Thanks for Commenting
(part 1)
First let me say I do not support drunk driving or driving while impaired, despite the underlying cause. Any means which can be employed to reduce the dangers of our roads should.
You advocate having an interlock installed on the vehicle of people who have been convicted of DWI for the first time. There are several problems with this, the first of which is enforcement. How do you follow up on it and where do the monies come from to pay for it? The easy response is to charge the people who have been convicted, but we all know that not everyone who receives a bill pays it. And that does not even address the cost of installation and removal. This is the major point where their system will fail.
(part 2)
Second is the fact that you are attempting some action after the fact. I understand your frustration and desire to change things, but the threat of installation of this device will not prevent someone from driving impaired. Humans are great at rationalization and when we are drunk most of us can tell you that we had a good reason for our action, even when later in the cold light of a hangover we realized what we did was stupid. This will not fundamentally change anything but will create an industry dedicated getting rich off this aspect of human nature.
Thirdly you are not addressing the issue of the time between the arrest/incident and conviction/installation. Often, if you check statistics, many people will get more than one DWI in very short order. What good does it do to have this program when a person is driving drunk between an arrest and conviction. The purpose seems to be stopping the problem of DWI, but the solution does not seem very effective.
(part 3)
Last is a person driving someone else's car to avoid the lock on their own. Wow, how creative. The state can't enforce the laws. People break the laws because they do not take responsibility for their own actions. And if that person attempts to circumvent their responsibility by getting a third party involved we blame the third party and hold them accountable. You have created a whole system of punishment and blame that does nothing to actually solve the problem.
(part 4)
I did not like the idea of having something installed in my car, especially when it would require money out of my pocket. However, what no one seems to be addressing in this debate is when are we going to ask that technology be used to attempt to solve the problem. The bottom line problem is we have people dying because these massive objects are allowed to travel at a high speed (Kinetic energy) with an unreliable guidance system which has no redundancies. In the 60's, when Ralph Nader took on the automotive industry and challenged them to do better they all claimed that the cost of implementing changes to improve the safety of their product would drive them to bankruptcy. We all know that has been proven false and that cars today are relatively cheaper and far safer than the product of yesteryear. Therefore, we need to recognize that we share a common problem and must be willing to collectively solve that problem.
Commenting by HaloScan
