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Comment by EvanAnderson | Hacker News Reader

I don't want much judgement in the laws. If someone has ingested alcohol and it's not yet metabolized I don't want them driving. It's irresponsible, full stop. (Same goes for other driving impairments-- drowsy, under the influence of drugs, distracted, etc.) The idea that one should be making a judgement call on their degree of impairment and choosing to drive is odious to me. If you're impaired, don't drive.

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.

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Drowsy driving causes more deaths than drunk driving plus drugged driving combined. Ever driven on less than a solid 8 hours?

See _Why we Sleep_ by Matthew Walker.

Drowsy driving should be as much of a crime as drunk driving-- absolutely. There is no excuse for getting behind the wheel impaired and exposing innocent people to unnecessary risk.

This basically means that no night shift worker is allowed to drive home from work.

I never found that driving after a night shift was much different to driving after a day shift. Of course, when working nights, I slept during the day. YMMV.

Night-shift workers should sleep during the day.

My guess is you've never worked night shift. It's not as easy to sleep during the day as it is at night, even with black out curtain, unless you wanted to get drugged up every day.

YMMV, I guess, I slept perfectly fine when I worked the night shift. (Went to bed around 5-6am)

That may have been the difference. We didn't get out until 9am (12hr shift) and by then the sun is high and bright so by the time you've driven home you've spent enough time outside where your body has switched from "I'm tired lets go to bed" to "the day is just getting started".

The problem is that it isn't binary... you aren't either drowsy or not drowsy, it is a spectrum... and you can't always tell exactly where you are on the spectrum.

So, exactly the same as drunkenness.

I agree, but the consequences of this policy would be really dramatic. For example, new parents are effectively on house arrest until their kids start sleeping through the night.

I would take this to its logical conclusion. New parents are chronically sleep-deprived, and therefore should not drive. On a social level, we should not place new parents under house arrest. Therefore, we should invest in public transportation so that driving is not necessary to function in society.

Young couples are well served by transportation just before they become parents. Then as the baby is arriving they explicitly and intentionally seek car-oriented housing, as this is considered the correct place to raise a family.

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.

> Then as the baby is arriving they explicitly and intentionally seek car-oriented housing, as this is considered the correct place to raise a family.

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).

In most cities in the US, decent housing near public transpiration that is big enough for a family is expensive enough that it's not really a viable option for most people.

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.

What is the drowsiness test? The convenient thing about breathalyzers is it provides a quantitative number we can use in judgement. I can't think of a similar test for drowsiness. Maybe there is a blood test? Maybe someone could create a similar device that looks for special metabolites in the breath to provide a measurement for drowsy people?

I don't doubt this statistic, but this is only an argument that we should find a way to better disincentivize drowsy driving rather than to soften the drunk driving laws. A few states have passed laws to penalize drowsy driving already.

What it does is make people realize that nearly everyone who drives, drives a little impaired sometimes. That stops us from thinking this is about "other" people who can be punished to an arbitrarily high degree. Instead, now we have to acknowledge that it will be our sons, daughters, spouses, uncles, and cousins. It's just a matter of whether they got pulled over after a restless night or trying to finish a school assignment or working too late thr night before.

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.

Exactly. Prohibitionists think that these laws will never affect them or their beloved ones. Why are we so keen on ruining other people's lives based on arbitrary crap that is meaningless without all the other variables that we do not take into account?

Similarly, texting while driving has been found to be more dangerous than drunk driving.

> If someone has ingested alcohol and it's not yet metabolized I don't want them driving. It's irresponsible, full stop.

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'm not a molecular biologist. I've edited my comment to be more precise in expressing the spirit of what I meant.

> If someone has ingested alcohol and it's not yet metabolized to the extent that it is unable to create a discernable impairment...

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?

Impairment is impairment. I want just as many drowsy drivers on the road as I want alcohol-consuming drivers.

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.)

> I want just as many drowsy drivers on the road as I want alcohol-consuming drivers.

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?

In many places that appearance is enough to charge you and the nearly zero BAC is only enough to provide some evidence against. Who knows what drugs you were taking? You’d have to prove a case that the cop had no real reason to suspect you.

> If someone has ingested alcohol and it's not yet metabolized I don't want them driving. It's irresponsible, full stop.

Some would say we put discretion in the legal system to account for incomplete empirical knowledge. This article is asserting incomplete empirical knowledge.

I was responding to the parent's comment re: differentiating between different "degrees" of offense. If the breath test system is flawed it should be replaced by a better test.

I agree w/ the other commenter who says that sentencing is the place where degree of offense should be considered.

The same goes with being tired. While the typical US DUI test does sound stupid, it at least has a chance of catching those who are tired.

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