This reminds me of an old quip I once heard: "If drinking and driving is bad then why do bars have parking lots?". Personally, I think bars should be banned from having customer parking lots.
I can guarantee that if you tried to ban bars from having parking lots, bars would just call themselves "restaurants" due to serving chips and popcorn, and sidestep the legislation.
@@radishpineapple74: In my state, there are laws that apply to businesses that derive "more than 51% of their income from the sale of alcohol for onsite consumption". I doubt anyone could get 49% from chips and popcorn.
I lived in NYC for most of my adult life. If you got drunk, you just took the train home or took a cab. After moving to Colorado, I was surprised to see people drinking and driving, as it was something I had never really seen before. I worked at a cafe, which also served alcohol and one customer was on her 3rd rum and Coke when I arrived at 11 am to start my shift. She then proceeded to get in her car and drive home after she left. Even my boss sometimes took a shot or two of whiskey before going to pick up his kids from school in the afternoons. I obviously don't advocate for drunk driving, but at the same time, this wouldn't be such a problem if cities were set up with good public transportation and/or if zoning laws didn't keep residential and entertainment districts separate.
Oh boy. I live in Colorado. I’m lucky I leave near downtown Colorado Springs so I ride my bike or take the bus. But my buddies who live out east they drink and drive all the time. I never really thought of how “normal” it is.
@@Frostbikerof course there will always be misguided individuals who make dangerous decisions no matter what. The point is, for places with no public transit or any bar within walking distance, drunk driving is going to be significantly more common
Is it required for the bartender to stop serving them drinks after a certain amount. I guess they can’t force them to take a taxi or designated driver that it might be good to suggest one.
I live in San Diego and there are so many breweries. Many of them are found in industrial areas with no feasible public transit and massive parking lots. Truly it is messed up that we are incentivizing drinking and driving in a city with the best weather in the country; biking, walking and light rail improvements would be so great here
Bartender for 20+ years, Drinker for even longer. Best thing I ever did was get rid of my car. Have a couple beers hop on a bus and get home. It's awesome.
yeah, it's awesome to transfer buses and look at a timetable and routes and walk to the stop when you could just hop in your car and it's a 10 minute drive with heated seats?
@austinboathYT An impaired 10-minute drive. Everyone likes to think "it won't happen to me," but your chances of striking something, or someone, go up when you are impaired. Would you feel comfortable with family members sharing a road with people who could potentially kill them? This thought process of yours is rather dangerous. Consider revoking yourself.
@@RafTheDude Just don't be an alcoholic. Drinking is for immature teens in high school. A grown man shouldn't be drinking heavy amounts of liquor. He should be working hard. I left vodka back in the high school party days.
Still not the best idea, and I think illegal in most countries. However, I have cycled to a pub, had a modest number of pints, and cycled home without any issues. I don't know if I'd have passed a breathalyser, but I certainly wouldn't feel comfortable driving.
I feel the same about wage jobs. People seem to think that "people who dont like work are just lazy" and how you have to "earn" a living, but I'm sure we would all benefit greatly if we didnt have to work soul crushing jobs everyday and could just take part in fun things everyday
I'd never heard of those mock DUI things in schools. American efforts to change behaviour without changing their systems or infrastructure never ceases to surprise.
@@danielbishop1863its like the joke of having a fundraiser to raise awareness for awareness. not only is nothing getting done but money that couldve gone to an actual cause is being wasted
There could still be parking for the bar's employees and designated drivers. But of course, if you size the parking lot with the expectation that almost all of the *customers* will drive (as you might for a shopping mall), that's dumb.
@@edwardmiessner6502shopping malls. Some parking is intended to be shared by many alcohol serving and non alcohol serving establishments. This would only work for alcohol serving places with their designated lot, and even then people would just park a little way away if there are spots. This stuff is here to stay and my solution is individually working around it instead of trying to change the world. Much simpler and more peaceful
My friends and I had this exact realization one day and it was mind blowing. Like, why does a freaking bar need parking spaces? They are literally inviting us to drive there because its the easiest option. I moved to suburbs from NYC and its always hard to convince friends here not to drive. No one wants to pay an expensive ass Uber/Lyft ride or take non-existent public transit, so we end up driving to bars. The consequences for DUIs are extreme yet for some reason we make drunk driving as easy as possible.
