> People can also help by double-checking anybody's licence before lending them their car, said Theresa-Anne Kramer, a spokesperson for MADD Montreal.
> The SAAQ says visually checking a driver's licence may not be enough, as a hard copy does not always provide up-to-date information. The agency reminds people that their car could be impounded for 30 days or more if the driver breaks the law.
> For a fee of $1.75, the SAAQ will verify a licence through its website.
> "That would be a wise thing to always do whenever you lend your car, even to your best friend," said Kramer.
> "That person might have kept it secret that they have an alcohol interlock in their own vehicle. Family members might not be aware of it. Friends might not be aware of it."
They want you to pay $1.75 for a single query against a database? That makes AWS prices look cheap.
Probably because usage volume is low, so they have to amortize the fixed costs (eg. payment to the government IT consultants) over a smaller number of requests.
That seems like a weak excuse. The capability needs to exist for SAAQ staff regardless, and something like this can either be implemented as a human service where it's an email request (low volume) or a form on the website.
I could be mistaken but I believe it was the SAAQ that had "business hours" for one of their online services where you could only submit a form between 9 and 4 or something ridiculous like that.
Aeroplan had this until recently too, the website shut down at 9PM PST and re-opened at 6AM PST. Last employee out turn off the servers? What is it about Canadian IT haha.
It’s an accessibility regulation. If a government website has to be equally accessible to people who are deaf / hard of hearing, blind, etc. then the website can only be live when services for those people are up. There are some sites that rely on humans to provide backup services like filling out forms, and they only work business hours.
I am not sure volume is going to be low. Won't every car rental have to do this check? Now every time anyone uses a ZipCar or rents a car, it costs an extra $1.75.
I hate it when governments do this, and they seem to do it a lot. The socially optimal price is the marginal cost of providing the service. In this case, the marginal cost is essentially 0 so the search should be free. They're leaving welfare gains on the table by setting such a ridiculous price.
> Unfortunately, this is one of the most effective methods of discouraging wanton scraping.
Maybe they could require you to add (and verify) a credit card and then not charge it for fewer than 30 queries a month.
Of course, it's a solution that brings other problems, but it's one way of using payment systems to provide the service and keep it free for everyone but the scrapers.
If you had a picture of the license you could certainly scrape it--but then you're doing it legitimately anyway, no need to scrape. Without a picture of the license it's not going to return anything but an error.
I'd imagine that the socially optimal price is _below_ marginal cost, since it's improving compliance with a law that (I hope) is uncontroversially utility-increasing
Stop spam I would imagine. If you have to pay such a "high" price for the query, then you're not going to enumerate every license combination (unless you had deep pockets)
Turning everyone into deputies to enforce that their friends not borrow their car seems pretty lousy to me. Reminds me of those felony murder laws, or the laws that punish parents where their children host binge drinking parties without their knowledge.
This isn't much different from lending your car to someone without asking if they have a driver's license, period? I mean it's slightly different (I'm not sure if the car is automatically impounded for driving without a license) but I think they're making a big deal out of a fairly minor detail. If your friend borrows your car knowing full well that if they're pulled over it's going to be evaluated... maybe in general a good sign it's time to reevaluate that friendship?
Addiction is hard. And some people hide it really well. There are many high functioning alcoholics out there, and you can be sure that many of their friends don't know how bad the situation really is.
Letting a visibly drunk person get behind the wheel is obviously a big no no, but there are many shades of grey here. You should not be responsible for other people's failures.
There is a world of a difference between knowing full well that your friend has lost his license and lending him your car after he has shown you a license that is no longer valid.
The obvious solution is to never lend your car out to anybody, but that is not the optimal solution.
They want you to pay $1.75 for a single query against a database? That makes AWS prices look cheap.
They want to set a price that's high enough to stop people invading the privacy of everyone they know for a cheap laugh, but low enough that it won't put people off checking if they're genuinely concerned but also very poor. Making it, say, $5 would cause some people to seriously think whether or not they can afford it.
30 years ago, Quebec was the province where "nobody cared how drunk you were as long as you stayed on your side of the road." It looks like that caught up to them, and is causing enough problems to warrant this new law.
I saw someone on the interstate bouncing from one lane marking to the other. I thought "maybe they're drunk...or maybe they're just testing the automatic lane-keeping feature on their new car".
True, but also, the dangers are somewhat overstated. A BAC of 0.10 (3-4 drinks in an hour for the average American, so, a lot) [1] makes you 7X more likely to be involved in a fatal accident. Sounds like a lot, right? The risk of being involved in a fatal accident is baseline 10.7 per 100,000 per year. That 0.01% per year. So, if you spent the entire year with a BAC of 0.1, commuting normally, you'd have a 0.07% per year risk of dying. That's still three 9's of, uh, up-time.
Should you do it? No. Knocking back a couple beers and driving isn't the equivalent of walking off a sheer rock face though.
The only thing that's caught up with Quebec is their puritanical tendencies, see: the CAQ being elected.
Your second link mentions that alcohol is a factor in 1/3 of fatal traffic accidents and that traffic accidents are the leading killer of adults under 25. I think dropping the leading killer of young adults would be worthwhile.
Your third link says accidents will be the cause of death for 1 in 77 people and compared it to 1 in 276 people dying of skin cancer. Does this mean I shouldn't bother wearing sunscreen?
> Your second link mentions that alcohol is a factor in 1/3 of fatal traffic accidents and that traffic accidents are the leading killer of adults under 25. I think dropping the leading killer of young adults would be worthwhile.
I'm with you 100%, and again, I don't recommend anyone ever drive drunk. It's hardly the responsible thing to do. I was pointing out that it isn't as most people assume, that if you have 2 drinks you're going to die in a multi-car pile-up.
I also suspect those under-25s had more than 3-4 drinks, and also that they likely drove extra recklessly as under-25s tend to do — hence their insurance premiums and inability to rent cars.
We should always evaluate the proportionality of our responses especially as humans are notoriously bad at managing low risk of a strongly negative outcome.
> Your third link says accidents will be the cause of death for 1 in 77 people and compared it to 1 in 276 people dying of skin cancer. Does this mean I shouldn't bother wearing sunscreen?
Not wearing sunscreen may well help you avoid skin cancer and have other ancillary benefits to both you and reefs. [1] tldr: vitamin D supplements don't work and sunscreen blocks your ability to synthesize vitamin D and nitrogen oxides (which lower blood pressure).
re: cancer risk of sun exposure: the most common cancers due to sun exposure are basal-cell carcinomas and squamous-cell carcinomas, which are almost never fatal.
People who work outdoors are half a likely to develop melanoma, and similarly for tanned people. “The risk factor for melanoma appears to be intermittent sunshine and sunburn, especially when you’re young,” says Weller. “But there’s evidence that long-term sun exposure associates with less melanoma.”
but I digress, you don’t have a mandatory sunscreen application machine stapled to all the doors of your house by law if you fail to put it on twice haha
> I think dropping the leading killer of young adults would be worthwhile.
