December is Impaired Driving Awareness Month, and data provided by the RCMP shows that more still needs to be done to eliminate drunk driving.
For the last decade, impaired driving has been ranked as the top safety concern on more than 80 per cent of Canadian roads, only surpassed for the first time by concerns about texting and driving in 2010.
Information from Statistics Canada indicates that that concern is warranted, especially in Alberta, where the impaired driving rate is 70 per cent higher than the national average. The number of impaired driving incidents in the province was 450 for every 100,000 people, compared to the national average of 262 out of every 100,000.
Country-wide, alcohol has been a factor in 30–40 per cent of deaths on the road in the past decade and a half.
From 2008 to 2012, 7,937 people were injured as a result of alcohol-related collisions in Canada; 471 died. Reliable data for 2013 isn’t yet available, but in 2012 alone 78 people were killed in drunk driving accidents, and 1,268 were injured.
And while motorists can die on the road for any number of reasons, there is a direct correlation between the severity of a collision and the likelihood that alcohol was involved.
In Alberta, one in five fatalities on the road are due to impaired driving.
Aside from death and injury, drinking and driving has harsh criminal implications as well. In the last five years, in Alberta alone, more than 43,000 people have been convicted of offenses related to impaired driving.
Preventing death, injury or arrest is as simple as not drinking and driving.
While doing that might seem to many like an easy task, trends in the data suggest some people are particularity vulnerable on specific days at specific times. Most drunk-driving accidents that result in a fatality occur on the weekends, most often between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. This trend is even more noticeable on long weekends.
The RCMP asks that the public pay close attention to this data during the holiday season, and reminds everyone to enjoy the holidays safely and responsibly.