That's because the goal of the society is not to discourage bad behaviour via structural changes, it's to pass judgement on the unworthy and punish them. Separate the wheat from the chaff. Push everything to individual responsability. That is the conservative mindset, you whole country was created by puritanism religious extremists, when viewed like this, the result is kind of obvious
There's a case to be made that they need some parking spaces for staff. And a bar/pub that's also a restaurant could justify some parking spaces for customers who come for food, rather than alcohol.
And in these cases, I think we should make the punishment as severe as possible. I'm talking about going to the level of suspending one's license for six months on just the first offense, which will stay on your record for 10 years. A second offense and you'll have to take driver's-ed again after one year. A third offense and the license is suspended for 5 years (and you'll still need to re-take driver's ed)
@@ZeldagigafanMatthew If you need a car to get to work a judge is reluctant to suspend your license. And even if you DO suspend their license: they are likely to drive without a license to get to work. Public transit is still needed to solve the problem.
I'm an attorney who spent a long time practicing criminal defense. Penalties have gotten stiffer every year for decades but the DUIs still roll in on a consistent basis. I don't know what DOES work but I know that enforcement and punishment DON'T work. Punishment often works on the individual being punished, as the number of 2- and 3-time DUI offenders is a small percentage of arrests. However, there's always a new first time offender ready for processing. Also, I've seen some statistics regarding how many times someone drives impaired before being arrested the first time, and also I wonder how many impaired drivers are actually getting stopped. I bet a large number of people who drive impaired are never stopped.
Almost everybody I know who drinks will, at least on occasion, drive after drinking. Even those of my acquaintances who are on police or fire services. Some do it regularly, as in every weekend. Very few are ever stopped. I do think that the extent of impairment generally has decreased, as it is unusual for me to see someone blackout drunk get behind the wheel anymore, compared to back in the day. But maybe that's only because I'm older now and the people I hang out with are older and somewhat less irresponsible. Or perhaps all the blackout drunk drivers I used to know are now dead. Anyway that's my anecdotal evidence.
And sometimes people who _aren't_ impaired are stopped and arrested because they weren't driving perfectly. This is a problem especially in states where DUI is a felony like in Florida.
I have found that in many cases the alcoholic beverage is purchased at a gas station and consumed in the vehicle. To me the question is why are alcoholic beverages sold where people buy gas.Seems a little insane.
I exclusively rode a bicycle for half a year, something in my heart I will always hold dear. But the auto industry has me over a barrel, for daily I felt my life was in peril. Disconnected bike lanes with no protection, distracted drivers coming from every direction. I want to be car-free but let’s get down to brass tacks: You need a car when the world’s like Mad Max. So many are lazy and want their motorized chair, declining in health increasing medical care. Some drivers see a cyclist and out comes the knives, to eliminate the person who might disrupt their lives. Leaders would rather pull their own arms from their sockets, because car companies and big oil are lining their pockets. So, while we wait, the climate gets worse, the automobile has gone from blessing to curse. They killed our earth with their relentless pollution, and electric cars are not the solution. A commute in a car will still be a slog, when vehicles are too big, keeping roadways clogged. Firetrucks and ambulances should not be impeded, getting there quickly to where they are needed. Fewer cars on the road will free up some space to make where we live a much safer place. Don’t trust big oil for they are constantly lying, prolonging their profits, keeping their industry from dying. They have promised changes then move like a snail, offering fake solutions that they knew would fail. Big oil and car companies must be made to bend; they have had their day, now their reign must end. 😃
I really wish more cities would watch and listen to you and your video. Growing up in Reno I ended up with a DUI leaving the tamarack after cashing a paycheck and having a single beer (back in 2008). I was guilty of driving under the influence and I paid the price. But this video has really opened my eyes on how car-centric and bad Reno is.
Wide roads also would be a major factor in drunk driving deaths. The sense that you can go high speed + impaired = very high speed crashes, especially at intersections.
Excellent points. The efficacy of solving drunk-driving by focusing solely on the "drunk" side of the problem has an asymptote.. and we're approaching it. The only option left is to address the "driving" side. Put 3rd places back near neighborhoods and prioritize giving people reasonable, safe, and direct alternates to driving there. Prioritizing automobiles yields nearly exclusively negative externalities (like drunk-driving), whereas prioritizing micromobility has so many positive externalities. It seems obvious which we should be pursuing.
