If you’ve been in an accident and are working with your attorney to obtain compensation, these statistics may be of some help. Impaired driving is a major concern within the United States, and a new release of information through 2013 and 2014 has updated the data related to drunk and drugged drivers. The data has been collected from 300 roadside sites around the country, and the data was given voluntarily.
The findings by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration have shown that drinking and driving is on the decline. In fact, between 2007 and 2014, the number of drivers with alcohol levels high enough to be measured during a stop declined by around 30 percent.
In total, it was only around 8.3 percent of drivers who had measurable alcohol in their systems, but that’s not to say that they were over the legal limit of .08 percent. In 2014, 1.5 percent of drivers driving on weekends and at night registered with a blood alcohol concentration of .08 percent or higher.
While that’s the good news about drunk driving, the bad news is that drugged driving is actually on the rise. Twenty percent, approximately, of drivers tested for the study had tested positive for at least one drug in their systems. This is an increase of 3.7 percent from 2007. Additionally, marijuana use has increased; in 2007, only 8.6 percent of drivers had marijuana in their systems, while 12.6 percent had it in their systems in 2014.
In 2014, over 15 percent of drivers tested positive for illegal drugs, while 12 percent had been tested positive for those drugs in 2007.
Source: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, “NHTSA Releases Two New Studies on Impaired Driving on U.S. Roads,” accessed Oct. 15, 2015
