Alcohol-impaired driving is an important health and social issue as it remains a major risk to Americans' health today, surpassing deaths per year of certain cancers, HIV/AIDS, and drownings, among others, and contributing to long-term disabilities from head and spinal injuries. Progress has been made over the past decades towards reducing these trends, but that progress has been incremental and has stagnated more recently. Getting to Zero Alcohol-Impaired Driving Fatalities examines which interventions (programs, systems, and policies) are most promising to prevent injuries and death from alcohol-impaired driving, the barriers to action and approaches to overcome them, and which interventions need to be changed or adopted. This report makes broad-reaching recommendations that will serve as a blueprint for the nation to accelerate the progress in reducing alcohol-impaired driving fatalities.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) developed an assessment process that gives States an opportunity to conduct a review of their efforts to control impaired driving by an outside team of nationally recognized experts. Each assessment examines a State's overall program and presents recommendations to improve or enhance it. NHTSA reviewed 38 State assessment reports and found 2,982 individual recommendations, including 852 that were identified as priority recommendations by the teams. Most of the recommendations fit into 10 thematic areas: (1) increasing deterrence by prioritizing enforcement efforts and enhancing the arrest, prosecution, and adjudication process; (2) improving public information and education efforts related to prevention and deterrence; (3) remedying problems involving DUI data and records (reporting requirements, offender tracking systems, data linkages, uniform traffic citations); (4) enacting new laws or revising existing laws aimed at increasing the deterrence and/or prevention of DUI; (5) enhancing training for law enforcement, prosecution, and judicial personnel; (6) evaluating programs and activities to combat impaired driving; (7) providing sufficient resources for treatment and rehabilitation; (8) improving inter/intra-governmental coordination and cooperation; (9) providing funding (including self-sufficiency) to provide for adequate resources (personnel, equipment); and (10) developing or increasing task forces and/or community involvement.