Quote:
Just remember kids, 60% of road fatalities are caused by the perfectly sober.
|
I know this comment is being at least partially facetious, but the stats need to be looked at the right way.
One question to ask is what proportion of all drivers fall into the different BAC categories. It's easy to conclude that 60% of sober drivers were involved in an accident since there are just so many more sober drivers on the road. To me, 22% of fatal accidents caused by drivers with BAC > .16% is pretty telling. Even 11% of fatal accidents caused by drivers with BAC between .08% and .16% sounds very disproportionate. Put another way, if you think that 1 in 11 drivers on the road have a BAC between .08 and .16, then having a BAC between .08 and .16 effectively doubles your chances of getting into a fatal car crash.
And while 1 in 11 seems very conservative to me, we are also at the mercy of the stats here - lots of other factors that aren't taken into account like time of day (my guess is that the majority of sober accidents take place during the day, majority of non-sober accidents take place at night), other impairments like drugs, etc. So as always, take the analysis with a grain of salt.
The real stat that would be good to know, but unfortunately impossible to find out, is how many of the fatal accidents caused by drivers with non-zero BAC would have occurred if they were sober?