If you’ve gone out drinking in the Bay Area recently, there’s a good chance that you’ve used Lyft or Uber to get home. App-based ride-share companies claim, as a selling point, that their competing fleets of driver-contractors are doing cities a favor by reducing rates of drunk driving. But is this true, or is it just good marketing?
Certainly, it seems a matter of common sense that drunk people should be less likely to get behind the wheel if they have the option to summon a sober driver with a few taps of a smartphone screen. When we venture into the realm of statistical proof, however, the situation becomes less clear.
The academic jury is still out on whether the advent of ride-share services has had any bearing upon the incidence of drunk driving. Researchers attempting to track DUI rates tend to analyze trends in law enforcement data (e.g., DUI arrests) and public-health data (e.g., alcohol-related traffic fatalities and injuries), but the hard data is woefully incomplete, given that the one million Americans who are arrested for a DUI each year may represent less than 1 percent of all annual alcohol-impaired driving episodes. Furthermore, it is not exactly a boon to objective analysis that Lyft and Uber pay teams of marketers and statisticians to frame their services in a positive light.
An independent study recently found that there has been a 25 to 35 percent reduction in alcohol-related car accidents across four boroughs of New York City (excluding Staten Island) since Uber began operating there in 2011. On the other hand, a 2016 report in the American Journal of Epidemiology analyzed data from 100 metropolitan counties across the nation and found no association between the presence of Uber and the number of traffic fatalities. In California, a 2015 analysis concluded that between 2009 and 2014, the introduction of Uber led to a significant drop in the quarterly rate of alcohol-related vehicular homicides — and according to SF Chamber of Commerce president Tallia Hart, the number of annual drunk-driving arrests in San Francisco decreased by 42 percent between 2012 and 2017.
Drunk driving is a major cause of death and injury in the United States, but its role in traffic fatalities has decreased significantly over the past four decades. In 2014, 31 percent of road fatalities in America involved a drunk driver, which is to say that nearly 10,000 people died because someone was operating a vehicle with a BAC above the legal limit of 0.08 percent. On a national level, however, this number actually represents a huge improvement from the mid-1970s, when alcohol played a role in more than 60 percent of automobile deaths.
Thus, even if it’s true that commercial ride-hailing services play a role in the reduction of drunk-driving rates, we must consider their impact within the context of all the other work that’s been done to address the problem: drunk-driving-awareness initiatives, for instance, along with zero-tolerance laws and the raising of the drinking age to 21.
The crux of the matter is that companies like Uber and Lyft are still too new — and the problem of drunk driving perhaps too complex — for us to reach a definitive conclusion about the relationship between the two. We can draw upon seven years of data since Uber began operating in San Francisco, but the use of ride-share services has been far from ubiquitous throughout that time. A national Pew survey conducted in late 2015 found that only 15 percent of Americans had ever used a ride-hailing app — and 56 percent of that number took a ride less often than once a month. A San Francisco–specific survey from around the same time turned up similar numbers. Ben Rosenfield, the city controller, has stated that frequent users of ride-share services — mostly well-educated and well-employed young adults — are less likely than their peers to own a car and are more likely to use public transit. Drunk driving is not an act of common sense, and one imagines that the people who tended to drive drunk in the pre-ride-share era are the same people who tend to drive drunk now.
Of course, even though we cannot yet be sure of the extent to which ride-hailing apps are dissuading San Franciscans from driving drunk, there are certainly plenty of people who do use these services to get home safely after a night of drinking. Numbers notwithstanding, it’s hard to argue with the common-sense angle.
“We advocate for people using ride-share companies because it reduces the chance that someone who has been drinking will get into their car and try to drive,” said SFPD officer Grace Gatpandan. “At the end of the day, the common denominator is that the person who has been drinking does not get behind the wheel.”
So yes, Uber and Lyft have a vested commercial interest in convincing you that their services benefit society, but that does not change the fact that ride-hailing apps provide a safe and convenient alternative to driving drunk.
