Re: Drink driving at Christmas : Fri Dec 14, 2012 12:57 am
cod'ead wrote:
Statistically drink-drivers contribute to 20% of all road accidents,...
Except they don't. For many years now, road accident statistics have become increasingly meaningless, due to the fact that, for the overwhelming majority of road traffic collisions, you have as much chance of getting the police to attend as you have of getting Starbucks to pay corporation tax.
The statistics can only ever tell a story of those collisions of which details are recorded, and if 90%-plus of all collisions are not attended by the police then the 20% statistic is pretty meaningless.
If 100% of the non-recorded collisions were contributed to by alcohol, then the overall statistic would be over 90%. If none of them were, the statistic would be hardly over 2%. The actual truth could lie anywhere in between, and nobody actually has a clue.