Comment by Dylan16807
7 months ago
> Basically what happened when we moved the limit from .05 to .02 is that people stopped having “only one beer” (which is, of course, at risk of becoming three) before driving home. You choose a designated driver or you take public transport. It was a Good Thing.
Eww, that's a pretty ugly way to accomplish that. So even if you're actually fine to drive, and it's been quite a while since you had alcohol, you're facing a huge monetary risk just because some assholes would lie about how many drinks they had.
In particular if you have three drinks and then wait four hours you should not have to get someone else to drive you around because you can't guarantee you're below .02
You're saying this like “having three drinks, waiting a couple of hours and then driving home” is some sort of obviously reasonable (or even desirable) thing to do.
I didn't specify where. Maybe you drank at home. Maybe you drank somewhere, already got home, and then waited over two more hours. Or maybe you drank at lunch and you want to drive home for dinner.
And not a couple. Four hours. One hour per drink plus an entire extra hour. There's so little alcohol left at that point.
But that's just an example of how very long the rule stretches out. The basic example of "one drink, drive home" is the main thing affected, and banning it when there was no problem with people actually doing that is pretty sucky.
I recognize that you think this is a great injustice towards something, but since the level was moved from .05 to .02 (in 2001), the number of traffic deaths in Norway (of which 64% involved alcohol over the legal limit at the time) has dropped by about 2/3. Simply put, fewer people are drunk driving and fewer people are dying due to it.
FWIW, the level was set at .02 because it was the closest to zero one could get and still have a reliable measurement on breathalyzers at the time.
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