Citation

Votey HL, Shapiro P. Accid. Anal. Prev. 1983; 15(6): 523-533.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1983, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This research is an investigation into the effect of sanctions imposed for drunken driving on the control of fatal and serious injury accidents in Sweden. The analysis makes use of lagged relationships to avoid alleged shortcomings of other investigative techniques. This approach facilitates sorting out cause and effects among such influences on accidents as levels of alcohol consumption, distance driven, vehicle mix and rainfall on the one hand and arrests for drunken driving, jail, fines and licence withdrawal on the other. The data are based on individual records of accidents and persons arrested for drunken driving from 1976 to 1979. Criminal histories are available for all such drivers back to 1970. These data have been used to construct a monthly time series for each of the three major cities of Gotenborg, Malmo, Stockholm and for the rest of the country. The statistical analysis lends support to the hypothesis that control efforts work in Sweden to reduce accidents below what they might otherwise have been. The combination of apprehension and jail is shown to be effective in reducing serious injury accidents that represent close to 80% of all serious accidents, whereas for fatal accidents jail appears to be less effective than fines. A surprising result is that licence withdrawal is found to have a uniformly positive effect in reducing accidents, irrespective of the investigative technique used. This result is of particular interest since licence withdrawal is not regarded as a sanction in Sweden and its use receives much less attention than the much more costly use of jail as punishment.