Seen in Insurance Journal:
The chairman of the Judiciary Committee in the Vermont House says he’d like lawmakers to consider lowering the threshold at which a driver is drunk behind the wheel from a blood-alcohol content of .08 percent to a lowest-in-the-nation .05.
Considering the volume of complaints when the threshold was dropped to 0.08% from the traditional mark of 0.10%, I’ve got to believe that there will be some pretty vocal opposition to any such move.
I have to admit that I have a certain bias on the subject, seeing as how the guy who hit my wife in her car accident six years ago had had a couple of drinks, but wasn’t legally over the limit.
Personally I’d like to see a multi-tiered approach taken to DUI laws, something like this:
- Let BAC at/above 0.08% be considered sufficient to deem a driver too impaired to drive safely.
- Let BAC of at least 0.05%, but less than 0.08% be considered evidence, but not proof, of being too impaired to drive safely. A citation for DUI would require other evidence of impairment, such as being at fault in a crash, or erratic driving behavior.
- For drivers of commercial vehicles, drivers under the legal drinking age, or drivers under restriction for prior offenses, adopt a no-tolerance limit of 0.02%, for hopefully obvious reasons.
