Over half of car crash victims had drugs or alcohol in their systems
npr.org
npr.org
The other option is for people to drink less and do fewer drugs, but that seems even more unlikely that a radical shift in favor of walking/transit.
Need to mandate WFH. One way is to tax companies for every employee that is required onsite proportional to the average commute distance of the city that the worksite is located. This will reduce travel substantially and undercut support for building more roads (since peak traffic will drop).
Until businesses relocate away from large, legacy central locations downtown to distributed locations closer to consumers, we can fund means-tested subsidies for grocery deliveries, etc. If you don't need to move people around, there is no need for a sclerotic, politicized, centralized solution that exists just to move people around!
I also believe that WFH increases total miles driven because people are more willing to move to rural areas where driving to do anything is longer.
They already do this to some extent with higher wages. But making it an actual line item on the budget would focus minds a great deal better.
“People should not be driving” is not a statement that I - or most normies - will ever get behind. Some of us don’t like the bus, the bicycle, or walking. I get it, some of you have a pamphlet to give us about the benefits of these things. We’re not interested. We like the vroom vroom.
If the average person's driving experience was like yours your opinion wouldn't be in the minority.
I take it you’re from an affluent area and make a high salary.
Come to New York City and talk to some of these people about how much they love the subway. It’s not short, inexpensive, or safe.
The great thing about people espousing their hatred for cars and the people who use them is it exposes the tech-elite disdain for the average person and a complete disconnect from reality outside of the Bay Area bubble mentality.
If I drove to work instead of taking the subway, it would cost a full order of magnitude more per year, and my commute time would increase by a factor of 2. I have never felt unsafe on the subway, but then again I am a white guy. That said, my wife has no problem hopping on the subway with our 6 month old son on her own and has never complained.
Look at recreational drugs. We've spent untold billions over decades, curtailed civil liberties, enacted extreme penalties, ruined countless lives and what has it gotten us? You can still easily buy coke, meth, heroin, whatever you'd like in every city and town in America.
People should not be drinking and driving... but they will. So what do we do with this reality?
Driving while genuinely intoxicated is absolutely not a "common" activity except for a tiny minority of people who do it habitually.
The only way your statement makes any sense is by some puritanical definition of drinking.
I agree that the headline is probably also using some comically low threshold.
I am going to restate my prior comment (which was already quite clear) with more verbosity for the benefit of good faith readers. Trivial amounts of alcohol (e.g. two bud lights) affect a person's performance at any given task less than day to day variation from other factors (last night's sleep, how your day is going, etc), it is "below the noise threshold" so to speak. Thats why it's basically impossible to attribute any given degradation of performance to a couple beers but if you were to do a big study with many participants you could see an effect. Hence my point, if you are an unsafe driver after a couple water-beers or any other thing that gives you a BAC that's solidly below the typical legal maximums (.04-08 depending on country or US state) are an unsafe driver sober.
As I read it, your statement implies that people who drink (a bit) and drive should be overrepresented in accidents when sober too, because the bit of alcohol isn't what makes them risky. I pay a bit of attention to this area and have never seen any studies that support this. Granted, I only pay a bit of attention.
Conclusion: Half of America is stoned and/or drunk.
You would need a control group that isn't injured to support your conclusion.
But, presumably, that population would have a much lower percentage of stoned/drunk people, in line with loads of existing data showing that operating under the influence is a strong cause of crashes & injuries both statistically, and with a well-established causal chain (impaired perception, impaired cognition, slowed reaction times, etc.)
THC presence could be as much as 56 times likely to show as alcohol.
You really need to know the THC (and any other drug) level before you can determine impairment.