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Last month, a 33-year-old mother was charged with vehicular homicide after she was driving the wrong way on Interstate 70 and ran head-first into an oncoming car, killing her 12-year-old daughter and critically injuring her 9-year-old daughter.
It is a senseless tragedy, the kind policymakers have tried for years to prevent. Despite intermittent progress, these kinds of tragedies still occur.
Five years ago, Utah lawmakers, spurred on by a lobbying from the National Highway Transportation Safety Board, hoped they had found a solution when they lowered the state’s standard for drunken driving to a blood alcohol content (BAC) of 0.05%, the lowest in the country.
I’ll admit, I didn’t like the change because the data on drunken driving accidents showed conclusively that people in that 0.05 BAC to 0.08 BAC range were causing very, very few of the accidents the bill sought to prevent. They accounted for about two fatal crashes a year and even those included other factors like drugs or excessive speed.
But, I was also willing to be proven wrong if the data proved it had worked.
Last week, there were splashy headlines in publications all over the country — played up and without scrutiny — for an NHTSA study touting the success of the policy change.
“Overall, the study’s findings indicate that passage of the 0.05 per se law had demonstrably positive impacts on highway safety in Utah,” the study said.
The finding would be encouraging, had it not depended almost exclusively on results from one outlier of a year.
Let’s go back a few years to the inception of Utah’s current drunken driving law.
The Legislature passed the 0.05 BAC law in the 2017 session, which didn’t take effect until Dec. 31, 2018. That means 2019 was the first year data on drunken driving accidents would reflect the effects, if any, of the law.
But the authors of the NHTSA study took the data from 2016 — what was then an exceptionally high year for alcohol-related fatal crashes — and compared it to the three subsequent years, 2017-2019. Again, the latter year being the first for the new law.
The study found that total traffic fatalities decreased by nearly 20%, which is a good thing, although not really related to the DUI law. All drivers, sober or otherwise, seem to have simply been driving safer.
The researchers also found that fatal alcohol-related crashes dropped 12.5% from 2016 to 2019, the first year the law was in effect. That is also encouraging and the “demonstrably positive impacts” they reference.
“On the ground you could feel it, talking to law enforcement, talking to other people, and you could feel that this was actually working,” Rep. Norm Thurston, R-Provo, told my colleague Stefene Russell, when the report was released. “It was very, very comforting to know that what we thought was happening was really happening.”
But more recent data from the Utah Department of Public Safety seems to indicate that the 2019 numbers, critical to the report’s conclusions, were an anomaly. And fatal crashes involving alcohol have actually gone up, not down, since the law was passed.
In 2017, the year the 0.05 law passed, fatal crashes where the driver was over the legal limit climbed to 30, up from 23 in 2016. They went up significantly again in 2018, with 39 crashes killing 48 people. The law still hadn’t gone into effect.
And then in 2019, the first year of the new law, crashes dropped to 26, claiming 27 lives. But this is where the “demonstrably positive impacts” stop.
In 2020, 48 people were killed in 45 alcohol-related crashes. And the following year, 49 Utahns died in 43 crashes.
Thurston’s hope was that the law would change behavior and a survey by the state found that initially that may have been true — 22% of those who consumed alcohol were aware of the change and said they had changed their behavior. But crashes and fatalities involving drunk drivers have climbed since and are actually higher than the recent pre-0.05 years.
There has been a 24% increase in the average number of drunken driving fatalities in the three years the law has been in effect, even with that low tally in 2019, compared to the three years before it was enforced.
What makes the recent numbers even more jarring is that during the pandemic people were staying home more and driving a lot less, meaning the increased rate of fatal alcohol-related crashes per mile traveled was even more dramatic, nearly doubling between 2017 and 2021, according to DPS data.
When the law was being debated, T. Bella Dinh-Zarr, then-vice chairwoman of the NTSB, said reducing the state’s blood alcohol level would reduce deaths from alcohol-related crashes by 11%. Maybe future data will bear that out, but so far it hasn’t delivered.
These deaths are certainly not something to celebrate; each is an unnecessary tragedy.
We also shouldn’t whitewash the truth and pretend the policy is paying off. Nor should we be surprised that it isn’t, because the individuals it was targeting — those who maybe had two glasses of wine with dinner — were never the real problem.
The real problem is — and always was — those drivers who habitually drink to excess and then get behind the wheel. The average person arrested for a DUI has a BAC of 0.16, triple the legal limit. That is very drunk. Nearly 30% have had a prior arrest and about 10% have had two or more. Those are the people who are the problem, people like the mother who drove the wrong way on I-70 on a suspended license.
But those issues are complex and addressing them is hard. Instead, the Legislature opted for what was easy and — notwithstanding the splashy, national headline-grabbing report last week — it isn’t working.
