Rbt: A Matter For Debate
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday November 19, 1987
SOME weeks before the Christmas death rush begins on NSW's roads, the Government and police arealready softening us up for their back street breathalyser blitz.
In terms of civil liberties, it's an appropriate companion program to Operation Noah and typifies this State's law enforcement approach to drugs. But does random breath testing (RBT) reduce road crashes?
According to a recent road safety seminar in Melbourne, our focus on alcohol in road crashesmay be too obsessive and unproductive.
The meeting was sponsored by the Victorian Police, the RACV (the Victorian equivalent of theNRMA), the road transport industry and the Liquor Trades Consultative Council. The papers presented were not shy in criticising drink-driving but also unashamedly put forward research whichsome in the road traffic establishment find uncomfortable.
Mr Jim Youngman, the road safety manager for the RACV, gave the results of a study which setout to test the general assumption that alcohol causes road crashes. Using his own State's figures, Mr Youngman found that changes in the blood alcohol levels of drivers in serious road crashes did not relate closely to changes in the road accident statistics.
During 1980 and 1981, when average blood alcohol levels did not change, the accident rate fell by 17 per cent. And when one compares 1981 with 1984, the average blood alcohol levels of drivers in road crashes fell by a quarter with no difference in the number of dead or seriously injured drivers.
The statistics show that fewer drivers with illegal blood alcohol levels are killed nowadays, but the overall numbers of drivers killed has remained about the same in recent years.
"You could say," said Mr Youngman, "that all we seem to be doing with our current drink-driving policies is reducing the blood alcohol levels of dead drivers."
There is no argument that, around the nation, four out of 10 fatal crashes involve people with raised blood alcohol levels. But that is a long way from saying that in all these cases alcohol was the cause of the crash.
The RACV study, not showing a strong causal relationship between serious crashes and alcohol,tried to ascertain what factors might be the best ones to predict the crash rate.
And it seems that alcohol, at least part of the time, is not the direct cause of road crashes in which it is involved. It is a marker for something else.
The RACV research used overseas studies and found that a US-developed basket of factors relating to unemployment and other social factors predicted Australian road crash statistics better than booze.
This again is not proof of cause, but it does illustrate that an emphasis on alcohol could be seen to be simplistic.
For instance, one reason for the preponderance of high blood alcohol levels in road deaths and serious injuries is that for any given degree of impact, you are more likely to come off badly if you have been drinking. Alcohol in some way affects your body's ability to cope with trauma, and it doesn't matter whether you are the driver or the passenger.
Hence an alternative preventive message to random breath testing could be to tell people that they are risking serious injury if they get into a car at all after drinking.
Nonetheless, NSW can be proud that since RBT was introduced, there has been a considerable drop in both the rate of serious crashes and the levels of blood alcohol. But that has just brought our fatality rate closer to the national average.
NSW experts do not necessarily agree with the questioning of RBT. Dr Ross Homel, senior lecturer in behavioural sciences at Macquarie University, has researched this field and written tworeports on NSW accident figures.
He feels strongly that law enforcement is, and has been, a cost-effective strategy and points to the relative stability of the injury and death rates as evidence that support for RBT should be maintained, if not increased.
The alternative view, which seeks to reduce road crashes to far lower levels, is that we need to shift the emphasis in policy and spending much closer to causes.
Some argue that the most extreme option is not to let young men drive at all. This would cutthe road toll by 40 per cent overnight since young men dominate crash figures.
This is unrealistic of course, particularly since not all young men are bad drivers. But the point is that more effort should be made to correct the largely male factors which produce roadcrashes.
Studies have indicated that feelings of aggression, alienation, anger and powerlessness turnpeople into so called risk-takers. And risk-takers are more likely to drink, use other drugs and drive dangerously.
The reckless driving would be there whether they drank or not. And these people are likely to be encouraged into this behaviour if they know it will annoy people in authority such as the police.
Solutions to this are much more complicated than sticking a squad car on a street corner. It also involves parents and schools.
It seems, as with many health messages, we have reached those who are easily converted. "Nice" people think that RBT is a good thing but those we need to communicate with go on driving dangerously. Our law enforcement approach to drugs in general is not very effective with risk-takers, and here perhaps is another example.
© 1987 Sydney Morning Herald