That's statistical feel-good thinking
Young adults don't usually die of natural causes
Impaired driving, while it is certainly a concern, gets too much "think of the children/puritanical" influence.
How many people are impaired by lack of sleep? By texting? By lack of or confusing road signs? And while all of those are addressed more or less, none of them are tackled as punitively as DUI.
(And of course different BACs have very different effects, or even the same BAC can affect people differently)
I’d love numbers on how many are killed or injured by amber alerts. My phone goes off as though the Russians just launched the Nukes for an incident half a state away, and while driving it’s kinda terrifying.
Edit: According to a comment below, for every 100 fatal accidents caused by drunk driving, additionally there are approximately 220 serious injuries and 1,800 minor injuries.
Yep, that's absolutely fair, and I don't have data on it. I also picked a specific BAC value only slightly above the legal limit. The more you drink the worse it gets, naturally. Without data, I'd speculate that the incidence of non-fatal and fatal accidents increases commensurately as you are of course generally less able to control your vehicle.
Sure but that’s not a rational way of approaching it. The question is wholistic, what is the total harm to society in criminalizing this behavior and enforcing it to such an extent? Humans are dreadful at dealing with things that are unlikely to happen but carry substantial consequence.
Case in point, according to Schneier, many more people died because they chose to drive instead of fly after 9/11 (and the increased airport security theater) than died in the actual incident. [1]
You could make the same case, what if it was my family in the towers? My heart goes out of course to those people but the decision made as a result was not the right one for society.
In court, from what I've seen, police officers (as witnesses) put on quite a show laying out their experience, the calibration of the machine, the outcome of the field tests, etc. because of the skepticism that people have. You get a very different picture than what you get from journalism like that. Not saying it is always accurate, or nothing is ever fabricated or lied about, just that it seems normal to cover every possible objection twice over and only prosecute the most aggravated cases (at least in my locale).
For what would the breath analyzer results be necessary in court? Arent there judge ordered mandatory blood alcohol tests after failing a breath analyzer test?
That's kind of my point, I don't think anyone goes and presents the breath test on its own. They're like "I was trained for X months to identify drunk drivers and use this equipment, and I've stopped X hundred drunk drivers, and I've been at parties where people are drinking, so I know what levels of drunkenness are like, and the machine was calibrated and they failed the walking and eye tracking tests and their pants fell down and they pissed themselves and they had a blood test of double the limit..."
The breath test is, I think (I am not a lawyer) insurance that there was reasonable suspicion of the person being drunk, not final proof of anything.
In Australia all positive breath tests are immediately followed by an actual blood sample test which is pretty reliable. I think its a good idea to double check like this.
At least in NSW/ACT, generally speaking, outside of police attendance at an actual crash where someone has been injured, a roadside positive breath test will be followed by an evidentiary breath test (typically taken at a police station) and they are not required to do blood tests.
You can get arrested for DUI at a 0.00. Both legitimately (doesn't have to be alcohol - could be many meds too, or even fatigue.) - or just catch the wrong cop on the wrong day.
Procedures are different in every state. You can get arrested if you are suspected of driving under the influence and then required to take a breathalyzer elsewhere.
An arrest isn't a conviction. Police don't hand down these judgments.
I think there is a general principle, that if a certain number of people have a condition, possibly rare, that severely affects them, then there are almost certainly going to be a lot more with milder versions that may go unnoticed, by the public, or by the health system, or statisticians, or whatever.
I think your unstated assumption is that the level of the condition that causes health problems and/or a diagnosis is the same level that would mess with breathalyzers. It could be much less.
Isn't jail time a punishment? Obviously driving in most of North America is a governmentally enforced obligation, which is why durisdictions often permit even those whose licence has been suspended to drive. I think it seems a fair response.
Had a coworker that found that out the hard way. Got a DUI and didn't tell anyone. Then one day a few months later had a work trip in Canada. They stopped him at customs in Canada and shipped him back. Company had to fly someone else out there on short notice.
Still better than the coworker that flew to Canada on business and then while on the trip his name got added to the "NO FLY" list. That was a fiasco.
A coworker of mine went to Pakistan and then was not allowed to come back for quite a while. I don't know if it was the proverbial "no fly" list or something else, but eventually he was allowed back.
I remember reading about someone who was denied entry to Canada because they brought anti-depressants with them.
You have no rights traveling across borders, and it's not just US officials that are arbitrary and unreasonable.
Yup. We have a group of people who regularly camp the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) on the Minnesota side of the boarder. We started doing trips where we would paddle to the Canadian side into Quetico - and found out one of the guys had a DUI when we did the boarder crossing. Had to cancel that part of the of the trip... and add some difficult questions for folks on the subsequent trips.
They must. We all just handed over our passorts and paperwork. It was really, really unexpected when one of the guys was told they could not enter. Root cause was the DUI in the US. Very much threw a wet blanket on what is a great trip.
The guy who had the issue never camped with us again, even on the US side. Not fun.
That is not a 100% accurate statement...I’ve had a DUI for over 3 years and I’ve travelled to and from Canada at least 8-10 times without any issues. Initially, I was scared to cross the border solely for the reason you mentioned...but after talking to a few others in the same situation and learning that they didn’t have any issues, I took my chances. Seems like they might utilize a risk factor along with your driving/criminal history...or maybe solely at the CBP agent’s discretion.
Public transportation is good in Quebec. So much so that taking the license away for life would likely be better and specifically when it comes to residing in Quebec. Driving drunk is rarely a mistake and tremendously selfish to others.
Thats only true in Montreal and its close surroundings, a driver license is required if you live pretty much anywhere else, since the suburban growth is pretty high overall in Canada and public transport cant effectively keep up
Define drunk. I drive beyond the limits (probably, I don't know it for sure) quite often. I go very slow, drive very carefully on roads that I know by heart, and hadn't had a single accident in twenty years.
Most people thought like you did thirty years ago. Societies have changed, and not for a frivolous reason; you might want to update your views.
Drunk in this case is precisely defined in the law as a permillage of alcohol in the blood stream (the law varies per country, but you should know the ones applicable to you). Valid methods of measuring this are described as well.
Incidentally, what you say is almost literally what every inebriated driver who caused an accident resulting in severe harm or loss of life says afterwards before coming to terms with their actions.
I disagree. I know very well the difference between driving blind drunk and carelessly and possibly very young ("I drive great when I'm drunk") and driving extremely carefully, basically never going beyond 40km/h.
And of course what the law defines is an alcohol limit, which is probably very conservative: it cannot define the meaning of the word "drunk".