@@denelson83 I agree, but mostly to the extent that exclusionary/mono-residential zoning has pushed the 3rd place away and any proposed changes to the zoning code is like hitting the hornet's nest of NIMBYs. Hearing their complaints they must think that allowing for the *possibility* of a local pub equates to mandating a Coyote Ugly on every corner. In reality there is *so* much in between those extremes.
england has 12x less drunk driving fatalities despite the fact that pub culture is much stronger there. The difference is most people in England walk to the pub and don't drive to a bar
One thing that may influence someone to drive after drinking is that they can't leave their car somewhere overnight without the risk of it being impounded. It's not just the person who needs a way to get home, it's their car too (just a further extension of car culture really). I've heard of programs that both drive a person home and tow their car back to their home and I wish that was more common.
Everything about car-centric infrastructure makes the vehicle as an extension of the self that's why ppl get so defensive and think ppl are trying to rip away their human rights when others talk about deincentiviziing driving or funding transit. Everything about car ownership is associated to the ego and it takes a lot of work to deconstruct that individualistic mentality and have someone think about their community
It’s a rite of passage in Florida you can’t get elect for public office if you don’t have charges under your belt and if you get caught hurting someone or crashing only then you’re a bad person
I live in an older American city with a streetcar suburb. There are still a number of shops, cafes and restaurants in the neighborhood. There's even two bars. Much of this was established decades ago. A new restaurant was opening. They planned to sell beer. The NIMBYs came out in force exclaiming "this is a family neighborhood, you can't serve alcohol". Seemingly unaware of the bar that already exists 2 blocks over. I guess they'd rather their residents drive out to the burbs to get drunk?
@@CinnieReal supposedly it was an astroturf movement started by the owner of one of the other restaurants on the street. They wanted to block the new restaurant from opening and diluting their business. The new place opened anyway and now the block is slammed with pedestrian traffic. The entrenched business owners are insanely shortsighted because the whole area is prospering more now and home prices keep going up.
Great video! It's very well-structured. It's definitely time for authorities to recognize that our land use patterns and incentives to drive everywhere are exacerbating the issue. NDOT and RTC Washoe give roadway death updates every meeting--but they do little more than wave their hand at the number going up or down every month.
I saw a documentary years ago in the 90s on how the automobile industry conspired with city officials to shut down public transportation systems and make cars necessary for Americans to get around. Things are the way they are because of design!
The financial disincentive to own a car is definitely effective. In Seattle, parking in apartments can be higher than $200 per month. Then, virtually everywhere you drive will also have paid parking. It's general inconvenient to drive, so for most people you can use rideshare services liberally and still pay significantly less than you would to own a car, without the time, stress, and effort associated with finding parking and dealing with being intoxicated. This also encourages walking or taking the bus since, when you don't own a car, those often come ahead of alternate options. All because driving a car is expensive and inconvenient.
Seeing so many alcohol and car advertisements alongside anti drunk driving PSAs is like being perpetually gaslit. Buy alcohol, buy a car, but never do them together, because you're the evil scourge of the earth if you do
@@Frostbiker it's about getting mixed messages. North Americans are constantly encouraged both to buy/drive cars, buy/drink alcohol, and then are constantly reprimanded/scared against doing both at the same time. The result is insane stuff like a week long drunk driving pageant while still having high rates of underage drinking and drunk drilling fatalities
@@GaigeGrosskreutzGunClub but it is not a mixed message. Do A, Do B, don't do A and B at the same time. It doesn't get much simpler than that. A mixed message would be: do A, don't do A.
"It's worth it if it can save just one life" is an easy way to ignore any criticism of a failed safety campaign while preventing effort to implement something more effective. If someone's resorting to that line, they're effectively admitting their solution doesn't work and that something else must be tried. I feel sorry for anyone who's had the misfortune of going through one of those anti-drunk-driving programs at their school. Conservatives often complain about young people being exposed to too much violence, yet their solutions to problems always seems to involve graphic violence in some form; through appeals to harsher policing, use of firearms against people they dislike politically, or forcing students to hold mock funerals for their own classmates.
