The Road Safety Authority is consulting on plans to cut deaths among young drivers, including new alcohol limits. Sweden has a very low road death rate from alcohol, despite high consumption. ISABEL CONWAYreports
SWEDISH ANTI-DRINK-driving laws are among the toughest anywhere so nobody batted an eyelid when a 46-year-old man, found to be over the limit in the passenger seat, was jailed for shirking his responsibilities as an observer to a driver in training.
Stiff penalties – automatic loss of licence, heavy fines and possible jail sentences – are meted out to anyone caught driving a vehicle with more than 0.2 mil (0.02 per cent) blood-alcohol on Swedish roads. Their companion(s) may also risk punishment, as accessories to the crime.
In one recent case a driver, pulled over and breathalysed seconds after eating a liquor- filled chocolate, tested positive. When tests showed no trace of alcohol in the police laboratory he was acquitted but he still had to pay a fine for wasting police time and foot the bill for the tests.
The Road Safety Authority (RSA) of Ireland has recommended sweeping changes, including zero tolerance on alcohol for learner drivers in a bid to stop the carnage on our roads. Swedish experience, registering Europe’s lowest road deaths in successive studies for years, is held up as an example.
Last year there were 50 deaths (Sweden, population: nine million) on their roads. Of those killed, 34 per cent had consumed alcohol, proof, if such were needed, of the strong link between road deaths and alcohol.
“Only about 0.24 per cent of drivers in Sweden are driving over the limit and they cause about 15 per cent of the accidents, a third are re-offenders with an alcohol problem,” says transport legal expert Catrin Tidstrom. “For that reason we have a well-developed system whereby drunk drivers are automatically in a ‘rehabilitation’ programme.”
Learner drivers are allowed out on Swedish roads only in the charge of a parent or designated adult who has had a clean driving licence for at least five years and who has to sit next to them at a three-hour road safety course beforehand.
Juvenile drink-driving cases and serious road accidents involving young people, while they do occur, are rare in a country where social control and fear of draconian penalties appear to work well.
“Young people are drinking more but we are targeting them, encouraging their peers to take the car keys away and prevent those who have consumed alcohol from driving,” Asa Ersson of the Swedish Road Administration told The Irish Times.
“There is a big social stigma to drunk-driving convictions in Sweden; you might tell friends about a speed penalty, but you would be far too ashamed to say you were driving under the influence of alcohol, so social control is a major deterrent.”
Social control certainly took a front seat ensuring that two men were put off the road after being found to be drunk in charge of a lawn mower in western Sweden last summer. The pair, who had been drinking at home, decided to drive their motorised lawnmowers down to their local pub for a nightcap.
A neighbour who watched the lawnmowers being driven erratically called the police and after failing a breathalyser test they had their driving licences revoked.
Taking it all a step further, drivers of transport and public service vehicles, and private motorists of the future in Sweden may have to take a breath test every time they get into their vehicles. A government commission, studying the use of alcohol ignition interlocks late last year, stopped short of recommending that they be implemented as a general requirement on new cars, fearing opposition under competition rules from the EU authorities.
From this month, more than 10,000 national and local government vehicles have been fitted with the alcohol locks and there are plans to have them in all public service vehicles, including buses within a couple of years. The lock, which prevents someone from starting a vehicle if a sensor detects traces of alcohol on the driver’s breath, is expected to be approved this year as an automatic form of punishment for those convicted of drunk driving in Sweden.
There is a strong Swedish lobby to have them included in European-wide transport safety programmes targeted at countries battling with drunk-driving offences.
EU surveys show that, together with Ireland, Britain, Finland and Denmark, Swedes are among Europe’s heaviest drinkers. The most effective deterrent against excessive alcohol consumption has always been the state monopoly of its sale.
But EU membership has seen a major erosion of authority. A European Court of Justice decision legalised the right of Swedes to import wine, leading to an explosion of companies offering wines online.
The court ruled that the ban on importing alcohol, to bypass the state-owned liquor stores called “Systembolaget”, was unjustified. A similar court decision deemed the Swedish ban on alcohol advertising as incompatible with the EC treaty on free movement of goods and services.
Lately, consumption of wine in Sweden has risen steadily while sales of heavily taxed spirits are falling. Addiction experts are raising the alarm, seeing a dramatic increase in the number of women alcoholics, up 50 per cent over the past four years, concluding that the flood of cheap booze and relaxation of strict restaurant and bar licensing laws provide greater access, leading to significantly greater consumption, especially among women.
The conflict of interest between the hospitality and retail industries and public health and alcohol-related illness, and growing problems of drink- fuelled violence and drink driving is a cause of ongoing worry.
So when police decided to hire a container to detain drunk skiers overnight at a popular ski resort in the province of Värmland, many felt it was high time for a crackdown.
A custom-made freight container to house drunken skiers and rowdy youths while they sober up has also been placed in Bränas, a popular alpine area, and it will stay open until the snows disappear after Easter.