You have probably seen the phrase on a billboard or on the television – “Buzzed driving is drunk driving,” but the legal definition of buzzed driving states that it involves operating a vehicle with a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) between 0.01% and 0.07%, which is below the 0.08% legal limit. So by the letter of the law, buzzed driving is not drunk driving. In fact, research suggests that buzzed driving may actually be safer than driving without a drop of alcohol in your system. How can this be? We explore the study that makes this claim and dive into the “Grand Rapids Effect” in today’s blog.
The Grand Rapids Effect
There’s no debate that drunk driving is incredibly dangerous. Numerous studies have found that driving under the influence of alcohol delays your physical and cognitive abilities and significantly increases your risk of being involved in a car accident. In fact, the very study that we’ll be citing later found that for elevated levels of BAC, the risk of collision increases greatly. In the 1964 paper from Robert Frank Borkenstein on drunk driving in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he found that drivers with a BAC at or above 0.15% were 25 times more likely to get in a traffic collision than someone with a zero BAC.
However, that paper also brought to light a very interesting statistic. According to Borkenstein, drivers with a BAC between 0.01% and 0.04% actually had a lower risk of collision than those with a BAC of 0.00%. This finding has been categorized as “The Grand Rapids Effect.” Another study in 1995 from Wurburg University in Germany came to a similar conclusion, that the risk of collision was lower for a driver with a BAC of 0.04% or less than someone with zero alcohol in their system.
So why is this the case? Does one beer help people lock in behind the wheel? Are you actually a better driver when you’re loosened up after a glass of wine?
While the researchers couldn’t pinpoint to an exact reason, they believe that there may be a more obvious reason behind the findings, and that’s about driver groups in general. The main theory is that people who drive with a BAC of 0.01%-0.04% are more likely to a healthier group of adults with decent driving behaviors than other subsets who already might be at a higher risk for crashes. For example, two groups that already have very high driving accident rates are drivers over the age of 70 and teenagers. It’s pretty unlikely that these two groups, especially underage teenagers, get behind the wheel with a BAC that falls in this small range. They may make a much worse decision and get behind the wheel well beyond the 0.08% limit, but you’re really going to have a tough time in general finding drivers in these groups with a BAC of 0.01%-0.04%, and these groups are heavily included in the dataset of drivers without a drop of alcohol in their system that have higher rates of traffic accidents.
In other words, drivers who were completely sober were more likely to be teenagers or old adults, who are statistically among the worst drivers on the road. It’s not that being slightly intoxicated actually improved driving ability, it was that people who drove with a BAC of 0.01%-0.04% were more likely to be in the peak age range for driving ability. It’s almost certain that a person with nothing in their system would be a better driver than a clone of themselves with a BAC of 0.01%-0.04%.
We understand the dangers of buzzed driving and drunk driving, and while we apologize for the gotcha-style title of this blog, it certainly is interesting that multiple studies, when conducted in such a manner, found that people with a BAC between 0.01% and 0.04% were involved in fewer traffic accidents than those who were stone cold sober!
Make good choices and never get behind the wheel when you’ve had too much to drink, even if that’s only a drink or two! Don’t assume that you’re a better driver after one beer, because that’s not what this study is saying. And of course, if you or someone you know needs legal help after a traffic stop, reach out to Avery and the team at Appelman Law Firm today at (952) 224-2277.