Certainly less people would die. It might smell and annoy the people on the bus, but it's better that nobody dies. And for people who don't care about human life... We've all seen the traffic jams that result from car crashes. Imagine how much less time you'd have to spend stuck in traffic!
This! Before I got interested in urban planning, I always wondered how we can curb back drunk driving. No amount of regulations or enforcement can curb back drunk driving because if there's no alternatives to travel to a bar except via a car, then what can one do? Note: I am not forgiving or excusing drunk driving or the people who do it because it's illegal, irresponsible, and dangerous. But I do understand where they're coming from. If there's little to no transit, and since taxis are expensive, and if the bar is inaccessible by walking or cycling and just so happens to have large parking lot, then what about just driving there? It's only a few drinks (sarcasm). I do notice that transit connection can and do reduce drunk driving as occasionally while riding the SkyTrain (metro Vancouver's metro system in British Columbia, Canada) I see some fellow passengers sit down and pop open a beer can and drink it and one time I saw a empty beer bottle on the "dashboard" at the front of the train (always remember to take you stuff with you and dispose of garbage in the bins at the stations) and since the SkyTrain is automatic with no driver and the Mark II's just so happen to have a seat right at the front where the main windshield is, this person probably sat down, relaxed, and had a cold one while they enjoyed the view. Hey, beats drunk driving. Though I will say that one issue that is brought up is that with few exceptions, transit especially metro lines do close relatively early (1 or 2 am) meaning that even with a good transit system, if it closed at night, you're still going to have the issue drunk driving. Probably the best option is to have bars be accessible by walking as it negates the dangers of drunk driving. Are they're still going to be people who are jerks and Drive Under the Influence? Yes, but most people try to be responsible and providing alternatives to reaching a bar makes it safer and more enjoyable for a patron at a bar. They can spend more time partying, without worrying about how to get home. Thank you for covering this subject as it really isn't talked about enough. Remember to stay safe and drink responsibly and I wish you all the best of luck!
Covid obviously wrecked a lot of public transit so it should be no surprise that it forced LA Metro to pull back on their hours of service. The surprising thing though is that LA Metro STILL has their light and heavy rail service ending before typical last call at bars across the city. This obviously has left a lot of us scratching our heads. Such an easy win that we’re leaving on the table…
Austerity politics means governments move quickly cutting back funding for important services as soon as they get the excuse. But giving funding to necessary services moves slowly and meets resistance at every step of the way. In the United States there's no such thing as an easy win unless you're conservative.
That's the problem in the US. What you're describing is what happens when public transport is more of a nuisance than an essential service. In other countries public transport agencies do not need to fence for themselves, they are essential and their funding is secured. Where I live public transport has more usage now than before the pandemic with many new projects in the making. Here no one in their right mind will even consider cutting back or reducing operation hours or frequency.
One way to disincentivise drunk driving: require that any business that sells alcohol be at least 200m from the nearest parking space. You could end up with a city of parking-free islands, all with alcoholic businesses at their centres, like a bunch of medieval castles.
My city, reasonably walkable and has decent transit, is rather small and has many large parking garages. We expect most people coming to the city to be suburbanites. I worry that a policy requiring businesses selling alcohol to be 200m away from parking would mean that all of the businesses selling alcohol in the city would have to close. And all these businesses would be forced to move out into the suburbs. Leaving our most walkable area, the area that I think this establishment should be, without any of them.
@@tacticallemon7518 They probably walk further than 200m across the gigantic parking lots for many malls. Besides, 200m really isn't that far. Depending on your walking speed, it'll only take 2-5 minutes. This estimate is based on the fact that I regularly take about 20 minutes to make a 1km uphill trip on foot.
@@Roxor128 Generous to assume the people that associate cars with freedom think 5 minutes on foot isn’t too long of a walk I got that passive aggressive “okay” from family when i first got my license and my response to “do you want to dive” was “no, i’d rather walk/ride my bike” It’d take 20 minutes, but somehow driving was the logical method of transit Then they’d get mad at me for “wasting” like $30, which always confused the hell out of me How can you simultaneously push me to waste money while condemning my waste of money
This is a far bigger problem in the US as the comparison to other countries does not take into account the fact that many of the other countries have higher alcohol consumption rates than the US (and Canada).
In most places in the US, the legal blood alcohol limit is .08. If you ever have your BAC tested while drinking, you'll quickly discover this is way higher than what feels safe to drive on.
