Do Belgians Drink Too Much When Driving? Results from a Representative Roadside Survey
Since 2003 the Belgian Road Safety Institute (BRSI) has conducted a series of nationally representative measurements of car driving behavior on public roads. This series includes measurements of the prevalence of driving under the influence of alcohol (DUI). The main outcome of these measurements is the percentage of DUI drivers in various contexts (time of the day, region, etc.). Information is also gathered on the driver and trip characteristics. This article presents the results of the 6th edition of this DUI measurement that was conducted in the Spring of 2015. The methodology is based on a random selection of drivers that are submitted to an alcohol test. The alcohol tests are performed by the local and federal police services, under the guidance of BRSI. In the current edition, over 75% of all local and federal police units in Belgium cooperated with BRSI. Each police unit is asked to carry out a certain number of alcohol checks following specific instructions. According to Belgian law, the drivers cannot refuse an alcohol check by the police. The police units organized 596 checking sessions of at least one hour and checked over 12,000 drivers. The main result is that on average 2.7% of the checked car drivers had a blood alcohol level above the legal limit (0.22 mg of alcohol per liter of exhaled alveolar air or 0.5 g of alcohol per liter of blood). The prevalence of 2.7% is not significantly different from the prevalence observed in 2009 and 2012 (2.7% for both studies), and is even higher than the results obtained in 2007 (2.0%). A negative development is that the share of highly intoxicated drivers (more than 0.8 g of alcohol per liter of blood) among offenders has also increased (from 55% in 2007 to 69% in 2015). The article describes several factors contributing to the prevalence of DUI such as gender, age, passengers in the car, region, origin of the trip and time. It concludes with a number of general and specific recommendations towards policy makers.
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Supplemental Notes:
- This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ANB50 Standing Committee on Alcohol, Other Drugs, and Transportation.
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Corporate Authors:
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Authors:
- Focant, Nathalie
- Diependaele, Kevin
- Van den Berghe, Wouter
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Conference:
- Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting
- Location: Washington DC, United States
- Date: 2017-1-8 to 2017-1-12
- Date: 2017
Language
- English
Media Info
- Media Type: Digital/other
- Features: Figures; References; Tables;
- Pagination: 15p
- Monograph Title: TRB 96th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers
Subject/Index Terms
- TRT Terms: Demographics; Drivers; Drunk driving; Sobriety checkpoints; Social factors
- Geographic Terms: Belgium
- Subject Areas: Highways; Safety and Human Factors; Society;
Filing Info
- Accession Number: 01623766
- Record Type: Publication
- Report/Paper Numbers: 17-00402
- Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
- Created Date: Jan 25 2017 3:08PM