I think every opinion and decision must be challenged, otherwise, when only one side of the debate has legitimacy, you end up with entirely skewed decisions. And since drunk driving does kill people, and nobody dared to defend drinkers, there has been a lack of balance in the initiatives against it.
So I'm sacrificing my karma for the sake of some balance :)
> I go very slow, drive very carefully on roads that I know by heart, and hadn't had a single accident in twenty years.
Said every drunk driver, ever. I have no respect for drunk drivers. You don't care about your life, that's on you. But you are putting the lives of other people in serious jeopardy by doing this. Someone could end up having their life destroyed, or maybe even dying because of your shitty actions.
> And since drunk driving does kill people, and nobody dared to defend drinkers, there has been a lack of balance in the initiatives against it.
There is a reason behind this. When you are drunk, you have lowered inhibitions, poor judgement, more (often unwarranted, like in your previous post) self confidence, vision problems, poor hand-eye coordination, drowsiness, the list goes on. You should not in any case be driving while drunk, and you do have to be daring to defend drunk driving. I am happy there has been a lack of balance in that regard.
If it was just you driving on am empty field or track where the only person you could harm is yourself, I'd have no problem with it. But you are putting others at risk, and that's where I draw the line.
And it's not just the actions you take when driving inebriated yourself. By taking the 'I never had an accident, I just drive slowly and surely' stance, you implicitly tell others that this is fine, and that one or two drinks don't matter (or three, or four), as long as you take it slow and steady, and really, the law is too strict anyway.
People are influenced by others, younger drivers in particular. You are not only responsible for your own actions, but also for the message you send to others.
In Australia, it's referred to as drink driving rather than drunk driving. Because it's about impairment of driving ability (as approximated through more objective measures like BAC), not "drunkenness".
The funny thing of this conversation is that the legal BAC limit for driving in the US and Canada is 80mg/100ml. In my country is 50mg/100ml. So at least some of you self-righteous people are happily driving with the same BAC as I do, only within the legal limits, while being mad at me for doing the same. You should all go to jail. :)
In most of North America the governments effectively require you to drive a car through their town planning and public transport policies. This is not a technical problem, and solving it would be more effective in solving the social problems (and many others besides).
There are companies creating blood alcohol detection devices that would be an integral part of new vehicles. They can detect alcohol in the cabin air or from the driver's finger. It's only a matter of time before they become mandatory on all new cars, similar to airbags and TPMS.
The scary part is how inaccurate and secretive breathalyzers can be. You have no right to cross examine the machine's software or anything. It's a magic blackbox that is treated as irrefutable truth.
If something becomes universal, then any problem with false positives will be exposed through large numbers, and be fixed.
Also, in the US, and I assume in Canada, standards for new cars have generally not affected peoples' rights to continue owning and driving existing cars. If new requirements are really onerous, it will increase the market for previously produced cars, and then we can debate whether to force people to upgrade or something.
Good. If I'm licensed to carry a handgun and one day get drunk and fire my gun at a crowd without hitting anyone, how long should I have to wait before being allowed to carry a gun in public again? Most people would say I should never be trusted with lethal force again.
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait to Hacker News? You've been doing it a lot, unfortunately, and we're trying for a bit better than internet default here.
Well, that analogy seems to me to apply also to any instance of an "accident" where the driver is at fault. However, that would be a significant change to society, and also, (at least in the area of the US I'm familiar with) the police and legal system don't normally pass judgment on who is at fault in an accident, unless there is a specific law broken; it is up to the insurance companies.
That seems unfair, to give a pass to people who are naturally terrible drivers without drugs. Meaning poor reflexes, decision making, risk management, or aggression.
It's a false equivalence. We're much more tolerant of the dangers of driving because of the positive value it brings. A gun is rarely essential for somebody's work but driving often is. That's also why some countries ban guns but allow cars despite cars killing far more people.
It can see unfair. There's a truck driver in my country who killed two people with his truck on two separate occasions. Both his fault. But he'll still be allowed to drive again after maybe a 6-12 month suspension.
The way I try to feel comfortable with such seeming injustice is to see road accidents as random bad luck. So by using the road, you're playing Russian roulette. You never know what might kill you or whose fault it might be, including your own. Extreme punishment for the tiny subset of dangerous drivers who make certain mistakes and happen to be unlucky enough to get caught won't really make it much safer. People still risk their own lives driving dangerously, after all, so even the death penalty for drink driving won't stop people doing it.
I don't see why I should be at excess risk of dying because I tripped on my shoelace or badly maintained road while walking to the shops. In particular, a person walking to buy milk shouldn't be at excess risk of death even through their own fault. If you hit your head when you fall and die from it, then that happens. But if you survive the fall, another person going to pick up their children from soccer shouldn't be excused from killing you just because it happened on the road.
I think it's fantastic to be addressing crime with instant prevention rather than deterrence. Many people don't have enough impulse control to follow the law regardless of how harsh the penalties are. What they need is some kind of full time supervisor like a breath interlock to stop them before they break the law.
Actually, the whole justice system is based on a faulty idea that all humans rationally evaluate the risk of getting caught. Some people will follow the law regardless, some will decide what crime to commit by evaluating the risk, and some will break the law regardless of the risk. That last category needs a different system.
I question what "rationally evaluating the risk of getting caught" means for an individual.
If I'm an insurance company, or other entity dealing with large numbers of "getting caught", then indeed, I can rationally determine that it will happen x% of the time and plan accordingly.
But if I'm an individual, and I don't have a way of significantly changing the risk, then all I can do is make a binary decision - do the risky thing, or don't. If the risk is small, then I'm probably going to do it. How is a person "rationally" supposed to react to, say, a risk going from 0.1% to 1%, when the choice is only do or do not do?
I'd guess a lot of those decisions are probably fairly insensitive to small changes in the risk. But if, say, the sentence duration for murder was gradually reduced towards 0 years, there'd have to be some kind of increase in offending. Maybe not linear, but at some point, people are going to be angry enough at their enemies to take the 1 year jail when they wouldn't take the 30 years.
But for drink driving, you typically do it many times without getting caught, so you could respond to changed risk by changing how often you do it.
A friend of mine had one in her car. It was a major pain, frequently drained the battery and/or had to be reset to function, which she had to call someone to do and hope she got a response.
While I have no sympathy for drunk drivers, this technological solution is sufficiently unreliable to be dubious.
I think that depends on the installation. My gf had one for a year and there were very few issues with it.
The most regular issue was nicotine spray setting it off.
It had to be serviced once in a year and this service was included in the price.
Personally I think a lifetime sentence is a bit harsh but I definitely agree that drunk drivers should have an ignition lock for a long time, perhaps 5-10 years.