Seattle protected bike paths =car parking. Try looking st those white posts and see how many times they have been hit. We need more jersey barriers like they did next to that one stretch by greenlake
I don’t know what a jersey barrier is, but I think a barrier such as a big flower planters spaced out would be much safer than white post to protect bike paths.
@@enjoyslearningandtravel7957: Jersey barriers are the modular concrete wall units that separate opposing lanes of traffic on divided highways (where there's not enough room for a grass median).
I have a condition that makes me very tired always. I don't drive, because I don't think it is safe. Fortunately, I have the option to do so without it being a huge sacrifice
Bars should not be allowed any parking at all except for Taxis, bus or other transportation, that should discourage people to drink and drive, or just build the city right from the start would be even better, parking in an alcool serving place is such nonsense Thank you for the video !
while downtown Reno is certainly better than the suburbs it is by a microscopic margin and further the lack of options for transportation means that the common experience for going downtown is looking forever for parking only to be far away and forced to walk through unaccommodating environments. Having once delivered pizza in the area i cant count how many times the streets have been too choked with cars for even cars to make it where they need to be
I'm currently injured and hopping on crutches for the last month after 3 weeks of being immobile, but I have visited almost all the Seattle locations in this video after getting injured in the last 3 weeks and I haven't sat inside a car for the last 3 weeks. I'm realising how privileged I am after watching this video.
Great Points! I can't believe I haven't heard someone specifically link drunk driving to car dependency but you make it so obviously. This makes me think that banning or highly restricting parking at bars could save even more lives. More generally, you could just try to disincentivize driving to bars, and making us less dependent. The sleep relationship is interesting too. Glad you made this video. Although, at some points I think you make the framing of your argument a bit too strong. I ultimately agree on the solutions with you, if maybe not the exact target.
Even teenagers need a car come around 🤯, locked 🔒 up at home without a car🙄. The age to get a driving license in Europe (EU) is 18, there are some exceptions for motorized scooters and supervised driving by Parents at 17. That means when there start drinking there have no driving licence, learn responsible drinking without the opportunity to drive😉. In Germany you can buy beer and wine with 16 and normally there start drinking with 14/15.
Great video and I totally agree, It is so nice being able to walk home or ride the bus after a night of drinking. As somebody who lives next to the Space Needle in Queen Anne, I would love to hear what you have to say about how Seattle did infrastructure around our tourism district. There is an underground parking garage, a few surface lots, and I would LOVE to hear your opinion on 6 lane mercer street on the North side of the Seattle Center. It is definitely the eye sore of the area. Great content as always though!
What a great video. I especially love when you pointed out that it's the driving part of drunk driving that we should focus on. Like it's so blindingly obvious. If fewer people drive then there's going to be less drunk driving full stop. Great video
I generally disagree with you, but this time you're right. Bars shouldn't have parking lots. I intentionally bought a house within walking distance of my favorite bar. It's tough to get a DUI walking.
Replace parking minimums for bars with a sidewalk requirement and pullout requirements for buses/kiss-and-gos/cabs. And then the municipality needs to step up with at least an on-demand/dollar ride public transport option, if not connection to buses.
I would love to see you make a video on the proposal to cover part of i5 near downtown and capitol hill. I'm not sure how much you could really talk about it as it is in very early stages, but it would be interesting to hear your opinion on it.
My idea: Enact a law such that no place may sell alcohol for onsite consumption unless there is either a pre-existing public transit stop or a population of at least 500 within a quarter-mile radius. And of course, get rid of minimum parking requirements at bars.
@@artirony410And it would likely be lobbied out of existence by the restaurant industry, but imagine how quickly politicians' heads would spin if thousands of restaurants and bars became illegal overnight!
@@artirony410 Exactly! Hopefully, the mere potential of having your town in the middle of Ohio fiscally explode would be enough to force a local politician to react, rather than the current feet dragging. That seems to be the only thing they care about these days.
@@artirony410: Yeah, given the current level of car-dependence in most of the US, it's probably not politically feasible to outright ban "car bars". Perhaps we could have a reasonable compromise though. For example, (1) Limit car bars to serving low-alcohol (
An open door is still an open door even if it has a "do not enter" sign on it. If you really don't want people coming in then you have to shut it. Decades of anti-drunk driving campaigns and the door is still wide open. Parking minimums for bars is the most absurdly American city planning. Anyone who has been inside a bar knows it isn't full of "designated drivers", nor would they ever encourage that. I'll never forget the Simpsons episode where Barney had to be the "designated driver", it really illustrated the absurdity of the concept.
