0.05 saves lives

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0.05 saves lives *

Lowering the BAC from 0.08 to 0.05% deters impaired driving

and affects every drinking driver.

PREVENTING IMPAIRED DRIVING

IMPROVES ROAD SAFETY

From 2011-2022, at least 40 percent of traffic fatalities in Hawai‘i involved alcohol. During the same timeframe, the national average for alcohol-related traffic fatalities hovered between 35 and 36 percent, bumping up to 37 percent in 2022. Lowering the legal blood alcohol concentration (BAC) for driving from 0.08 to 0.05 percent will serve as a general deterrent to intoxicated driving and prevent future deaths.

Impaired Driving by the Numbers

Impairment begins at 0.05 percent BAC – starting with critical driving skills such as alertness and judgment. By 0.08 percent, muscle coordination is reduced and harder to detect danger; judgment and reasoning are impaired.

Forty percent of all traffic fatalities in Hawai‘i involve impaired driving.

Approximately 37 people die in drunk driving crashes every day in the U.S. (one person every 39 minutes).

Seventeen hundred people could be saved in the U.S. every year if all 50 states adopted a 0.05 BAC limit.

Drivers with a BAC between 0.05 and 0.079 percent are seven times more likely to get killed in a single-vehicle crash than if they had not been drinking at all.

More than 100 countries — including Australia, France, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Germany — have reduced their legal BAC levels to 0.05 percent or lower. Sweden, Norway, Japan, and Russia have set their limit at 0.02 percent BAC. In most of those countries, traffic fatalities in which drivers had an illegal BAC are under 25 percent, with many falling in the single-digit range.

A December 2022 statewide poll of Hawai'i voters showed that the majority (62 percent) of the State's voters support lowering the BAC to 0.05 percent.

One state in the U.S. has a BAC limit of 0.05 percent. Utah lowered its BAC to 0.05 in 2019, and from 2019-2023, alcohol-related fatalities accounted for 16.7 percent of all traffic fatalities in Utah.

From 2018-2024, Utah alcohol sales increased 28 percent. LOWERING THE BAC DOES NOT HURT THE RESTAURANT AND TOURISM INDUSTRY.