[jamesvandyne]

Japan used to have a bad drunk driving problem until they changed the laws to be mostly zero tolerance. If your caught it's an automatic 90-day suspension of your license. Over 0.25mg and it could be up to 2 years. That's excluding potential fines and imprisonment. Oh, and any adults in the car and or the person who owns the car can also be held liable.

Technical monitoring is one solution. Making you calculate if driving is potentially worth, at a minimum 3-months of no driving, quickly makes you decide it's not worth the risk is another. That said, you'd think potentially running someone over would be enough risk for to avoid driving under the influence, but it's obviously not.

[curryst]

Japan has very different city structures, iirc. The presence of good public transportation is a big one.

There's a considerable portion of the US where your options are drive drunk, pay $$$ for an Uber, or sleep next to your car (people have gotten DUIs for sleeping in the car). There are also areas where Uber doesn't exist at 2am, so your options are drive drunk or sleep next to your car.

Japan also has this neat concept of tiny hotels, where they stack beds almost like the drawers at a morgue. They're super cheap though, which gives Japan's drinkers yet another option if they don't want to drive. In the US, I've never been able to rent anything but a full room + bathroom, and you'd still have to solve the issue of how you get to the motel.

Japan has to convince their drinkers to sleep in a tiny hotel or take the train instead of driving. The US is trying to convince a drunk person they'd rather sleep on the ground than try to drive home. I am not surprised that Japan has better compliance rates than the US; it's a much smaller ask.

[jamesvandyne]

The Japanese country side isn't too different than the US. Sure there's trains, but not an extensive network ala Tokyo, and you drive everywhere.

The way they handle the issue is "daikou taxi", which is a service from the taxi providers. If you've been drinking, you call them, they send a taxi with 2 drivers. You get in the taxi, and the other driver drives your car home.

Introducing a service like this would help reduce DUIs, I think. Having stricter laws about also helps avoid people making the decision to drive somewhere, where they know they're going to drink, in the first place. Instead they may opt to take a cab, find a designated driver etc, drink closer to home etc..