Road Casualties: Drinking and Driving, 2008

Statistics on Road Casualties: Drinking and Driving include data for Wales for the period up to the end of December 2008.

There is a reasonable level of agreement between sources of information about drink driving and accidents. These 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. The available estimates suggest that one of more drivers over the drink-drive limit were involved in around:

• 1 in 7 fatal accidents in Wales; other figures go as high as 1in 6;
• 1 in 14 serious accidents in Wales; other figures  go as high as 1 in 11; and
• A range of between 1 in 14 or 1 in 25 slight accidents.

Other information about drink driving suggests that:

• Drivers over the drink-drive limit were involved in collisions that resulted in 1 out of every 11 of all the people who were killed or seriously injured on the roads;
• Over 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 149 accidents in 2008 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; and
• There is some clustering of drink driving in Wales.

Contact

Tel: 029 2082 5062
E-mail: stats.transport@wales.gsi.gov.uk

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