In last week’s Numbers Guy WSJ column, Carl Bialik examines a dust-up between MADD and the (beverage industry-backed) Century Council. They published a bar-chart of alcohol-related fatalities broken down by BAC levels.
Note that the term alcohol-related means simply that any of the drivers involved had a BAC of 0.01 or greater.
What intests me, however, is how the chart looks if we include all fatalities and how the same chart would look.
I haven’t made the chart yet, but it would look way different. The new bar, i.e. everything below 0.01, would swamp all the others — it would be 59%, and the former biggest category of BAC 0.19+ would shrink to around 16%, and all the others would shrink commensurately.
raw 2007 fatalities (“old definition”) : total/alc-related/drunk – 41,059/17,036 /14,575
raw 2007 fatalities (“new definition”): total/alc-impaired – 41,059/12,998
The distinction between the old and new definition is that the “new” drops the BAC of pedestrian as a criteria. In other words, alcohol-impaired means drunk motor vehicle DRIVER. It also drops the BAC of bicyclists as well — we could debate that BUT it would only move the stats less than 1 percentage point.