Drunk Driving Fatalities

Goal on Curbing Alcohol-Related Traffic Deaths Is Proving Elusive

By BRIAN WINGFIELD - New York Times

Published: January 15, 2005

WASHINGTON, Jan. 14 - The government is falling short of its longstanding goal for cutting the nation's alcohol-related traffic deaths, and traffic fatalities involving drinking remain stubbornly stable at about 17,000 a year, according to transportation safety officials and private groups.

Meeting the target, they say, might save as many as 1,700 lives a year.

Federal and state safety officials spoke of meeting the lower target by the end of 2004, and although the final data have not been assembled, they now say the efforts will probably fall short.

"To be intellectually honest with you, I don't think we're going to make it," Dr. Jeffrey W. Runge, the administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said Thursday in an interview.

In 2001, in an effort to focus on a single nationwide goal, the agency aimed to reduce alcohol-related traffic deaths to a rate of 0.53 per 100 million miles traveled by all vehicles by the end of 2004.

In 2003, the most recent year for which comprehensive statistics are available, the rate was 0.59. While the figure has been going down, to reach the target it would have had to plummet by an additional 10 percent last year, much faster than in previous years.

In 2003, there were 17,013 deaths in alcohol-related traffic accidents, the fewest since 1999.

Throughout the 1980's and early 1990's, alcohol-related traffic fatality rates did drop steadily as the government and many private organizations, like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, waged highly publicized campaigns to curb drinking and driving and states tightened laws against drinking and driving.

In recent years, the absolute number of alcohol-related traffic deaths has hit a plateau, just over 17,000 a year, and officials said it had been hard to keep the issue in the public eye. Wendy Hamilton, the national president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, said that "people think the problem's been solved."

Earlier this week, Mothers Against Drunk Driving held a news conference to call for the greater use of "high-visibility law enforcement," like sobriety checkpoints. In particular, the organization would like to see 10 states - Idaho, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Texas, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming - change their laws to allow such checkpoints.

Barbara Harsha, executive director of the Governors Highway Safety Association, a nonprofit organization that represents states' highway safety concerns, said: "States are cutting back on law enforcement right now, they're diverting law enforcement to homeland security, and law enforcement officers are retiring. Resources are stretched thin."

Dr. Runge, of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said that in the short term, highly visible enforcement efforts were the best way to remind people that drunken driving was still an issue.

He said some states with high alcohol-related traffic fatality rates had not done much with the federal government to reduce deaths. But he listed 13 states with severe impaired-driving problems that appeared willing to improve: Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and West Virginia.

"If we can get those states to the national average, we'll be 80 percent of the way to meeting our goal," Dr. Runge said.

Tags: Fatalities & Accidents |  Statistics