I had a friend who had an interlock device; it was so unreliable, and triggered so many false positives that his sentence was extended because the DMV thought he was regularly driving drunk. What's worse is that when the device had a positive reading, he'd blow again, and it was negative. This was accurately recorded, and yet the DMV wouldn't recognize the impossibility of going from incredibly drunk to stone cold sober in the span of three minutes.
While I support the idea itself, the technology is incredibly unreliable, and since it only affects "criminals", there's no public demand for them to improve.
If it happens repeatedly in the records, you'd either expect him to learn (and see the get the person first), or you'd need to start looking at the thing that can't learn :-)
This is a life sentence which could impact your ability to support yourself. I imagine this could result in quite an impact on getting any job which requires driving. You should have options for getting this thing removed at some point.
I imagine this is for your personal car. A company car would probably not have this. Though, I would hope that companies that are paying you to specifically drive would skip the 2x DUI people.
it seems that a workaround for this for a somewhat wealthy or privileged repeat drunk driver would be to form a corporation, buy a vehicle, put some company stickers on the car, get company vehicle insurance. I'm sure you could pay a web developer a few hundred bucks to create a plausible looking company web page, register domain for it, set up email, have a whole set of letterheads for communicating with the relevant government authorities.
This is very clever and made me laugh, but really, someone with two drunk driving offenses should just take the humble, honest, simpler path of being sober and blowing in the breath machine.
Except, if I’m reading correctly, the restriction is on the offenders license and they are prohibited from driving any vehicle that does not have the lockout device.
I think it's a restriction on your license and applies to any car you drive. The company car won't have the device so the driver would not be able to legally drive it. This would be similar to how some locations make you do a road test with a standard transmission or you are only allowed to drive an automatic.
I've done some pretty stupid shit carwise in my youth and lost a few licenses along the way.
Perhaps extrapolate your statement out to other forms of justice meted out by society and ask if you'd say the same about those crimes?
I'd certainly hope I could get a driving job today if worse came to worse. I did my time and certainly paid my dues. Technically it's been long enough that my crimes are wiped off the record and I can legally not mention them to workplaces/authorities.
It's very easy to demand heavy lifetime justice for everyone you don't sympathise with, a lot harder to make it fair and equitable to the longterm benefit of a society. I honestly don't understand how the US treats their convicted criminals, it's basically a life sentence in many respects.
As in you can't ever drive again afterwards? I'm fairly honest here about my own failures in life, by this judgement do you think I should never be able to drive a car ever again? Most of my life has been living in places with absolutely no public transport, how exactly do I go to work as a middle aged person having being deemed unworthy of 60 years of no license because of being a young idiot once upon a time?
Please go down this path and say what should happen
Yes, it’s a hard place to be. Especially in rural areas, people use their cars to get around. That doesn’t mean that you have a right to drive, no matter the impacts on the people around you. If you’ve been convicted of drunk driving twice, you’ve already shown an ability to ignore the potentially deadly impacts of your actions on others. Being young doesn’t make those impacts any less severe for the victims.
I think that's a fair compromise. But then again given physical access I do wonder about how many people have workarounds. Or like most things it prevents enough people to be effective enough.
I bought a calibrated breathalyser because I simply can't afford to lose my Australian license, it's a really good investment, surprising how they aren't subsidised a little bit given the potential societal benefits.
1. You could move to a place with decent public transportation.
2. You could use ride-sharing services.
3. You could bicycle.
4. You could walk.
I am not trying to be snarky here, but absent living in rural environs, there are usually options for personal transport that do not require operating a motor vehicle. Again, it is a tradeoff society makes between personal liberties, i.e. the privilege to drive versus public safety. And different jurisdictions may have differing standards on where that line is drawn.
Yes, I think society is too easy on people in general and yes, if you drive drunk or while texting once, you should lose your license for a year and get 14 days in jail, do it twice and lose your license for 10 years and 6 months in jail, kill someone drunk or texting and get life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Might be (first source that popped up). Does it make it untrue?
The point is: One the one hand people are willing to forgive terrorists and reintegrate them into society, on the other hand you're forced to have a breathalyzer in your car for the rest of your life for drunk driving twice within ten years.
There was a case with a 14 year old girl here in Denmark who got hit and murdered by an ex teacher of hers who was super drunk and crashed into her in an intersection -- the impact was so bad it basically blew the bike a part.
And it is the most stupid crime possible to commit, since the upside is so small and the downside so huge.
Personally I would support an instant death penalty for drunk driving if I didn't think it would be abused, so yeah I am okay with somebody not being able to support themselves after murdering a 14 year old girl. I hope the starve themselves to death on the street.
According to Wikipedia, the murder's typical sentence would be for 12 years. This suggests that your legal system believes people can chamge and have their rights restored.
[0] In Denmark manddrab (manslaughter) is the term used by the Danish penalty law to describe the act of intentionally killing another person. No distinction between manslaughter and murder exists. The penalty goes from a minimum of five years (six years in the case of regicide) to imprisonment for life. The standard punishment for manslaughter - i.e. where there are neither aggravating or mitigating circumstances - is 12 years imprisonment.
Driving drunk is something we should have absolutely 0 tolerance for in 2019. It is nearly never mandatory, except possibly in a disaster, and should be punished according to the externalities it causes. In this case that is death, which is non-reversable.
I, for one, find this to be a barely passable minimum punishment for two DUIs
Hydro Québec & other Quebec govt entities will soon have the ability to identify you as a "historic anglophone" for giving you services in English. Everyone else will get govt services in French. CAQ govt. says it will implement this people identification system as a part of Bill 101 enhancements.
Not saying I agree with it but Quebec's only official language is French so it doesn't have to offer services in English at all. This is just a case of granting special privileges to a certain group of people based on historical factors, as is the case with indigenous peoples.
If that's the meaning of "official language", then it seems they're illiberal, anti-democratic and unnecessary. I see no reason why the state shouldn't be able to use any convenient language when dealing with the people who live there.
Using the government's actions to define the natural rights of the government's subjects against the government is a little backwards.
I am more curious about the technology that Québec will use to identify groups of people online & offline to determine whether they are historic Anglophones in Québec or other anglophones from rest of Canada. Something like smart card ? It all seems a little bit crazy that how far Québec will go protect French in an English dominated world.
> Quebec's Ministry of Transport says from 2013 to 2017, alcohol-related crashes killed an average of 100 people annually. That's on top of the approximately 220 serious injuries and 1,800 minor injuries.
Given these numbers, you can keep cranking the knobs but is that really going to be an effective use of money?
At this point, it looks like the only people left are the really hard cases. And they probably need medical and mental health care more than jail.
Whenever I have contact with DUI stuff in the US, about 1/3 are young, idiotic dipshits who did something egregiously stupid and dangerous and wind up on the straight and narrow after being punished. The other 2/3 are so clearly repeat, hardcore alcoholics that desperately need some form of treatment and are so bad that I wonder how they can even function.
