Having to blow while you're already driving is supposed to be a feature. It's to dissuade people from successfully turning on their car, immediately drinking, and then driving.
If it only kicks in at 45 or lower (i.e., not the highway) then there's always a safe place to pull over. I have no idea how it actually does work though, thankfully.
I take it you've never been stuck in slow traffic on a long narrow bridge, or highway sections that surround you with concrete barriers on both sides for miles. There is nowhere to pull over.
Is this comment a joke or do you not understand how dangerous it is to ask a driver to blow into a breathalyzer while operating a vehicle?
All this seems to be is a company collecting corporate welfare while doing the bare minimum. Such companies should both be sanctioned and have their leadership investigated for potential fraud.
If you receive public dollars to function, the public should expect some modicum of sensibility and accountability.
If they set their own place on fire, they're also homeless. Just as self-inflicted, but significantly less dangerous to third parties than driving drunk.
Driving while drunk is not a silly little mistake. A third of all fatal crashes involve drunk drivers. Letting these people drive at all even with a breathalyzer is an abomination. You can expect them to have a similar disregard for other fundamentals of safe driving.
I'm not commenting on the morality of drunk driving. I'm commenting on the effectiveness of just fucking them over, that being, not effective at all.
There's this thing in the mainstream where people feel like the best way to handle people doing bad things is to just pummel them into the ground as much as possible.
While that might feel the most justified, that doesn't actually solve the problem. Suspending licenses doesn't stop drunk people from driving, because cars are more or less a necessity.
So, knowing it's a necessity, we have to design the car around that and enforce safe operation by an alcoholic.
Which is a stop-gap solution. A better solution is making cars not a necessity. But until then, we should do the stop-gap.
Stop-gap is restricting the driving to work schedule then. Everything else is optional and you can learn to work within that system. We try to put up industrial solutions to everything. Why not keep the laws cut and dry. This action = this consequence. You determine your actions you must accept x consequence. Or better yet jail time for 6 months then you will be fed and you will lose everything. There are options
It wasn't that long ago these devices weren't mandatory and they'd just suspend your license.
I am actually curious now whether that was more effective since the offender had to endure the judgment of the person in their life giving them a ride to work.
I don't understand why this is obviously untrue. Do we have any reason to believe that those people didn't just... continue to drive with a suspended license?
Not to mention DUI is a fairly recent development. In the 20th century, it was pretty easy to drive drunk and get away with it.
Yeah and what's stopping someone from drinking while borrowing someone else's car? Oh they don't want their car wrecked too? They may just drive the drunk to work then.
We arrive at the same place with the same real solutions (the people). The technology doesn't do anything except add extra steps and convince the public something was done.
If anything it creates enough hassle for the offender that new crimes are being committed with harsher consequences (domestic abuse), or dragging additional people into crime they didn't intend (negligent entrustment).
You might be a functioning alcoholic, but when alcohol intoxication is so prevalent in your life it interferes with day to day routines activities, it absolutely meets the psychosocial definition of addiction, and likely points to a deeper one.
Unfortunately driving on a suspended is mostly not enforced either, so giving them the carrot of keeping their license is the only thing the judicial branch can do that has much sway (other than jailing them) without being able to order the executive branch to change.
LOL. Do you know how many people are driving with suspended licenses now? The number would skyrocket if systems like these didn't exist.
Especially in rural areas, you can get away with driving on a suspended license for a pretty long time before a cop catches you. I know someone who was probably (she wouldn't admit to it) doing it for at least a year.
Once while hot air balloon chasing, we saw a guy driving his 4 wheel drive in the ditches along a gravel road and found out later from someone he had a suspended license.
They said he figured the cops couldn't stop him if he stuck to the ditches and didn't operate on the official roadway.