'Crashed car' displays urging you not to drink or drug drive this Christmas

FIREFIGHTERS are warning motorists who have overindulge in Christmas spirit to keep out of their cars with a dramatic display.

Cars which appear to have crashed with the boundary walls of two Bournemouth fire stations are now in place.

The cars are in place in Redhill and Springbourne alongside banners which read: 'Drink, drugs, drive - don't do it!'

The displays will stay in place until the new year, and have been marked as ‘police aware’ in case members of the public believe them to be a real accident.

Source : bournemouthecho

Should drink and drug-drivers who cause fatal crashes face life sentences?

Came across an article in the Telegraph today about nine in ten people saying that "Drink or drug-drivers who cause fatal crashes should be charged with manslaughter and should face life sentences in prison"

Motorists who are not under the influence of alcohol or drugs should also face hefty sentences of 10 years or more, two-thirds of people believe.

The figues come from a survey of 1000 people carried out by road safety charity Brake, campaigners recently called for the Government to urgently review the guidelines for charging and sentencing criminal drivers.

Current Laws

Death by dangerous driving
minimum sentence of one year in prison, with those convicted also disqualified from driving for at least two years. While judges can hand out prison terms of up to 14 years, although this is extremely rare.

Death by careless driving
Minimum one-year disqualification - an up to five years in prison.


Roads to Justice campaign

Brake wants officials to consider introducing long sentences, getting rid of the charge of careless driving and stopping those convicted from being “automatically released” upon completion of half their prison terms. (please see the Telegraph article for examples of sentences that have been handed out in various situations)

What do you think? should penalties be made larger?

Drink-driver ONLY 100 metres from his home decides to take the car - and gets caught!

Drunk driving is always stupid, but if there were levels of stupid this is probably the dumbest example ever!. In Boston, Lincolnshire, a 34-year-old man named Przemyslaw Szulc was arrested for driving under the influence.

Szulc told police that he had been drinking at a barbecue only 100 meters (328 feet) from his house. Rather than walk (which would have taken two minutes), he decided to drive.

Ironically, because the town of Boston is a maze of one-way streets, the drive home was actually a mile and a half long. It was during that mile and a half that police saw him swerving into the kurb and pulled him over for drink driving.

The man was fined £275 and ordered to pay costs of £85, as well as a victim surcharge of £28. He also got a 20 month driving ban.

Defence solicitor Carrie Simson said:

"He admits that what he did was a foolish decision and he has shown remorse. He is a hard working man and luckily will not lose his job after losing his licence but he will have to arrange transport."

Sources: The Lincolnshire Echo

Rising toll of drink driving by stressed working women

Heather Ward a road safety expert says that women are making up a greater proportion of drink drivers because of the stress in their lives. 
 
Family problems such as marital breakdown and children leaving home are a factor behind many – particularly professionals in their 40s – getting behind the wheel when they are over the limit.
 
Mrs Ward, a road safety consultant at University College London, was speaking at the UK Road Safety Summit on drink, drugs and mobile phones recently and called for a lower breathalyser limit because the current threshold is based on how men, who have larger bodies on average, metabolise alcohol rather than women.

She said women’s bodies process alcohol differently meaning they reach higher blood alcohol concentrations than men when drinking the same amount, even when body weight is taken into account. Stress levels and diet can also affect how alcohol is processed by the body.
 
Mrs Ward said: ‘Women in their middle ages are often fairly stressed. They’ve got family issues, children leaving home, marital breakdown. I spoke to one woman whose husband had left her for a younger woman and she started to drink. She got in the car and she was caught.

Her research has found women in their 40s were more likely to be over the limit than men of a similar age, once the proportion of time they spent on the road was taken into account. It also revealed the proportion of drink driving convictions committed by women nearly doubled from 9 per cent in 1998 to 17 per cent in 2012, despite the overall number of convictions dropping. While the conviction rate for men halved from 0.49 per cent to 0.24 per cent between 2003 and 2012, the rate for women changed ‘very little’ from 0.07 per cent to 0.06 per cent.She said other reasons women were drink-driving included professional pressures and safety concerns.