> And they probably need medical and mental health care more than jail.
If they dont want help and keep repeating then the second is absolutely needed. The problem isnt that they are addicts and self destructive, but that they carelessly endanger other peoples lives. One would imagine what an apocalyptic outcry it would be if any other drug, that large parts of society consume daily, was found responsible for people starting to kill people in their surroundings. Do you all remember the PCP scare? Or the Spice Horror stories?
> If they dont want help and keep repeating then the second is absolutely needed.
Is there anything to suggest that they don't want help or is it that they can't afford help?
Alcoholism is not easy to shake off for various physiological reasons (drying out an alcoholic seems to damage your impulse control brain centers, for example).
Consequently, treating alcoholism is rather expensive.
From my personal experience, not wanting help is rather common. Its a core problem with most drugs and addicts. People have to want to get better or what ever you are trying to help them will fail.
I wonder if drunk driving is simply a trait to which certain individuals are more sensitive to. Just like some people always manage to show up late, no matter how often you tell them to be on time.
Alcohol use, itself, does have traits that some are more sensitive to. Alcoholism, though may be the case for many repeat offenders, and is a disease, not really a trait, but a series of traits that are symptoms.
In general, impairment is a trait that does lead to bad decisions, like driving under the influence.
It’s incredibly hard to escape a poor childhood with few role models. In my case 3 points made a line so I became an alcoholic. Family; friends esp. at University (esp. esp. the Koreans); colleagues esp. when I arrived in Silicon Valley. Drinking was how we hung out, bars and clubs were where we made rando friends, loud parties were where we got wild, etc. In retrospect there were plenty of non-drinking options under my nose, but we see what we pay attention to.
Now since laying off drinking culture and focusing on health in 2012, I find myself ostracized and slandered by my old drinking friends and colleagues (look up scapegoat), and really completely alone in the world. I have become homeless and am mercilessly bullied at each job because I lack social skills of non-drinkers and am not likable to drinkers.
Everything is pushing me back to alcoholism. I have a bottle of wine in my bag that I don’t drink... I’ve had like 5 drinks in 3 years. In 2013 I was accused of DUI with 3 drinks in my system in 3 hours, and that has caused innumerable problems in my life. It’s on my record as DUI even though it was charded as “careless driving,” as there was no breathalyzer etc. No sympathy, no doubt I’d had some drinks so whatever. After being accused of DUI the month before moving back to SF I relapsed into heavy drinking with an old buddy for about a year, and worse, due to existential despair over the implications if DUI. Then I found out tons of people have them. Life is funny.
I’m more sober and healthy than I’ve been since 21 before I first drank, but I spent Thanksgiving alone on the street in Palo Alto, with my regular bathrooms closed and denied access to others. Sadly most people would slide back into drinking in my situation; I dunno what I’d do without YouTube.
I know I drifted off. I see some harsh judgement here and it’s uncalled for. Personally I think people should be able to demonstrate that they’ve been habilitated and have their records wiped. Alcoholism is complex, and the last thing that will help is imposing upon a life meant for growth. Dis-ease, to make uneasy; disease, like alcoholism. Penalties only make things worse. Revoke the license and treat the soul of the person and let them earn it back, sure. Spending a little time homeless hasn’t hurt me (18 months), so nothing in a treatment program should hurt anyone. The DUI popping up on background checks certainly doesn’t make me eager to apply to jobs; it comes with very harsh judgement; “rightly so,” my old self would say. No, permanent punishment for symptoms are pretty much evil.
Thanks for your words tonight. I've been in the same boat and that's why I replied to the overly generalized, naive, parent comment. I hope you're okay. I'm nowhere near SV, but reach out to someone local if you need. Maybe you drink the wine, maybe you dont, but dont give up okay!
We also punish violent adults who learned to be violent in their childhood. It is sad to think someone might be doomed to be who they learned to be as a child.
But it’s also clear that many have risen above such circumstances and even far worse. So we protect the people from those who put them in great danger (whether by impulsive violent outbursts or dangerous drunk driving).
I see that the vibe in the comment section is that this is too harsh. In my opinion, this is too lenient. If you repeatedly break the law DUI-wise, you should have your license revoked.
The whole supporting yourself thing should already be a deterrent from maneuvering a ton of metal at speed on public roads while impaired. Contrary to popular belief, driving is not a right, it's a privilege and I firmly believe that the state should take it away from you if you fuck it up. I don't want to get into the whole gun debate but gun ownership (about which I have mixed feelings) is a right, protected in the US by the constitution. However, there are mechanisms in which a single mistake (unrelated to gun ownership or operating a gun) will have the state take that right away from you. Statistically speaking, based on the number of deaths, a car is more dangerous than a gun. Why aren't we applying the same types of bans? Because Joe Bob can't help himself to downing a couple of beers before driving, I need to share the road with him because he 'must drive' in order to sustain himself? Fuck Joe Bob. He can bike, take the bus or ride a cab.
If driving is essential for a person to be able to sustain themselves then it should be regarded with a much higher attention in the first place, attention which should warn you that drinking and driving is monumentally selfish and dangerous, especially repeating it.
Not in rural parts of the country. Before driving existed the US had much better public transport. I think your argument holds water in Europe, but not the US, where driving is essential for most people to survive.
I think this should be an argument for building public transport though, since many people are excluded societally when they don't have a means of transport.
Being able to support yourself might include having to move. Indeed it does for most people at som point in their lives. Situations change. If you lose your license because you do stupid things, you might just need to move somewhere near a bus stop.
A dui costs about 5 to 12k before lawyer fees. Not sure most people have tht mu h lying around. Current dui laws effectively criminalize being poor. Then you want them to pick up and move, with no car and no job? I get it, crime is bad, but forcing them into destitution is no better.
Not sure how US legal system works, I’d lose my license if I’m repeatedly DUI (0.02%). The first time there would be a fine and my license is temporarily revoked. Unless I want to take it to a court I have no expenses other than the fine.
Not sure why it’s to “criminalize being poor”. It’s criminal to drink and drive.
I agree punishment shouldn’t be disproportionately affecting poor people but really I don’t feel sorry for people who choose to drink and drive.
I think the more liberal alcohol limits is unfortunate because they can make the crime seem like an accident (“I only drank a little”). A near zero limit is much easier to comply with - if I drink at all I don’t drive until the after on the following day.
As a final note: not living near public transport is a choice in the first place. Not voting for politicians who prioritize public transport is another.
I'm an advocate for carfree cities and an Australian.
But in rural parts of Australia, in the early days of cars, people could have to walk a whole day on poor roads to get to the nearest town in the relatively densely populated state of Victoria. Public transport is not an option in the country.
Participation in public life without a car is important and a human right, but it needs to be focused on towns and cities, not rural areas. Cars are optimised to the needs of the country.
