Barron H. Lerner, One for the Road

Remarkably little has been written about the history of traffic accidents—a strange omission since, as numerous commentators have pointed out, many more people died in the twentieth century as a result of road crashes than combined fatalities, military and civilian, during two world wars. Even less has been written about the origins and impact—positive, negative, neutral—of differing national attempts to reduce the incidence of drink driving. This, too, is a strange omission. Control of drink driving—in the USA ‘drunk driving’, as Barron Lerner notes, remained current long after it had been largely discarded in other countries—played a major role in undermining the widely accepted assumption that pro-motorist attitudes must indefinitely dominate the social relations of mobility. Furthermore, from the 1960s onwards, the widespread introduction of the breathalyser routinely required the application of scientifically authenticated measurement of blood alcohol content (BAC). This had the effect of ‘disciplining’ police forces which had in the past frequently tended to adopt procedurally lax attitudes towards irresponsible and dangerous drivers

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