Driving Impairment

In recent years, over 17,000 Americans die annually in alcohol-related traffic crashes and hundreds of thousands more suffer serious injuries. As bad as this is, it used to be worse. Decades of research and evidence-based prevention policies have helped reduce the human toll.

PIRE has been a national and international leader in efforts to understand and prevent impaired driving and has made seminal contributions at nearly all levels to help reduce harm consequent to impaired driving.  PIRE research scientists and program managers have evaluated and intervened on this problem from the perspective of public policy, law enforcement, geospatial mapping of alcohol crime, evaluation of interlocks and technologies for control and prediction of impaired driving, evaluation of sobriety checkpoints, development of  alcohol biomarker profiles of DUI offenders, conducting  national roadside surveys of impairment, social and health cost analyses of impaired driving, drinking and driving on campus, ethnic subcultures and impaired driving, impaired motorcycle and recreational boat operators, and many other topics.