beyond that most cities in the US only have a few areas that are high enough density where not owning a car is convenient. And those high density areas generally aren't geared towards families on a budget.
So, go ahead and punish people for impaired driving. But punish them like you'd want your daughter, cousin, or yourself punished. Not like a criminal who has crossed a major moral line.
Really? I had a glass of wine last night. There are probably a few molecules of unmetabolized alcohol still in my system. Is it "irresponsible, full stop" for me to drive today?
I sympathize, but your new formulation has exactly the same problem as your first one: discernible by whom? If your BAC is 0.0001 but a police officer says that you appeared to be impaired in their subjective judgement, should that be enough to convict you of driving while impaired? And do you even want to try to distinguish alcohol-induced impairment from sleep deprivation? Do you really want to start punishing people for driving while sleepy? What are you going to use as the legal standard for that?
An objective test of reflexes / response time would be highly technically feasible. (I'd also like to see periodic re-certification for drivers with such a test too, but that's another issue.)
So do I. The challenge is coming up with a legal standard to decide who goes to jail and who doesn't which does not result in a ton of false positives. Do you really want to turn going to work after a bad night's sleep into a crime?
Some would say we put discretion in the legal system to account for incomplete empirical knowledge. This article is asserting incomplete empirical knowledge.
I agree w/ the other commenter who says that sentencing is the place where degree of offense should be considered.
Does is it still sound easy?
No. Most people would go easy on someone who stays up late studying or has some insomnia, and still drives the next day. Or a designated driver that got to bed late because they drove their friends home. But why? They are impaired and a threat to life as much or more than someone who has a glass of wine or two with dinner and then drives.
To me you sound very much as though you are justifying your own behavior.
A drink or two won't do it. For a 180lb male, it would take 4 drinks for them to become over the legal limit
That's not true, but I don't blame you — I learned the same thing in school. As I recall, the 'drinks' they used were 10-ounce servings of 3.2 beer, not 16-ounce servings of 5.8% beer. And the limit now is 3/4 of what it used to be (was .12, then .10, now .08).
A single good beer is enough to throw you over the limit.
Just don't have a drink and then drive. Never mind whether you can drive just fine or not after one drink[0]: it's just not worth the legal consequences regardless.
0: I used to think it was okay, but I no longer do.
https://www.tabc.state.tx.us/publications/brochures/BACChart...
4 drinks for 180lb male gives .08 BAC, not accounting for time to drink (every 40 minutes lowers by .01)
also, it's sort of hard to trust these charts. I've looked at four or five from various trustworthy-seeming sources and they don't really agree with each other. they make different assumptions for what a standard drink is and some of them round in different directions. I saw one assuming a 1.5oz shot of 80 proof spirit is equivalent to 12oz of 4.5% beer and another equating the same amount of spirit to 12oz of 5% beer. some charts that used the same definition of "standard drink" disagree on the BAC numbers anyway. personally I just assume everything I drink is two standard drinks, and a recommend to my friends that they do the same. I'm unpopular at parties for some reason...
And yeah, avoid mixed drinks or liquors, that’s an easy way to a high BAC sometimes without even realizing it from what I hear people say (getting sick on drinking mixed drinks to the point of intoxication, or so on).