Tag: drunk driving

Walking to the pub

Dan Allison1 Comment

I’d like to expand on a tweet I posted last night:

“On St Patricks day, when everyone is reminding you to drive sober, let me remind you to live close enough to your pub that you can walk.”

As I was walking around early evening yesterday, I went by a number of bars that were catering to some degree to the St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. I was looking for a place with Irish music, of which there were as many yesterday as the entire rest of the year (sadly, Celtic/Irish music has faded from Sacramento). Some were pretty empty, some were so full there were long lines just to get in. The most popular in my part of town, De Vere’s, didn’t seem to be offering music at all. And I won’t set foot in a place that serves green beer. I settled on Shady Lady as the place I’d return to in the later evening. But this isn’t a post about favorite bars, it is about transportation.

Shady Lady is four blocks from my apartment. An easy walk at any time, and an easy walk if I’ve had enough to drink that it would affect my walking. I actually don’t drink much, and had only two strong beers last night. But the point is, I could have walked home if I’d had ten, or more. Or I could have done what many others were doing, jump in their car and head home, endangering themselves and their passengers, endangering other drivers and passengers, endangering pedestrians, endangering bicyclists. Everyone spends time talking about not driving drunk, about having designated drivers, but despite years of this kind of talk, and some effective shaming by Mothers Against Drunk Driving, people still do it. The talk is especially prominent around holidays, St. Patrick’s Day among many. But there are still drunks on the road, and they still cause a disproportionate percentage of crashes. We’ve made some difference, but only a small part of the difference we need to make, and I have the feeling that effectiveness has plateaued. When I read the newspaper, most crashes involve alcohol, or speed, or alcohol-fueled speed. We can never reach Vision Zero if anyone, ANYONE, is driving home from a bar with significant alcohol in their system.

So, what to do? Well, live close enough to a pub/bar that you can walk.

I think we would do well to return to the old concept of a pub, the public house, the gathering and drinking place where the town or the neighborhood went to on a regular basis. There was a time people did not jump in their cars to go drinking. I understand that pub culture has faded even in the United Kingdom, but given this celebration of St. Patrick’s Day and Irish culture, I’d like to see us turn back towards that model. Get drunk at the pub, stumble home. That was the tradition, and it could be again.

There are some issues:

  1. There are vast areas in the suburbs that have no bars, or at least no bars that the average person would feel safe walking into. Just like there are food deserts, there are good bar deserts.
  2. There is a strong social desire to go to the latest, greatest, most popular, most “cool” bar, so those places are packed with people who have driven in from somewhere else.
  3. Most people chose the place where they live based on other criteria, such as a nice house, or an affordable house, or good schools for the kids, or a quiet neighborhood. All of those are useful, but when that choice leads to killing yourself and others by driving drunk, it is a bad choice for everyone. And a real possibility is that you will end up killing your own kids or someone else’ kids.

So, do you drink enough that it affects your ability to get around? If you answer yes, then I’m asking that you commit to yourself, and to me and everyone else, that you will only do that at a place you can walk home from. No exceptions, no excuses. Will fulfilling that commitment cause you to have to move? Probably. Do it anyway. Don’t kill yourself, and don’t kills others, based on a broken concept that the decision about where we choose to live is without consequence to others.

For some more perspective on the issue, see Strong Towns “Mothers Against Drunk Driving Should Also Be Against Zoning.” Though I strongly disagree with the post title, and the post only provides arguments against dumb zoning, it is an interesting read.

drunk driving in midtown

Dan AllisonLeave a comment

Thanks, Chris Daugherty, for linking to this CityLab article (What If the Best Way to End Drunk Driving Is to End Driving?) from Facebook. This is not a new article, but one worth thinking about.

In midtown, there are always drunk drivers on Friday and Saturday nights, sometimes other times. While vehicles don’t carry a label indicating what part of town they are from, I strongly suspect from the streets they are using and the directions they are heading that the drivers are from the suburbs. And if I’m in a bar, I notice that the most drunk people are the people talking about suburban places. None of this is to say that midtown people don’t drink, or that some of them don’t drive drunk, but the big problem, in my perception, is suburban drunk drivers.

Though I certainly don’t mean to discount the risk, the slower speed streets in midtown are probably not the big problem, where most crashes occur at lower speeds and result in injuries rather than fatalities. But for these people to get home, they are driving on the freeways and arterials, and that is where the fatalities occur. In my weekly news summary, I only keep track of pedestrian and bicyclist-involved crashes, but if I kept track of alcohol-caused or exacerbated crashes, the posts would be at least three times as long.

So why are these people coming to midtown to get drunk? Well, the places to get drunk in the suburbs are few and not very interesting. The cool places are in midtown. I don’t just say that because I live here, but because these people are voting their preferences by coming to midtown, and driving, at considerable risk to themselves and others.

So, the article. It suggests that we could largely eliminate drunk driving by providing public transportation alternatives. To some degree, we have alternatives. There are two issues, though: public transportation is not considered cool by the suburban population, or even in Sacramento in general. This is not true in some other places, where it is cool. The second problem is the “last mile,” getting from the light rail station or bus stop to home. The transit network is not dense enough in the suburbs to get people most of the way home. In fact, in the suburbs of the Sacramento region, it is not usually the “last mile” but “the last five miles.”

When drunk drivers (and here I’m not just thinking of the legal definition, but of a person who has had enough to drink that they shouldn’t be operating a motor vehicle) are stopped in midtown, some get warnings, some get citations. But none of them gets told to use public transportation instead of driving.

So here is an idea. If a person gets stopped but is not enough over the limit to get a ticket, they would receive a one-month suspension of drivers license and a free one-month pass on SacRT. Yes, this would cost some money, but if it converts drunk drivers to public transportation riders, the investment is worthwhile. This relatively mild consequence, one month of a changed life, would I think also encourage law enforcement to confront more drivers. Only a tiny fraction of the Friday and Saturday night drunks get stopped. When if we stopped them all, and got them onto public transit, or at least into Lyft, Uber, and taxis?

In the long run, some of these people who are stopped, suspended, and moved to public transit would start to realize that living in the suburbs when most of the interesting night life is in midtown, is a pretty crazy idea that can be solved not only by using public transit, but by moving to midtown and walking home from the bar. Nah, these are not my favorite people, but they’d be much closer to acceptable if they were simply drunk instead of drunk drivers.