This piece by Dave Infante was originally published on Dave’s Substack, Fingers. Fingers is an independent newsletter about drinking in America.
Folly Beach is a little hamlet in the greater Charleston metropolitan area, right by the Atlantic Ocean. I’m partial to it because my wife and I spent a fair amount of time there when we lived in the area, but for all intents and purposes, it’s your standard-issue beach town.
A few weeks ago, a drunk driver going 40 miles an hour over the speed limit on a Folly Beach road plowed her vehicle into a golf cart1 carrying a newlywed couple that had been married earlier that evening. The groom survived with injuries; the bride “died on the road in her wedding dress.” Incredibly grisly stuff. Not that there’s a good time to be slaughtered by a drunk driver, but a wedding night at 34 years young is probably about as bad as it gets unless there are children involved. Which of course there often are.
A few days after this fatal accident, I was on Facebook trying to sell some shit—please buy my like-new WiFi router, thank you—when I stumbled across a post on a Charleston food & beverage industry page. The poster was encouraging people not to be so judgmental towards the driver, a 26-year-old woman who reportedly worked at a restaurant in Charleston. I thought this was remarkably compassionate for Facebook in general and this page2 in particular, so I kept reading (emphasis mine, all sic):
[A] lot of y’all are quick to say terrible shit like “Jamie [the driver] can rot in jail” “she’s a murderer” etc etc BUT that could have been ANY one of us. I’ve seen specific mfs say shit like that who have NO room to even comment on this situation. Y’all drink and drive as if its the norm.
…]
I say y’all quit wishing the worst for Jamie and instead hope some kind of good could come out of this… such as a wake up call for this community to Fuckin chill on the drinking and driving and for her to be an advocate for such.
Ah. Close, but no potato. I of course agree that this senseless killing should be a wake-up call about the dangers of drunk driving, but I doubt it’ll fix the problem, for two reasons. First, people are dumb and selfish and have a terrible capacity for assessing risk. Telling people to “Fuckin chill on the drinking and driving” is like telling them to floss: no one really disagrees on the merits of healthy gums, but flossing is inconvenient and time-consuming and it doesn’t really seem like it matters, so people skip it sometimes. Who cares? Not me, what you do with your mouth is your own business. But drunk driving is everybody’s business because it takes place in public. If roads are a public good, drunk driving is a public bad. Which brings us to Reason #2: individual choices are not a good solution to systemic problems. Appealing to people’s decision-making faculties (bad!) means the outcome is reliant on that decision-making (worse!) To solve this problem, we need more imagination about what’s possible.
If you found my flossing simile hackneyed and inadequate, here’s a more relevant analogy. Protected bike lanes—i.e., those that keep cyclists separated from moving cars by a physical barrier like a cement wall—reduce traffic injuries, whereas “sharrows” painted on the road by and large do not. Why? Because telling drivers not to hit cyclists isn’t as effective as making it impossible for them to hit cyclists! The underlying logic here is straightforward. To create safer streets, don’t encourage drivers to make smart individual choices; engineer the system so they can’t kill someone when they inevitably don’t.
We can’t separate a dedicated drunk-driving lane with cement barriers for reasons you can surely surmise, poetically just though it might be. So curbing the public bad of drunk-driving calls for a different sort of infrastructural solution: public transit. Buses! Subways! Uber, no! Aerial gondolas? If the topography calls for it, fuck yes! We know that some percentage of people will make the bad choice to drunk drive, and some percentage of those drunk drivers will slaughter innocents as a result of that bad choice. The bad choice flows from their dumbness and selfishness and “terrible capacity for assessing risk” -ness, yes, but upstream of that, it flows from the utter dearth of transit options for getting around most of this country other than driving a car.
New York City has the most public transit in this country by far, and not only is it falling apart after decades of neoliberal privatization and underfunding, it’s also just like… not very good, compared to the rest of the world. By the same comparison, Charleston has jack shit. The standard bus system is underfunded, a promising bus-rapid-transit project has been inching along for about a decade, and despite the tangle of privately owned, at-grade freight lines that carve through the region, building a light-rail or streetcar system is out of the question due to a classist, racist “pro-business” regime of privatization and low taxes. Folly Beach and every coastal town like it should run free shuttles with tons of stops to ensure no one has to walk more than a block or two to catch a ride. The fact that it doesn’t is a policy choice. It’s the same made in so many cities and towns across the country3, and it’s killing us.
Now, yes, transit is expensive4, and the data is mixed on how much it reduces drunk driving. After all, drinkers (dumb, selfish, terrible at assessing risk) still have to choose to use it. But here’s the thing: build it anyway! Robust public transit systems offer all sorts of social benefits beyond drunk-driving prevention like increased upward mobility and/or upsetting rich people. Speaking of riches: let’s take half the budget of every police department5, and half the cash every big beverage-alcohol supplier spends on ads flogging personal choice and see how many busses that’ll get us. Folly Beach, a town of ~2,000 year-round residents, spent $4 million on public safety last year. A company like, say, Heineken easily spends that much each year telling people to “please drink responsibly,” knowing full well they won’t. And if that’s not enough dough, good news, we already have a mechanism for raising money to fund public works. It’s called “taxation.” Corporations HATE this one weird trick!
We don’t have to countenance loved ones bleeding out on the pavement, mowed down by drunk drivers who made bad decisions. Enshrining drunk driving as an unfortunate fact of life rather than a behavior to be engineered away is a failure of the American political imagination. The money is there and a less deadly future is possible, but only if we’re willing to socialize the solutions to drunk driving the way we currently socialize the risks.
Just to preempt any victim-blaming: golf carts like the one the victims were driving are very common on Charleston streets, and also technically street legal. Also, would it have been better if they were run over while walking or biking? No, of course not.
It’s frequented by insane right-wing bar owners and Boomers from out of state (to the extent that those are even discrete demographics.) As you can imagine, it was a great source of deranged story ideas when I worked for the local paper.
Very much including NYC!
Much more so because of a vampiric public transit consulting industry that thrives in the United States and virtually no other developed nation; allowing it to is another policy failure.
Charleston’s is $53.4 million a year, and Folly Beach, with like ~2,000 year-round residents, spends a staggering $4 million on public safety in 2022.
If we’re talking public good stuff, cars shouldn’t be able to run without seatbelts being fastened and the driver should sure as shit have to blow into a breathalyzer to get that thing to turn on. If you’re going to be using public roads, you should meet a threshold of safety for yourself and for other drivers around you.
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