Re:Ride-hailing apps may help to curb drunk driving
by belovedeagle on Friday April 07, 2017 @07:59PM
(#14064398)
Exactly this, but it should be made clear that this has nothing to do with the general safety of rural roads. In general there are dangers encountered when driving (especially at night) on rural roads which aren't encountered in urban environments, although the converse is also true.
People always compare the US to Western Europe when this topic comes up, but that's simply an invalid comparison. For this topic, the US should be compared to Russia or possibly Canada. These countries have rural areas which are neither completely deserted (where drunk driving would be irrelevant even if it were likely to happen) nor support a large enough population to have reasonable transportation alternatives.
I wish the US would recognize this fact and have two sets of drunk driving laws - one for urban areas (matching Western European conventions) and one for rural (matching current conventions). Unfortunately, this is probably impossible since it could be seen as permitting drunk driving.
Re:Ride-hailing apps may help to curb drunk driving
by lazyasciiart on Friday April 07, 2017 @05:14AM
(#14058292)
It's a common misconception that rural roads are safer than urban, but it's just not true. The fatality rate is higher on rural roads (both in total and per mile driven) and rural roads are massively over represented in road accident stats for the percentage of the population that lives in them. Shitty google AMP link to a pdf: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
That, and by the fact that in a lot of the very rural areas, drunk driving has a rather low fatality rate, given that there are no other cars on the road and no obstacles to crash into. If you run off the road, you just drive into some corn or wheat or alfalfa, or at worst hit somebody's cows. (These are the same places you'll see people e.g. allowing their young children to drive trucks or motorcycles—even by themselves, at night. There's just nothing much that can go wrong.)
(I think this is all also true of rural Russia, which is a large part of where the American stereotype of Russians as constantly drinking comes from.)