U.S. efforts to cut DUI-related deaths fall short

WASHINGTON — The government is falling short of its long-standing goal for cutting the nation's alcohol-related traffic deaths, and traffic fatalities involving drinking remain stubbornly stable at about 17,000 a year, according to transportation safety officials and private groups.

Meeting the target, they say, might save as many as 1,700 lives each year.

Federal and state safety officials spoke of meeting the lower target by the end of 2004, and although the final data has not been assembled, they now say the efforts will probably fall short.

"To be intellectually honest with you, I don't think we're going to make it," Dr. Jeffrey W. Runge, the administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said in an interview.

In 2001, in an effort to focus on a single nationwide goal, the agency aimed at reducing alcohol-related traffic deaths to a rate of 0.53 per hundred million miles traveled by all vehicles by the end of 2004.

In 2003, the most recent year for which comprehensive statistics are available, the rate of alcohol-related traffic fatalities was 0.59 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. While the figure has been going down, to reach the target it would have had to plummet by an additional 10 percent last year, much faster than in prior years.

In 2003, there were 17,013 deaths in alcohol-related traffic accidents, the lowest since 1999.

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, alcohol-related traffic fatality rates did drop steadily as the government and many private organizations, like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, waged highly publicized campaigns to curb drinking and driving, and states tightened laws against drinking and driving.

In recent years, the absolute number of alcohol-related traffic deaths has hit a plateau, just over 17,000 a year, and officials said it had been hard to keep the issue in the public eye. Wendy Hamilton, the national president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, said that "people think the problem's been solved."

Last week, Mothers Against Drunk Driving held a news conference in Washington to call for the greater use of "high-visibility law enforcement," like sobriety checkpoints. In particular, the organization would like to see 10 states — Idaho, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Texas, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming — change their laws to allow such checkpoints.