I've said multiple times that speed limit enforcement along with speed and red light cameras are not about safety but about revenue raising. Now (H/T Instapundit), some are saying the same thing about drunk driving enforcement. Ronnie Schreiber writing at Cars in Depth says ever since the blood alcohol content (BAC) was lowered to 0.08%, the roads have been less safe:
[A]fter there was a national push by Mothers Against Drunk Driving to lower the legal BAC limits nationally from 0.10% to 0.08%, backed up by federal pressure on states, alcohol-related traffic fatalities went up in 2000, after 20 straight years of going down. That increase shouldn’t have been surprising. The push for a de facto national limit of 0.08% came after a 1995 NHTSA study already showed that some states that lowered the BAC limits were less safe than before.
Now how is that possible? Well the quick answer is that it moved enforcement from those genuinely dangerous to those exceeding an arbitrary number (the same thing happens with too-low speed limits, by the way). But Schreiber says it's more complicated than that because jurisdictions now see drunk driving as a cash cow and in most states have set up sobriety check points to catch those that happen to exceed 0.08% BAC:
Most drivers that have a BAC of between 0.08 and 0.10 percent are not driving badly enough to catch attention from police. They may be buzzed but they aren’t swerving, speeding badly, or failing to keeping up with traffic. When police are busy at a sobriety roadblock or setting up surveillance near restaurants and bars, they are not out on the roads trying to find more dangerously impaired drivers. Yes, they get some folks on the cusp of legal intoxication, generating lots of revenue in the process, but they don’t make the roads safer. A nighttime sobriety checkpoint might take more than 20 police officers away from tasks that actually make our roads safer. Only nine states don’t allow suspicionless sobriety checkpoints.
Washington State is, fortunately, one of those nine.
So we're taking cops away from finding truly dangerous drunk drivers and putting them in checkpoints to catch you at 0.08% because you had wine with your business dinner. That makes a lot of money for jurisdictions but may not be increasing safety. So why do we have this low limit and sobriety check points?
Drunk driving and sobriety checkpoints are big business. To begin with, a single DUI conviction can mean thousands of dollars of revenue for the jurisdiction that issued the citation. That’s only the tip of the iceberg, though. While sobriety checkpoints don’t catch many seriously drunk drivers, they do nab folks for equipment infractions or other sorts of minor crimes and they end up generating a huge amount of revenue for those municipalities and police officers that do use checkpoints.
A healthy distrust of government is a good thing. Even when it claims to be trying to make us safe, it's often just about money. Until people realize this, however, we are probably suck with over-reaching "safety" laws like speed limits and BAC levels set too low.



