Some say it will hurt business while others ponder whether a .05 level amounts to government intrusion.
Local tavern owners, defense lawyers and court administrators used their words carefully when weighing in today on a proposal to cut the threshold for drunken driving by nearly half.
The consensus was obvious -- drinking and driving is bad -- but there was also some agreement that lowering the threshold from a 0.08 blood alcohol level to a 0.05 would cause significant problems ranging from losses in business to concerns over government intrusion to a potential backlog of criminal cases capable of choking the court system.
The National Transportation Safety Board released a report today that said states should adopt the lower threshold to match a standard that has substantially reduced highway deaths in other countries. More than 100 countries have adopted the 0.05 standard or lower, according to the report by the staff of the NTSB.
NTSB officials said it wasn’t their intention to prevent drivers from having a glass of wine with dinner, but they acknowledged that under a threshold as low as 0.05 the safest thing for people who have only one or two drinks is not to drive at all.
Some Lehigh Valley bar owners said while they of course don’t support drunken driving, the lower limit would significantly reduce business.
“It would definitely hurt our business — everyone’s business in bars,” said Chaz Patrick, general manager and co-owner of Molly’s Irish Grille & Sports Bar in Bethlehem. “They’re driving people to stay home. It’s just another reason for people not to go out or to just have one drink instead of two drinks.”
Laz Melan, the owner of College Hill Tavern in Easton and The Pickled Egg in Wilson Borough, also said the lower limit would reduce business He said .05 is so low that they may as well forbid all alcohol while driving if they’re going to go that low.
“At 0.05 it may as well be 0.01,” he said.
Jim Burke, a Bethlehem lawyer who focuses parts of his practice on drunken driving law, said the proposed limits would leave many people unable to tell if they are legally intoxicated. Unlike 0.08 or 0.10 levels, many people won’t feel the affects of alcohol at 0.05.
“Personally, I am never going to leave my home,” he said. “I thought .08 was ridiculous. This is absurd.”
At the 0.05 level, he said he would expect cases like that to increase in frequency.
“Now you’re going to have people who are barely intoxicated going through the ringer,” he said. “This is probably going to be good for business, but I feel terrible for the people.”
Jill Cicero, assistant court administrator of Northampton County, said she could not estimate how much larger the court’s caseload would become under a 0.05 legal limit. Without that information, she said she would not speculate on what steps, if any, the court would take to address the proposed change if it went into effect.
However, she pointed out that nearly 100 people apply for ARDs each month for drunken driving charges, and those are only first time offenders.
Defense lawyer Gary Asteak believes that driving with a 0.05 BAC is no worse than other common road distractions such as driving while fiddling with a GPS, texting or applying makeup, he said. He questioned how the government could continue to focus its efforts on drunken driving when these other distractions are at least its equal.
“We’re going down an extremely slippery slope where the government is intruding on all of us,” he said.
If the legal limit drops to a near imperceptible level like 0.05, he said, authorities ought to have to prove that drivers are putting themselves and others at risk.
“People shouldn’t drink and drive at all, but to label it criminal without a showing that there’s an impairment is missing the point,” he said.
A drink is defined as 12 ounces of beer, 4 ounces of wine, or 1 ounce of 80-proof alcohol in most studies.
Alcohol concentration levels as low as 0.01 have been associated with driving-related performance impairment, and levels as low as 0.05 have been associated with significantly increased risk of fatal crashes, the NTSB said.
New approaches are needed to combat drunken driving, which claims the lives of about a third of the more than 30,000 people killed each year on U.S highways — a level of carnage that has remained stubbornly consistent for the past decade and a half, the board said.
“Our goal is to get to zero deaths because each alcohol-impaired death is preventable,” NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman said. “Alcohol-impaired deaths are not accidents, they are crimes. They can and should be prevented. The tools exist. What is needed is the will.”
An alcohol concentration threshold of 0.05 is likely to meet strong resistance from states, said Jonathan Adkins, an official with the Governors Highway Safety Association, which represents state highway safety offices.
“It was very difficult to get 0.08 in most states so lowering it again won’t be popular,” Adkins said. “The focus in the states is on high (blood alcohol content) offenders as well as repeat offenders. We expect industry will also be very vocal about keeping the limit at 0.08.”
Even safety groups such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving and AAA declined today to endorse NTSB’s call for a 0.05 threshold. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which sets national safety policy, also stopped short of endorsing the board’s recommendation.
The board recommended NHTSA establish "incentive grants” designed to encourage states to adopt the lower threshold.