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Abstract
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Alcohol-impaired driving remains the deadliest and costliest danger on
U.S. roads today. Every day in the United States, 29 people die in an
alcohol-impaired driving crash—one death every 49 minutes—making it
a persistent public health and safety problem. Furthermore, progress in
addressing the issue has stalled, with the number of fatalities from 2009
to 2015 leveling off at about 10,000 deaths each year.
Though the causes of alcohol-impaired driving are complex and
multifaceted, these deaths are entirely preventable, and many
evidence-based and promising strategies exist to address alcohol-impaired
driving. Many underused interventions and promising new technologies
can be utilized to reach a bold goal: zero deaths from alcohol-impaired
driving.
Each alcohol-impaired driving crash represents a failure of the system,
whether that is excessive alcohol service, lack of transportation alternatives,
lack of clinical services, or lack of effective policies or enforcement.
A coordinated, systematic, multi-level approach spanning multiple sectors
is needed to accelerate change. With support from the National Highway
Traffic Safety Administration, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering,
and Medicine convened a committee to help identify promising
strategies to reduce deaths caused by alcohol-impaired driving in the
United States. The resulting report, Getting to Zero Alcohol-Impaired Driving
Fatalities: A Comprehensive Approach to a Persistent Problem, highlights
interventions and actions to reduce alcohol-impaired driving fatalities—
including ways to improve important existing interventions—and presents
ideas for reviving public and policymaker attention, thereby turning concern
into decisive action to address this tragic and preventable problem.
OVERVIEW OF THE PROBLEM
In the early 1980s, alcohol-impaired driving rose to the forefront of the
public’s attention. New laws were passed, including those making it illegal
to purchase alcohol under the age of 21 or to drive with a blood alcohol
concentration (BAC) of 0.10 percent or greater. From the 1980s through
the early 2000s, alcohol-related driving fatalities steadily decreased.
Although progress was made as states passed and implemented policies, these heterogeneous policies lacked benchmarks, and they have been enforced with varying intensity. Progress has since stagnated.
Plateauing fatality rates indicate that what has been done to decrease deaths from alcohol-impaired driving has been working but is no longer enough.
More than 10,000 people were killed in alcohol-
impaired driving crashes in 2016; 214 of those deaths were among children aged 14 years or younger. In economic terms, the total cost of alcohol-impaired driving crashes was $121.5 billion in 2010 (including medical costs, earnings losses, productivity losses, legal costs, and vehicle damage, among others)... |