Great point about the overemphasis of personal responsibility/individual actions versus systems and institutions. Also applicable to issues of obesity, mental illness, homelessness, and so many other social problems we're experiencing under neoliberal capitalism.
The current phase of capitalism from the late 1970s to the present, characterized by free markets, privatization of public services, and austerity. Plenty of videos on RU-vid about it.@@enjoyslearningandtravel7957
I was hesitant to watch such a long video about the topic, but once again you bring up important issues that need to be addressed. I think there’s room for actually presenting some concrete solutions & analysis that go beyond just telling us what we need to do, to actually showing things that are being done & how they’re working. Perhaps that’s a second video or a more focused version of this one (?)
You are 100% correct, under the facts you present. It should be noted that drunk cycling leaves the rider just as culpable as a drunk driver, from a legal standpoint.
A lot of the bits from that "Every 15 minutes" shit was filmed outside of my old high school. Teenage me would have rolled my eyes at how useless that shit is. Also, the only time I ever drove off the road was when I was exhausted.
I grew up in Rural Ireland in the 1980s and 90s. In the 90s I can remember there being at least one serious alcohol related traffic accident per month in our very small town. These scared the community with death and serious injury (and the recovery and disability that comes with it). The thing was that 10 years earlier, it simply wasn’t the case because car usage and the construction of housing in the countryside, rather than living in towns and villages, wasn’t as common. People couldn’t afford cars and biking was much more common as roads were quieter. The changes in planning policy, allowing more construction of individual housing outside rural towns and villages and greater availability of cars caused people to drive more and then to drive drunk more. AND because people drank more but less often bars started to lose regular daily customers and closed down. It’s an example of were a simple change in planning policy to a more car dependent one can affect rural businesses and quality of life. Of course the lobby for this type of policy, who regularly virtue signal about caring for rural areas (ie farmers, estate agents, small construction companies), rarely mention that their own ideology has ruined rural life and push most of us to leave.
I always laugh when people try to defend car-centric design by bringing in rural folks. I grew up in that kind of area and everyone complained about how bad the public transport was even though every family had at least one car. People forget that not everyone out there can drive, should drive or wants to drive all the time. I swear the people defending that kind of design are the same people who speed on country lanes, piss off the locals and then get mad when the locals put up some speed cameras to curb the behaviour.
@@kev2034 Totally agree. My Mam is getting to the age where her eyesight is soon going to prevent her from diving. What's she gonna do them; get a chauffeur? What have these 'rural people need cars' people got to say for people in rural areas who can't drive? Are they going to pay for them all tho get their own personal minibus and driver?
Even worse than driving drunk, to me driving while fatigued has proven to be as deadly if not moreso than while intoxicated. I wouldn't drive under any of the two circumstances but fatigued driving does not get talked about nearly enough.
In my experience it's mostly suburbanites hating on cyclists. Which is everyone when cities are designed to look like suburbs. Then when you use the bike lane the exact same people tell you to get back on the sidewalk and get out of my way, you entitled cyclist!
you should compile a book. Like a book that is pretty to look at and has pictures and explanations like the ones in your videos. Something to get people talking. I would buy it.
Hi Yet Another Urbanist. Could you please make a video about the walkable neighborhoods in Seattle? Thank you! Which neighborhoods do you think it's walkable besides downtown?
That is definitely on the to-do list. I would probably focus on the Queen Anne and First Hill/Capitol Hill neighborhoods, as they seem to be the most walkable.
