Welsh Assembly Government | Road Casualties: Drinking and Driving, 2009

Road Casualties: Drinking and Driving, 2009

The latest National Statistics on 2009 Road Casualties Wales: Drinking and Driving produced by the Welsh Assembly Government were released on 29 November 2010 according to the arrangements approved by the UK Statistics Authority.

Statistics on 2009 Road Casualties Wales: Drinking and Driving include data for the period up to the end of December 2009. The latest release updates the statistics previously released on 01 December 2009.

The available sources of information about drink driving and accidents suggest that drivers with blood alcohol levels above the legal limit for driving (currently 80mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood) were involved in a significant minority of accidents in Wales. The uncertainty of the data makes it impossible to get an exact estimate, but the highest estimates (made for the Department of Transport, DfT) suggest that one or more drivers over the drink-drive limit were involved in as many as:

Between 1 in 5 and 1 in 4 fatal accidents in Wales;
Around 1 in 11 serious accidents in Wales; and
Around 1 in 16 slight accidents.

Other information about drink driving suggests that:

Around 1 in 9 killed or seriously injured (KSI) road casualties occurred in a collision involving a driver over the drink drive limit. There is better agreement between data sources here, with the attending police officers’ views of the contributory factors to an accident suggesting a slightly lower ratio of 1 in 10 KSI casualties.
Around a quarter of car drivers killed in traffic collisions were over the drink-drive limit;
However no motorcycle riders killed were over the drink drive limit; and
There were 129 accidents in 2009 where the reporting police officer considered that a pedestrian(s) being ‘impaired by alcohol’ was a contributory factor to that accident.

Drug driving

For every ten accidents where the driver was impaired by alcohol, there was around 1 accident where he/she was ‘impaired by drugs’, both illegal and medicinal.

Breath tests of drivers taken after accidents show:

No marked seasonal pattern in casualties over a year arising from accidents where one or more of the drivers involved tested positive;
More drivers in accidents test positive on the weekend rather than a weekday, and that they are more likely to test positive after traditional working hours, between 16:00 to 04:00.