The State Where Drivers Don't Drink
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday December 17, 1987
ONE OF the great success stories in road safety is the NSW random breath test law, which was enacted five years ago today. It is possible that RBT will turn out to be one of the most lastingachievements of the present State Government, although the law was not introduced with much enthusiasm.
In announcing the new measures on November 3, 1982, the then Ministers for Police and Transport maintained that in the face of "mounting supportive evidence for RBT, the Government has had little alternative but to agree to a trial period". The tone was cautious and hedged bets, perhaps justifiably in view of the experience around the world with get-tough road safety measures.
The importance of RBT in this State is not simply that the road toll was cut when the law was introduced - many jurisdictions have been able to achieve a temporary effect with tough new laws - but that the impact appears to have been sustained for five years. By contrast in South Australia, the RBT law of October 1981 had an initial, slight effect which had all but disappeared after one year, according to Dr Jack McLean of the National Health and Medical Research Ccouncil Road Accident Unit in Adelaide. It's the same story in other places.
How do we know that RBT in NSW has proved the exception to the rule? One line of evidence isthe traffic crash statistics. The accompanying graph shows the number of crashes in NSW involving at least one death for each month from January 1971 to October 1987. It doesn't take an expert statistician to see that something quite dramatic happened in December 1982. In the first year after RBT there was a 24.9 per cent reduction in fatal crashes compared with the average for the previous six years. Of greater significance is the fact that this reduction has been largely sustained over the past five years, with fatal crashes being 21.4 per cent lower over this period than in the six years before RBT.
When the figures for other States are examined there is little evidence of dramatic declines in December 1982, suggesting that RBT and not some other factor really was the cause of the good results in NSW. Data on blood alcohol levels of dead drivers, together with more detailed analyses of the crash statistics (especially analyses of night-time and single-vehicle accidents, which are often alcohol-related), support the conclusion that RBT was the key causal factor.
However, the statistics for the other States underline the need for caution in ascribing allthe decline in road deaths in NSW to RBT. Outside NSW, there has been a 15 per cent decline infatalities in the last five years, even though some States (such as Queensland and Western Australia) have not had RBT. In other words, it is likely that during the past five years several factors (such as road safety campaigns or changes in the economy) have been operating to produce lower crash statistics in all States.
Although it is important not to claim too much for RBT, there is a second line of evidence that RBT in NSW has been unusually successful. The NSW Traffic Authority has run four major surveys, three since RBT was introduced and the first just a month before the new law. The latest survey was in February this year. These surveys demonstrate clearly that the deterent impact of RBT has intensified over time.
Fewer motorists than ever believe that RBT stations can be avoided by taking back roads, theperceived chances of arrest for drinking and driving are higher now than when the law was introduced and an increasing proportion of drivers are taking steps to avoid driving after drinking, like counting drinks or leaving the car at home.
What is it then about the NSW approach to RBT which seems to have been so successful? My research suggests that the critical element is the continual, highly visible police enforcement.
In South Australia, enforcement of RBT was absolutely minimal for the first 18 months with one unit in the metropolitan area and one in the country. In Victoria, RBT has been conducted intensively in the form of blitzes of short duration. In NSW in the first year of operation (1983), the total number of random tests conducted exceeded the total for Victoria for all years since 1976!
The past success of RBT in reducing crashes should not guarantee its continuation, since benefits must be monitored continually and set against costs. The official analyses indicate that on purely economic grounds RBT is a winner, with savings in the first three years being at least double the estimated costs. My calculations suggest that even if only one third of the reduction in deaths in NSW is attributed to RBT, about 460 lives have been saved during the past five years.
However, while these figures are impressive, RBT has entailed a very real cost to civil liberties which cannot easily be quantified. Since it seems that the community is prepared to accept this loss of liberty in exchange for increased levels of road safety, it is critical that the effects of RBT be monitored on a continuing basis. My research suggests that the deterrent impact is very unstable and that the beneficial effects of the law would diminish quickly if enforcement were to become less visible.
The community should resist the temptation simply to increase the severity of penalties, since there is no evidence that such steps are effective for drinking and driving or for any other offence. Perhaps one of the great benefits of RBT, NSW-style, is that it has demonstrated that the key to a law's success is not severe penalties but a real fear of being caught. Draconian penalties for drink-driving, particularly mandatory imprisonment(which is employed in 17 States in the United States as well as Norway), are simply not necessary to achieve a deterrent effect.
A further benefit of RBT in NSW is that it has dramatised the role of alcohol in a substantial minority of serious crashes. It is time the Government looked beyond RBT to more general alcohol control policies. Options include raising the public drinking age (successful in the US), increasing taxes on alcoholic drinks, and supporting "server intervention programs" in which licensed establishments take responsibility for promoting responsible drinking (also quite successful in the US).
Equally important are policies designed to make cars and the roadside environment safer for drinking drivers - in fact, for all motorists whose driving is impaired in some way, whether byillness, drugs or just plain carelessness. Better roads are an obvious priority, but other measures include road signs which are easier for impaired or tired drivers to see at night, and maybe air bags which inflate when a car is involved in a crash.
© 1987 Sydney Morning Herald