375 Alcohol-impaired driving is a major public health problem in the United States. Traffic crashes involving alcohol killed more than 16,000 people in 1997 alone (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration [NHTSA] 1998b) and injure a million more each year (Blincoe 1996). Fatal traffic crashes, the leading cause of death for those aged 1 through 24, involve alcohol 4 times out of 10 (NHTSA...

Although public health efforts have made some progress in reducing risk of adolescent motor vehicle crashes over the last three decades, new technologies and evolving behavior patterns have focused attention on the risk of distracted driving. For many of the same reasons that alcohol-impaired driving represents a distinct risk for adolescents, distracted driving has an elevated impact on this a...

One approach for reducing alcohol and other drug problems is community-based prevention programs. These programs focus on changing the environment in which a person consumes alcohol rather than the behavior of the individual drinker. Several international and U.S. programs have assessed the effectiveness of such approaches in reducing alcohol-related problems. Some of those analyses have had in...

One of the most striking characteristics of human beings is their ability to function successfully in complex environments about which they know very little. Reflect on how little you really know about all the individual matters of fact that characterize the world. What, other than vague generalizations, do you know about the apples on the trees of China, individual grains of sand, or even the ...

BACKGROUND Some laboratory studies find that driving is impaired even at blood alcohol content (BAC)=0.01%. However, no real-world traffic studies have investigated whether minimally 'buzzed' drivers (BAC=0.01%) are more likely to be blamed for a crash than are the sober drivers they collide with. PURPOSE To determine whether official blame for a crash increases significantly at BAC=0.01%. ...

Recursive functions: computable on a TM; might be partial (i.e., the TM might not stop for some inputs). Intuitively, recursive functions are computable using WHILE-loop – without any priori bound on the number of iterations of the loop. (Cook the potatoes until tender.) Primitive recursive functions: A smaller class, computable using a loop of the form FOR i < g(x) DO · · · , where g(x) is pre...

OBJECTIVE Driving the wrong way on freeways, namely wrong-way driving (WWD), has been found to be a major concern for more than 6 decades. The purpose of this study was to identify characteristics of this type of crash as well as to rank the locations/interchanges according to their vulnerability to WWD entries. METHODS The WWD crash data on Illinois freeways were statistically analyzed for a...

Improved laws, enhanced enforcement, and public awareness brought about by citizens' concern, during the 1980s led to dramatic declines in drinking and driving in the industrialized world. The declines included about 50% in Great Britain, 28% in The Netherlands, 28% in Canada, 32% in Australia, 39% in France, 37% in Germany, and 26% in the United States. Some of these declines may be due in par...

INTRODUCTION Conviction rates for drivers driving under the influence (DUI) and in motor vehicle collisions (MVC) presenting to trauma centers are based primarily on data from the 1990s. Our goal was to identify DUI conviction rates of intoxicated drivers in MVCs presenting to a trauma center and to identify factors associated with the failure to obtain a DUI conviction. METHODS Retrospective...