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Comment by Gigachad

1 day ago

It only sounds like overreach because we have become numb to an incredible amount of killing from distracted drivers.

19 comments

Gigachad

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mattrighetti  1 day ago

Did a quick research and saw that in 2024 there were around 12k deaths in which one or more drunk drivers were involved. Doesn’t seem like much for a country with around 350 million people. In comparison, drug causes 7x those deaths. Cancer and heart diseases even more.

  • Klathmon  21 hours ago

    I feel like we have the technology to prevent a car from starting if the driver is significantly impared, but "solving" addiction, cancer, and heart disease are much harder problems.

    Obviously it would need to be implemented carefully, but I personally would be more than fine blowing into a tube to start my car if it meant saving 12k lives a year with a very low false positive rate.

    That being said I know it would never be implemented in a sane way in the US, and you would probably have situations like your car insurance automatically increasing due to a faulty sensor, so I'm ultimately against it unless a lot of other stuff changes.

    But it's still much more possible than "preventing drug addiction"

    • mattrighetti  15 hours ago

      > Obviously it would need to be implemented carefully, but I personally would be more than fine blowing into a tube to start my car if it meant saving 12k lives a year with a very low false positive rate.

      I can already see two issues with these devices:

      - They can’t reliably identify the actual driver. Criminals might simply ask someone else to blow into the device.

      - With every car equipped with this safety feature, people might assume everyone driving isn’t drunk.

      I’m not sure. It seems like this will only add extra hassle for law-abiding citizens while those for whom it was designed will likely find workarounds.

  • ajnin  13 hours ago

    12k is obviously a large number of preventable deaths, especially, and it's a huge difference with diseases, when you consider that some of those deaths are people getting killed by drunk drivers. I don't think there is any acceptable number of people that did absolutely nothing wrong getting killed by a drunk or inattentive driver.

    • oalae5niMiel7qu  13 hours ago

      If you simply lock everyone up for their whole lives, you can prevent all kinds of deadly accidents. Eventually, somebody will argue that we are all morally obliged to accept being locked up for this reason.

  • Gigachad  21 hours ago

    That's already a huge number. But it's ignoring the much larger issue of distracted drivers, usually on their phone.

  • basisword  12 hours ago

    I'm sure if you were one of those 12k your loved ones wouldn't be saying "what's 12k in a country of 350m?".

lettergram  21 hours ago

> incredible amount of killing from distracted drivers

> 1.10 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled

https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/trumps-transpor...

For reference, fatalities on bikes:

> 9.32 fatalities per 100 million cyclist miles (6 deaths per 100M kilometers)

https://www.calbike.org/urban-transportation-research-bike-f...