Volvo has a camera system tech that either makes the car start beeping like not wearing seatbelt and even pulls you over once the camera detects you playing with your phone.
This would also be something parents and insurance companies would love. Though I think insurance companies have this new docking system you get from them.. dock your phone & keep it there while in motion and get a discount.
I think almost all responses to drunk driving are weak, including this one. But the response to distracted driving, especially with phones, is even weaker.
If people stared getting banned for life from driving in a province/state, either behavior would change pretty fast or at least we'd be rid of repeat offenders.
Too little. I agree that it is a problem, but a) you can drop the phone in an instant if necessary whereas you can't get sober in an instant and c) you are distracted only over the road you are reading the SMS, not the entire way.
Here in Denmark it now cost a point on your license, as well as about 200 or 300 dollars in a fine. Depending on when you got your license, 2 or 3 points within 3 years will earn you a new driving test (which, unlike in the US, is really though to pass).
Arguably you should forfeit your license on the first offense, but at least this is better than the old rule.
$600 fine first offense. Double second offense. 5 demerit points for each offense. Not as extreme, but not ignorable.
Summary of Quebec demerit points: Demerit points last for 2 years, and if you have more than 8 and are under 23, you lose your license. Five demerit points would also add approximately $170 to the cost of license renewal. Points also make insurance more expensive.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 233 ms ] thread> The SAAQ says visually checking a driver's licence may not be enough, as a hard copy does not always provide up-to-date information. The agency reminds people that their car could be impounded for 30 days or more if the driver breaks the law.
> For a fee of $1.75, the SAAQ will verify a licence through its website.
> "That would be a wise thing to always do whenever you lend your car, even to your best friend," said Kramer.
> "That person might have kept it secret that they have an alcohol interlock in their own vehicle. Family members might not be aware of it. Friends might not be aware of it."
They want you to pay $1.75 for a single query against a database? That makes AWS prices look cheap.
I could be mistaken but I believe it was the SAAQ that had "business hours" for one of their online services where you could only submit a form between 9 and 4 or something ridiculous like that.
The cost of maintaining the server, and paying the salaries of multiple people to maintain 24/7 support is not essentially 0. Wake up.
Maybe 500 people use it per year, with yearly costs of $200,000+, should cost at least $400 per query.
I’m not sure about the laws in Canada, but aren’t these convictions public domain? Presumably someone could just scrape that and build a free API?
Maybe they could require you to add (and verify) a credit card and then not charge it for fewer than 30 queries a month.
Of course, it's a solution that brings other problems, but it's one way of using payment systems to provide the service and keep it free for everyone but the scrapers.
Letting a visibly drunk person get behind the wheel is obviously a big no no, but there are many shades of grey here. You should not be responsible for other people's failures.
The obvious solution is to never lend your car out to anybody, but that is not the optimal solution.
They want to set a price that's high enough to stop people invading the privacy of everyone they know for a cheap laugh, but low enough that it won't put people off checking if they're genuinely concerned but also very poor. Making it, say, $5 would cause some people to seriously think whether or not they can afford it.
Should you do it? No. Knocking back a couple beers and driving isn't the equivalent of walking off a sheer rock face though.
The only thing that's caught up with Quebec is their puritanical tendencies, see: the CAQ being elected.
[1] https://www.alcohol.org/bac-calculator/
[2] https://www.verywellmind.com/drunk-driving-the-dangers-63002
[3] https://www.cars.com/articles/are-the-odds-ever-in-your-favo...
Your third link says accidents will be the cause of death for 1 in 77 people and compared it to 1 in 276 people dying of skin cancer. Does this mean I shouldn't bother wearing sunscreen?
I'm with you 100%, and again, I don't recommend anyone ever drive drunk. It's hardly the responsible thing to do. I was pointing out that it isn't as most people assume, that if you have 2 drinks you're going to die in a multi-car pile-up.
I also suspect those under-25s had more than 3-4 drinks, and also that they likely drove extra recklessly as under-25s tend to do — hence their insurance premiums and inability to rent cars.
We should always evaluate the proportionality of our responses especially as humans are notoriously bad at managing low risk of a strongly negative outcome.
> Your third link says accidents will be the cause of death for 1 in 77 people and compared it to 1 in 276 people dying of skin cancer. Does this mean I shouldn't bother wearing sunscreen?
Not wearing sunscreen may well help you avoid skin cancer and have other ancillary benefits to both you and reefs. [1] tldr: vitamin D supplements don't work and sunscreen blocks your ability to synthesize vitamin D and nitrogen oxides (which lower blood pressure).
re: cancer risk of sun exposure: the most common cancers due to sun exposure are basal-cell carcinomas and squamous-cell carcinomas, which are almost never fatal.
People who work outdoors are half a likely to develop melanoma, and similarly for tanned people. “The risk factor for melanoma appears to be intermittent sunshine and sunburn, especially when you’re young,” says Weller. “But there’s evidence that long-term sun exposure associates with less melanoma.”
but I digress, you don’t have a mandatory sunscreen application machine stapled to all the doors of your house by law if you fail to put it on twice haha
[1] https://www.outsideonline.com/2380751/sunscreen-sun-exposure...
That's statistical feel-good thinking
Young adults don't usually die of natural causes
Impaired driving, while it is certainly a concern, gets too much "think of the children/puritanical" influence.
How many people are impaired by lack of sleep? By texting? By lack of or confusing road signs? And while all of those are addressed more or less, none of them are tackled as punitively as DUI.
(And of course different BACs have very different effects, or even the same BAC can affect people differently)
Edit: According to a comment below, for every 100 fatal accidents caused by drunk driving, additionally there are approximately 220 serious injuries and 1,800 minor injuries.
Case in point, according to Schneier, many more people died because they chose to drive instead of fly after 9/11 (and the increased airport security theater) than died in the actual incident. [1]
You could make the same case, what if it was my family in the towers? My heart goes out of course to those people but the decision made as a result was not the right one for society.
[1] https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2013/08/our_decreas...
It’s about the individual decision to drive drunk and the risk that this individual decision creates each time.
Are you referring to the rare condition where brewers’ yeast colonizes peoples’ gut and ferments carbohydrates into alcohol in vivo?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/03/business/drunk-driving-br...
The breath test is, I think (I am not a lawyer) insurance that there was reasonable suspicion of the person being drunk, not final proof of anything.
An arrest isn't a conviction. Police don't hand down these judgments.
I think your unstated assumption is that the level of the condition that causes health problems and/or a diagnosis is the same level that would mess with breathalyzers. It could be much less.
So you get caught violating the first punishment... and they simply slap you with another punishment?
That's like suspending a kid for skipping school.
I would think jailtime should be in order in that situation.
Still better than the coworker that flew to Canada on business and then while on the trip his name got added to the "NO FLY" list. That was a fiasco.
