Alcohol and Driving
05/02/2010
According to statistics six per cent of car accident injuries and 18 per cent of car accident deaths are related to drink driving or someone involved having been drinking alcohol.
On days/evenings when you’re planning to drive, the safest option is to drink no alcohol whatsoever. If you know you will be drinking or might be tempted it’s best to leave the car at home and make provisions to use public transport or take a taxi, or to get a lift from a friend or sleep at someone else’s house.
It is legal to drink some alcohol when you’re driving but there are strict limits. Currently the limit in the UK is that when you’re driving you may not have more than 80mg of alcohol per 100ml of your blood. For most men this is about four units of alcohol and for most women it’s three units of alcohol.
Anyone found to be driving with more alcohol than this in their system can be fined, jailed and/or prohibited from driving for a period of time. Those with a drink driving conviction will also end up paying more for car insurance.
Although there are rough guidelines for how much alcohol you can legally drink before being over the limit, the difficulty is that everybody reacts differently to drink and some people process alcohol faster than others. It can also take a long time to leave the system which is important to remember when it comes to driving. If you’ve been drinking on a night-time, alcohol can still be in your system the next morning and people have been prosecuted for drink driving because of this issue.
Alcohol has an effect on people’s ability to drive, even when only moderate amounts have been drunk. It can have an impact on co-ordination, reaction times, sight and reasoning. Therefore, this can be manifested in your driving through your speed, your distance from people and other vehicles and the amount of risk that you are willing to take on the road.