‘Women are drinking more,’ she added. ‘There is more (social) permission for them to drink: they settle down later, they work longer hours, they go out socialising after work, they get on the train, they get in the car left at the station and drive home – and they get caught drink driving.‘A lot of them are frightened of using taxis, they are worried about using public transport, so they think: “I’ll take the risk”.’

She said nearly 60 per cent of the women who were asked why they drove when over the limit said they felt they ‘knew’ their own bodies.
 
Just under a third felt it would be ‘OK if I drove carefully’, while one in six felt there was ‘no alternative’ – for example because one of their children needed help. Around one in seven felt they would not get caught because police ‘only stopped men’.
 
Mrs Ward said many women still believed they would be fine to drive ‘after a couple of glasses of wine’ but that most were unaware that wine was served in larger glasses and had got ‘stronger and stronger’ over the past decade. Mrs Ward said most anti-drink-driving advertising was targeted at men, which meant women could feel it did not apply to them. She added: ‘We need to recognise that women need to be thought about more, and more messages directed at them.’
 
The research she co-authored, published last year, was led by Dr Claire Corbett, of Brunel University, supported by insurers Direct Line, the Rees Jeffery Road Fund and Social Research Associates. It concluded: ‘There is a case for lowering the limit to reflect the effect of alcohol on women’s bodies.’ The current drink drive limit in England, Wales and Northern Ireland is 80mg in 100ml of blood, which is equivalent to two units.
 
Source

Drinking Behind The Wheel

We'd never encourage the act of drinking and getting behind the wheel. But when it comes to having alcohol in your car, Only in Mississippi is it legal to drive while drinking an alcoholic beverage, according to the aptly named site OpenContainerLaws.com.Which means that they can have a drink on their drive home from a hard day at the office!

Source: distractify.com

Scotland Moves To Slash Drink-Drive Limit

Under proposals due to reach the Scottish Parliament in the next few weeks drinking a pint or a single glass of wine could soon put you over the legal driving limit.

At the moment it would take more than 80mg of alcohol in the bloodstream per 100ml to make you a drunk driver, under the new proposals the Scottish Government wants to reduce that to 50mg. The move would bring Scotland into line with Germany, France and Spain. However it would create a situation where crossing the Scottish border after consuming one drink could lead to a drink-driving conviction, when you would have been driving legally in England.

The proposals have been welcomed by many families of those injured or killed by drunk drivers. Stacey Muldoon, a 23-year-old mother from Lanarkshire, was killed in 2008. Her sister, Leigh Payne, believes lowering the limit will prevent many other deaths. "We're coming into line with most of Europe and some of America. I think that people will now realise that it's not acceptable to have a drink . Physically ordering a drink and drinking it with your dinner you cannot do with 50mg."

Thirty people are killed on Scottish roads each year as a result of alcohol, 150 are injured and almost 7,500 people are convicted of drink-driving. The Scottish Government says lowering the limit is a priority. Yet it has been two years since it first consulted on the issue and, as a devolved matter, it does not require legislative action by Westminster. The Scottish Government said it hopes to introduce a bill affecting the change some time in August.
A spokesperson said: "We are working with Police Scotland and the UK Government to prepare for a lower limit, including obtaining the necessary type approvals for the devices used by the police to test drivers.
"As a lower limit cannot be brought in until the necessary approvals are obtained through the UK Government, we have made clear to the UK Government that we view introducing a lower limit in Scotland as a key priority which we want to introduce as soon as possible."

Guy Offers To Drive Drunk People Home For Free

In one of the most inspirational acts ive seen in quite  a while, one man took to one of the busiest bars in his town and began offering free rides home.

Chronicling his journey throughout the night, a guy called Alex wrote out a plea for anyone that had been drinking to accept a free ride home.

The message he wrote on a white board outside the bar read:

“Hi, my name is Alex.
If you have been drinking tonight, I’d like to offer you a free ride home. Someone I know killed a man while drinking and driving one year ago tonight. In honor of the man who dies, I’d like to help keep the roads safe. I will even bring you back to your car tomorrow.”
 
Acting on what he thought his friend would do if he was a free man, Reddit user becauseisaidiwould posted his journey to the photo sharing site Imgur. Follow this link to see the photos of him driving people home, along with his captions.

Sources: Redit, imgur. inquisitr