Quote:
Originally Posted by Rathji
If having a BAC of over 0.01 involves you in more accidents, which is what this stat and your comment/quote would indicate, how does the legal definition of "drunk driving" play any part?
Are you really saying that drunk pedestrians are to blame for enough accidents that it is statistically significant? That's the only "padding" going on here. If anything, the addition of the people in the 0.01 to 0.07 range would be padding the stats in the favour of actual drunk drivers, since, like you claimed, the alcohol would have had a limited impact on the results for the non-drunk people, and they would likely be a much higher proportion of the total drivers on the road.
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I'm confused by what you're trying to argue here?
When people hear "alcohol related" the vast majority assume that a
drunk driver
caused the accident. Which, by definition, is not the case.
If you start throwing in every single event that includes someone who has had a beer in the past hour or two into your statistic regardless of actual fault or cause, you end up with a bigger number, hence a padded statistic.
If you haven't consumed any alcohol, start driving, get distracted and cause an accident and kill a pedestrian who had beer an hour ago, it's labelled as "alcohol related" which adds to that 30% when in reality it shouldn't, which fudges the number because whether or not that pedestrian had that beer earlier, you still would have hit him and he still would have died.
It would be like labelling any fatal accident that involved a driver or pedestrian who had a cell phone on their person as a "distraction related" accident, regardless if they were talking on the phone or not and regardless of who was at fault. The cellphone is a non-factor that is being included in the statistics in order to pad the numbers.
At 0.01 the BAC is a non-factor that is being included to pad numbers.