@@YetAnotherUrbanist , definitely worth spending time in the U-district. Greenlake to Roosevelt to north Ravenna is also becoming a nice stretch, though there are parts that are still just houses. It's very tree-heavy, still, though, so it's nice. Bring your bike up on the light rail for a visit. :)
The English pubs work because they have a culture of patronizing the neighborhood pub, with emphasis on socializing with people who live nearby even if there is no other commonality among them. In this country, the emphasis is similar to your first example, of gathering people who share something in common, such an employer, but everyone is from different parts of town. This inevitably leads to a market for establishments that are in mutually convenient (and mutually inconvenient) locations such as your example. As for Lyft and Uber vs public transit, there is also the consideration of intoxicated people being likely to throw up during their trip home: this becomes a mess that will not be cleaned up in a transit system and consequently discourage people from choosing this option in the first place, while the ride-sharing will directly charge the patrons for the cleanup and lost-time expenses. As for bars and equivalents, the prohibition period emphasized the growth of hosting alcoholic parties in private homes, a culture the remains today, where the problem is that the invited people are generally not from the neighborhood, leading to the car travel to get a residential single-family home neighborhood. In the stats about accidents due to alcohol impairment, it helps to distinguish whether the driver came from a commercial establishment (where bar tenders tend to stop serving people who had too much) or the driver came from a private party with far less supervision of people's total alcohol consumption. Many severely impaired drivers come from private home parties rather than bars.
Don't forget if you do try to walk home from a bar you can get arrested for being drunk in public disrupting the peace and whatever other charges they want to add on.
I would also like to point out that someone awake for 16 hours is about as impaired as someone legally drunk, so all of the issues you talked about are also applied to tired people. No tired person should be forced to drive simply because there is no other option. Driving while tired is as dangerous as driving drunk, and due to its prevalence it results in more accidents and kills more people.
Parking minimums for alcohol serving establishments is still a thing in the rest of King County, though I suspect it isn’t being enforced anymore. You only have to take the ferry over to Vashon and you will find lots of vine tasting rooms, cideries, and breweries in pretty far from town. There is no taxi service on the island (not even uber or lyft). Even if you pick a bar in town the last bus leaves from there before 10:00 PM (7:00 PM on weekends). Predictably drunk driving over here is rampant. There have been some efforts in the past where some hero leaves their phone number at the bar and offers to drive anyone home for free, but that obviously didn’t last. Hitchhiking from the bar is not uncommon either. But by far the most common ways people deal with this on the island is to drink strategically. That is try to keep their blood alcohol levels under the legal limits-which I doubt most do-before driving home. This is nuts. I live close enough from town that I can walk or bike home after drinking. Luckily there is a back rode that I can take if I feel unsafe biking along the highway next to all the drunk drivers.
Not to mention that compared to other oecd nations with better transit, us in the US have laughably low driving standards to pass and allow people under 18 who are proven to have less mature decision making skills due to their brain still developing. So combine sketchy and low standards with allowing people who are less capable of making good decisions like not texting/drunk driving, and it’s no wonder our driving deaths are ludicrously large
Just to further strengthen the point about UK drinking and driving. The comparison is not really valid as the UK has about 20% of the deaths by traffic accidents scaled by its population, about 24/million compared to 120/million so the real result is that 10x fewer people are killed in accidents caused by drunk drivers. The reality is that drink driving is socially unacceptable in the UK. I see a similar think in seatbelt wearing. In the UK, everyone wares a seatbelt. The prime minister got fined for taking it off to look good in a filmed segment, broadcast on TV got the police involved and he was cited for it. In the US I would say about 1 car in 10 the driver isn't wearing a seatbelt.
It shouldn't be a matter of disincentivizing driving. It should be a matter of encouraging people to get around without driving. You should also start locally and fix the problem locally before trying to fix it everywhere else. You should buy a bus and hire someone to drive it and charge people to ride it. Then you could actually solve the problem, instead of complaining about it.
5:51 I like this graph. For countries like Russia and South Korea, known for their drinking cultures, both are below HALF of the drunk driving found in the US and Canada. But can someone explain South Africa??
People will drink and drive as long as there is no real consequences. They need to treat it like what it is operating under influence plus intent for homicide and make it so you can't buy your way out 1st offense 5 year prison minimum Speeding 1st offense 1 year prison minimum =no more Speeding and kids don't get run over
One of my older relatives spend a lot of time and money starting a small farm in California and one day he was returning from buying supplies he got hit by a drunk driver and died
lived in this place called townville, australia. there is one street that has all the bars on it, its on the other side of the city from the university. this 'city' has no trains or trams, just a few bus routes that stop at about 10pm. There were cheap nights when it was $2 drinks, you would spend $20 on drinks and have a good night and in a time before Uber, spend $80 on a taxi getting home.
