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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> Better driver education and higher test standards would save lives too. So would banning alcohol. None of these solutions, including automated cars, will be mandated any time soon. It's not enough to have data

You can't subsidise "better driver education" (to a meaningful sense, to my knowledge) or "banning alcohol." You literally can't do the latter. We tried, and I'll torch a supporter's house for fun with some high-proof something or other for fun if someone tries it again in 2026.

You can use direct poicy action to save lives through AVs.

So at the end of the day, we're deflecting from harm reduction to preserve a parochial mode of transport or not.

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I took banning alcohol to mean lowering driving BAC to 0%, not banning alcohol society-wide.

It would be a lot easier for drivers to have the following thought process: "I drank tonight, I can't drive home" rather than "I drank two beers over the period of 3 hours, am I good? Yeah, probably, let's gooo."

> I'll torch a supporter's house for fun with some high-proof something or other for fun if someone tries it again in 2026.

If you react that strongly and violently to the idea of alcohol being banned, you might want to look into your relationship with alcohol.

> If you react that strongly and violently to the idea of alcohol being banned, you might want to look into your relationship with alcohol.

There are two reasons for a violent reaction like this, only one of which relates to your relationship with alcohol.

Alcohol is indisputably an addictive poison and for many people a giant net-negative. It can be hard to admit this because everybody does it and it feels good at the time. For example, I've recently concluded that I shouldn't have alcohol.

But that's a decision that I am making for myself. It's a very different thing to make that decision for everybody in a society, and I think it's the imposition of someone else's values on your your personal choices that can provoke a reaction like this.

All that to say, I wouldn't assume that it's the person's relationship to alcohol that makes them feel like we shouldn't make laws like prohibition.

> that's a decision that I am making for myself. It's a very different thing to make that decision for everybody in a society

Bingo. We've done Prohibition. It didn't work then. It hasn't worked with the War on Drugs. A neo-Prohibitionist is either ahistorically stupid or trying to distract.

DUIs should be treated more seriously. First time, warnings and the blow-y thing. Second time, multi-year license suspension and a month in jail. Third time, license revocation and multi-year jail time.

But alcohol as a whole is a drug with deep precedent and broad integration into socieety. If you want to reduce its use, tax it, message on it and give more people other things to do with their time and money.

I barely drink, but the previous attempt to ban it was terrible for society. I totally understand their thinking on this.

From what I’ve been able to read it seems like it was a net positive public health intervention that’s been horribly dramatized.

Drink driving has stiff penalties in the UK. It is also socially unacceptable to drink and drive. The UK also has increased requirements on drivers, and the number of road deaths is far lower per capita than it was in the 60s when there were fewer people driving. There are numerous other measures, which are too numerous to list here.

My understanding is that in US states a DUI (Wisconsin) is nothing but a fine, and drinking while driving isn't taken seriously at all.

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