Drinking-driving accident countermeasures: why not try changing the environment?

Abstract

Effective long-term countermeasures to accidents involving alcohol-impaired drivers are in short supply. Environmental countermeasures, currently the poor relation among drinking-driving countermeasures, may offer some hope in improving this state of affairs. The knowledge needed for the design of appropriate environmental countermeasures is, however, grossly deficient and this needs to be remedied before any real change to the current "countermeasure implementation by guesswork" approach takes place. The paper should be regarded first as a prompt for rethinking current drinking-driving accident countermeasures, and second as a call for more pertinent research on driving behaviour degradation with alcohol intoxication.