I remember reading about someone who was denied entry to Canada because they brought anti-depressants with them.
You have no rights traveling across borders, and it's not just US officials that are arbitrary and unreasonable.
The guy who had the issue never camped with us again, even on the US side. Not fun.
So far, the world hasn't found one. A breathalyser is a pretty small price to pay if you already have two DUIs.
Note that anyone who has been caught driving drunk twice has, statistically speaking, probably been driving drunk a lot more times than those two.
Drunk in this case is precisely defined in the law as a permillage of alcohol in the blood stream (the law varies per country, but you should know the ones applicable to you). Valid methods of measuring this are described as well.
Incidentally, what you say is almost literally what every inebriated driver who caused an accident resulting in severe harm or loss of life says afterwards before coming to terms with their actions.
And of course what the law defines is an alcohol limit, which is probably very conservative: it cannot define the meaning of the word "drunk".
I think every opinion and decision must be challenged, otherwise, when only one side of the debate has legitimacy, you end up with entirely skewed decisions. And since drunk driving does kill people, and nobody dared to defend drinkers, there has been a lack of balance in the initiatives against it.
So I'm sacrificing my karma for the sake of some balance :)
Said every drunk driver, ever. I have no respect for drunk drivers. You don't care about your life, that's on you. But you are putting the lives of other people in serious jeopardy by doing this. Someone could end up having their life destroyed, or maybe even dying because of your shitty actions.
> And since drunk driving does kill people, and nobody dared to defend drinkers, there has been a lack of balance in the initiatives against it.
There is a reason behind this. When you are drunk, you have lowered inhibitions, poor judgement, more (often unwarranted, like in your previous post) self confidence, vision problems, poor hand-eye coordination, drowsiness, the list goes on. You should not in any case be driving while drunk, and you do have to be daring to defend drunk driving. I am happy there has been a lack of balance in that regard.
If it was just you driving on am empty field or track where the only person you could harm is yourself, I'd have no problem with it. But you are putting others at risk, and that's where I draw the line.
People are influenced by others, younger drivers in particular. You are not only responsible for your own actions, but also for the message you send to others.
Crippling insurance costs?
If you're caught here then you better have deep pockets, assuming you get your licence back in a year.
Also you turn to psychologists for assistance with handling recidivist alcoholics.
The scary part is how inaccurate and secretive breathalyzers can be. You have no right to cross examine the machine's software or anything. It's a magic blackbox that is treated as irrefutable truth.
Also, in the US, and I assume in Canada, standards for new cars have generally not affected peoples' rights to continue owning and driving existing cars. If new requirements are really onerous, it will increase the market for previously produced cars, and then we can debate whether to force people to upgrade or something.
If you'd please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Otherwise, yes, of course. Thanks for the reminder.
It can see unfair. There's a truck driver in my country who killed two people with his truck on two separate occasions. Both his fault. But he'll still be allowed to drive again after maybe a 6-12 month suspension.
The way I try to feel comfortable with such seeming injustice is to see road accidents as random bad luck. So by using the road, you're playing Russian roulette. You never know what might kill you or whose fault it might be, including your own. Extreme punishment for the tiny subset of dangerous drivers who make certain mistakes and happen to be unlucky enough to get caught won't really make it much safer. People still risk their own lives driving dangerously, after all, so even the death penalty for drink driving won't stop people doing it.
Using a road shouldn't be Russian roulette.
Actually, the whole justice system is based on a faulty idea that all humans rationally evaluate the risk of getting caught. Some people will follow the law regardless, some will decide what crime to commit by evaluating the risk, and some will break the law regardless of the risk. That last category needs a different system.
If I'm an insurance company, or other entity dealing with large numbers of "getting caught", then indeed, I can rationally determine that it will happen x% of the time and plan accordingly.
But if I'm an individual, and I don't have a way of significantly changing the risk, then all I can do is make a binary decision - do the risky thing, or don't. If the risk is small, then I'm probably going to do it. How is a person "rationally" supposed to react to, say, a risk going from 0.1% to 1%, when the choice is only do or do not do?
But for drink driving, you typically do it many times without getting caught, so you could respond to changed risk by changing how often you do it.
While I have no sympathy for drunk drivers, this technological solution is sufficiently unreliable to be dubious.
The most regular issue was nicotine spray setting it off.
It had to be serviced once in a year and this service was included in the price.
Personally I think a lifetime sentence is a bit harsh but I definitely agree that drunk drivers should have an ignition lock for a long time, perhaps 5-10 years.
While I support the idea itself, the technology is incredibly unreliable, and since it only affects "criminals", there's no public demand for them to improve.
or maybe they recognised he could go and get someone else to blow in it?
The article states that you're not allowed to operate a car without one installed.
Perhaps extrapolate your statement out to other forms of justice meted out by society and ask if you'd say the same about those crimes?
I'd certainly hope I could get a driving job today if worse came to worse. I did my time and certainly paid my dues. Technically it's been long enough that my crimes are wiped off the record and I can legally not mention them to workplaces/authorities.
It's very easy to demand heavy lifetime justice for everyone you don't sympathise with, a lot harder to make it fair and equitable to the longterm benefit of a society. I honestly don't understand how the US treats their convicted criminals, it's basically a life sentence in many respects.
Just can’t do it twice, I think that’s fair.
As in you can't ever drive again afterwards? I'm fairly honest here about my own failures in life, by this judgement do you think I should never be able to drive a car ever again? Most of my life has been living in places with absolutely no public transport, how exactly do I go to work as a middle aged person having being deemed unworthy of 60 years of no license because of being a young idiot once upon a time? Please go down this path and say what should happen
I am not trying to be snarky here, but absent living in rural environs, there are usually options for personal transport that do not require operating a motor vehicle. Again, it is a tradeoff society makes between personal liberties, i.e. the privilege to drive versus public safety. And different jurisdictions may have differing standards on where that line is drawn.
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/trudeau-sparks-outrage-wit...
Might be (first source that popped up). Does it make it untrue?
The point is: One the one hand people are willing to forgive terrorists and reintegrate them into society, on the other hand you're forced to have a breathalyzer in your car for the rest of your life for drunk driving twice within ten years.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_under_the_influence#Ri...
There was a case with a 14 year old girl here in Denmark who got hit and murdered by an ex teacher of hers who was super drunk and crashed into her in an intersection -- the impact was so bad it basically blew the bike a part.
And it is the most stupid crime possible to commit, since the upside is so small and the downside so huge.
Personally I would support an instant death penalty for drunk driving if I didn't think it would be abused, so yeah I am okay with somebody not being able to support themselves after murdering a 14 year old girl. I hope the starve themselves to death on the street.
