Effectiveness of Seven Publicized Enforcement Demonstration Programs to Reduce Impaired Driving in USA: Georgia, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Indiana, Michigan, and Texas

This article, from a special issue on road safety, briefly reports the results from seven alcohol demonstration programs, conducted between 2000 and 2003 by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in seven different states of the USA. These programs were designed to reduce alcohol-impaired driving through well-publicized and visible enforcement efforts. The States varied markedly in their enforcement methods and media methods, including the paid and earned media budgets and methods. The author reports the details of these programs and briefly describes findings from a telephone survey conducted in five of the seven states. A major finding concerned the use of paid advertising: three of the four states that had a decrease in fatal crashes involved drunk driving used paid advertising in their programs. In general, states employing sobriety checkpoints, using paid advertising, and implementing their program statewide were associated with crash reductions, relative to surrounding states. The use of saturation patrols alone may result in crash reduction. One table summarizes the result of various analyses conducted on the data from these studies.