NTSB Seeks to Lower Blood-Alcohol Limit to 0.05 for Drivers of Passenger Vehicles
This story appears in the May 20 print edition of Transport Topics.
Passenger motorists would be considered drunk and prohibited from driving if their blood-alcohol content exceeded 0.05, based on recommendations proposed last week by the National Transportation Safety Board.
Each state and the District of Columbia currently has a 0.08 blood-alcohol content limit for drunken driving, but about 10,000 people still die due to alcohol-impaired driving every year, NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman said at a May 14 press conference in Washington.
“Many people in the United States believe that we have solved the drunken-driving problem, but in fact, that is not the case,” Hersman said. “It’s frustrating that with the education and advocacy, with laws and enforcement and with the many processes set up to deal with the problem of drinking and driving, that we are still seeing so many lives lost.”
NTSB can only make recommendations and cannot write any regulations or legislation. The recommendation is part of a 100-page report on impaired driving, released May 14, that NTSB has worked on for a year, starting with a May 2012 public forum on drunken and impaired driving.
Although federal regulations state commercial drivers are subject to a stricter 0.04 blood-alcohol content limit, they cannot drive while drinking nor within four hours of drinking. In addition, a commercial driver who violates the alcohol-use regulations must immediately stop driving and cannot drive again until he or she is evaluated by a substance abuse professional, according to Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration regulations.
A commercial driver must also follow all treatment guidelines from the substance abuse professional before driving a truck again, and then must have six random alcohol tests during his or her first 12 months back on the job, under the FMCSA rules.
A December 2012 study from NTSB found that drunken driving was the leading cause of crashes related to wrong-way driving on one-way roads.
Of the about 10,000 alcohol-related traffic deaths in 2011, almost 1,000 were caused by drivers with a blood-alcohol content reading between 0.05 and 0.07, Hersman said.
Only the states can change their blood-alcohol content limits for most drivers, though Congress has used the threat of withholding transportation funds to entice states to change their limits before.
American Trucking Associations agreed with NTSB.
“All motorists should support reducing the instances of impaired driving,” ATA President Bill Graves said in a statement.
Though blood-alcohol content relies on a number of factors, including food consumption and tolerance, a 180-pound man generally would reach 0.05 by drinking four alcoholic drinks in three hours, according to the Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Health Education and Wellness. A 140-pound woman would reach the same blood-alcohol content with three drinks over the same period.
Hopkins defines a drink as 12 ounces of beer, 5 ounces of wine or 1.5 ounces of 80-proof liquor.
NTSB wrote in its report that blood-alcohol content levels as low as 0.01 could impair driving performance and that 0.05 can significantly increase the risk of a fatal crash.
The American Beverage Institute opposed NTSB’s recommendation of a 0.05 blood-alcohol content, saying it would do little to solve the problem of impaired driving.
“This recommendation is ludicrous,” Sarah Longwell, the institute’s managing director, said in a statement. “Moving from 0.08 to 0.05 would criminalize perfectly responsible behavior.”
Hersman said NTSB did not intend to prohibit drivers from having a drink with dinner because that is rarely a problem. But she also advised that it would be safest for people never to drive after drinking.