[0] In Denmark manddrab (manslaughter) is the term used by the Danish penalty law to describe the act of intentionally killing another person. No distinction between manslaughter and murder exists. The penalty goes from a minimum of five years (six years in the case of regicide) to imprisonment for life. The standard punishment for manslaughter - i.e. where there are neither aggravating or mitigating circumstances - is 12 years imprisonment.
I, for one, find this to be a barely passable minimum punishment for two DUIs
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/english-government-s...
Using the government's actions to define the natural rights of the government's subjects against the government is a little backwards.
If it actually worked, it could be like an insurance against their own worst proclivities...
Given these numbers, you can keep cranking the knobs but is that really going to be an effective use of money?
At this point, it looks like the only people left are the really hard cases. And they probably need medical and mental health care more than jail.
Whenever I have contact with DUI stuff in the US, about 1/3 are young, idiotic dipshits who did something egregiously stupid and dangerous and wind up on the straight and narrow after being punished. The other 2/3 are so clearly repeat, hardcore alcoholics that desperately need some form of treatment and are so bad that I wonder how they can even function.
If they dont want help and keep repeating then the second is absolutely needed. The problem isnt that they are addicts and self destructive, but that they carelessly endanger other peoples lives. One would imagine what an apocalyptic outcry it would be if any other drug, that large parts of society consume daily, was found responsible for people starting to kill people in their surroundings. Do you all remember the PCP scare? Or the Spice Horror stories?
Is there anything to suggest that they don't want help or is it that they can't afford help?
Alcoholism is not easy to shake off for various physiological reasons (drying out an alcoholic seems to damage your impulse control brain centers, for example).
Consequently, treating alcoholism is rather expensive.
In general, impairment is a trait that does lead to bad decisions, like driving under the influence.
Now since laying off drinking culture and focusing on health in 2012, I find myself ostracized and slandered by my old drinking friends and colleagues (look up scapegoat), and really completely alone in the world. I have become homeless and am mercilessly bullied at each job because I lack social skills of non-drinkers and am not likable to drinkers.
Everything is pushing me back to alcoholism. I have a bottle of wine in my bag that I don’t drink... I’ve had like 5 drinks in 3 years. In 2013 I was accused of DUI with 3 drinks in my system in 3 hours, and that has caused innumerable problems in my life. It’s on my record as DUI even though it was charded as “careless driving,” as there was no breathalyzer etc. No sympathy, no doubt I’d had some drinks so whatever. After being accused of DUI the month before moving back to SF I relapsed into heavy drinking with an old buddy for about a year, and worse, due to existential despair over the implications if DUI. Then I found out tons of people have them. Life is funny.
I’m more sober and healthy than I’ve been since 21 before I first drank, but I spent Thanksgiving alone on the street in Palo Alto, with my regular bathrooms closed and denied access to others. Sadly most people would slide back into drinking in my situation; I dunno what I’d do without YouTube.
I know I drifted off. I see some harsh judgement here and it’s uncalled for. Personally I think people should be able to demonstrate that they’ve been habilitated and have their records wiped. Alcoholism is complex, and the last thing that will help is imposing upon a life meant for growth. Dis-ease, to make uneasy; disease, like alcoholism. Penalties only make things worse. Revoke the license and treat the soul of the person and let them earn it back, sure. Spending a little time homeless hasn’t hurt me (18 months), so nothing in a treatment program should hurt anyone. The DUI popping up on background checks certainly doesn’t make me eager to apply to jobs; it comes with very harsh judgement; “rightly so,” my old self would say. No, permanent punishment for symptoms are pretty much evil.
But it’s also clear that many have risen above such circumstances and even far worse. So we protect the people from those who put them in great danger (whether by impulsive violent outbursts or dangerous drunk driving).
The whole supporting yourself thing should already be a deterrent from maneuvering a ton of metal at speed on public roads while impaired. Contrary to popular belief, driving is not a right, it's a privilege and I firmly believe that the state should take it away from you if you fuck it up. I don't want to get into the whole gun debate but gun ownership (about which I have mixed feelings) is a right, protected in the US by the constitution. However, there are mechanisms in which a single mistake (unrelated to gun ownership or operating a gun) will have the state take that right away from you. Statistically speaking, based on the number of deaths, a car is more dangerous than a gun. Why aren't we applying the same types of bans? Because Joe Bob can't help himself to downing a couple of beers before driving, I need to share the road with him because he 'must drive' in order to sustain himself? Fuck Joe Bob. He can bike, take the bus or ride a cab.
If driving is essential for a person to be able to sustain themselves then it should be regarded with a much higher attention in the first place, attention which should warn you that drinking and driving is monumentally selfish and dangerous, especially repeating it.
Not in rural parts of the country. Before driving existed the US had much better public transport. I think your argument holds water in Europe, but not the US, where driving is essential for most people to survive.
I think this should be an argument for building public transport though, since many people are excluded societally when they don't have a means of transport.
Being able to support yourself might include having to move. Indeed it does for most people at som point in their lives. Situations change. If you lose your license because you do stupid things, you might just need to move somewhere near a bus stop.
Not sure why it’s to “criminalize being poor”. It’s criminal to drink and drive.
I agree punishment shouldn’t be disproportionately affecting poor people but really I don’t feel sorry for people who choose to drink and drive.
I think the more liberal alcohol limits is unfortunate because they can make the crime seem like an accident (“I only drank a little”). A near zero limit is much easier to comply with - if I drink at all I don’t drive until the after on the following day.
As a final note: not living near public transport is a choice in the first place. Not voting for politicians who prioritize public transport is another.
But in rural parts of Australia, in the early days of cars, people could have to walk a whole day on poor roads to get to the nearest town in the relatively densely populated state of Victoria. Public transport is not an option in the country.
Participation in public life without a car is important and a human right, but it needs to be focused on towns and cities, not rural areas. Cars are optimised to the needs of the country.
This just doesn't sound enforceable, really...
No doubt whoever made this happen is happy to get state-coerced customers-for-life.
Breathalyzer as a Service
Volvo has a camera system tech that either makes the car start beeping like not wearing seatbelt and even pulls you over once the camera detects you playing with your phone.
This would also be something parents and insurance companies would love. Though I think insurance companies have this new docking system you get from them.. dock your phone & keep it there while in motion and get a discount.
If people stared getting banned for life from driving in a province/state, either behavior would change pretty fast or at least we'd be rid of repeat offenders.
Here in Denmark it now cost a point on your license, as well as about 200 or 300 dollars in a fine. Depending on when you got your license, 2 or 3 points within 3 years will earn you a new driving test (which, unlike in the US, is really though to pass).
Arguably you should forfeit your license on the first offense, but at least this is better than the old rule.
Summary of Quebec demerit points: Demerit points last for 2 years, and if you have more than 8 and are under 23, you lose your license. Five demerit points would also add approximately $170 to the cost of license renewal. Points also make insurance more expensive.