Too drunk to drive? There is an app to let you know
As there is for everything that affects the human condition these days, there’s an app for drinking and driving. Indeed, in the case of impaired driving, there are multiple apps, each proposing a different method of preventing you from getting behind the wheel after a few too many.
There are, for instance, apps that will measure your blood alcohol content (BAC) directly. There are more that will “estimate” your BAC (blood alcohol concentration) by your weight, age and, yes ladies, sex. There are still more that will try to get you home safely after a night of drinking. And when’s the last time a mere app was discussed in the U.S. Congress, as was an application that warns presumably drunk drivers that there is a checkpoint on their route home?
Here are our picks for some of the apps to get you home.
BACtrack is actually a miniature breathalyzer, and thus is one of the few apps that measures your BAC directly. This, of course, requires buying a Bluetooth-enabled measuring device ($124.99) as well as downloading an app. However, it is amazingly easy to use (if I can’t screw it up, no one can) and provides easily repeatable readings. It’s now also available as a totally self-contained breathalyzer, not requiring your iPhone.
The most surprising element of using the BACtrack was how much I had to drink to get to my 80 milligrams, and how truly and completely impaired I was when I got there. As I have said in another column, it’s time to redefine the limits for drunk driving; 80 milligrams per 100 millilitres of blood is, in my opinion, far too much to be allowed behind the wheel of an automobile. BACtrack will store your readings and help you call for a ride. Recommended.
Endui is one of the apps created by official government bodies (in this case, the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration, but many other U.S. states have something similar). You basically enter your particulars — weight, age, etc. — and then every time you have a drink, enter it into the app. Endui then estimates what your BAC is.
It also will allow you to call a taxi, and even has a game that tests your reaction time and your road-sign recognition abilities. It requires you to remember to enter the number of drinks you’ve had, which is a stretch by the time you’ve hit Chumbawamba’s third chorus of having another “lager drink.”
Educ’alcool is similar to Endui, but a little more involved. Besides being Canadian — from Quebec — Educ’alcool asks not only for your age and size but also the gender of the operator. Women, for the same body weight, have a little less capacity to process alcohol because their bodies contain less fluid to dilute the ethanol.
It even — seemingly anticipating a typically Quebecois long night of entertaining — asks you how many drinks you’ll have before starting to eat, how many you’ll have with your main meal and how many you’ll have as an aperitif. Then it asks what time you’ll go home, to determine your readiness to drive. Educ’alcool allows for multiple users, will display a graph showing the changes in your BAC level and will call you “le taxi.”
My favourite among all these reactive systems is from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in the U.S. Despite being the hoariest of old-school organizations, it most accurately — and honestly — reflects the needs of the typical teenage binge drinker. SaferRide simply has but three options when you’re three sheets to the wind.
First, there’s the “Get Taxi” button. There’s a “Call Friend” option. And finally, proving that the person who designed SaferRide really isn’t too far removed from his reckless teen years, there’s the “Where Am I” button for when you’re so blotto you need GPS to remind you of where on the planet you are if someone needs to come pick you up.
Kudos to the NHTSA for an app that emphasizes utility over selfrighteousness. Its marketing slogan — “Too drunk to drive means too drunk for complicated apps” — is perhaps the most realistic antidrunk driving messaging I’ve seen.
The last member of this quintet is a category rather than a specific app, namely those that promise to alert you to a sobriety checkpoint. They are, to say the least, controversial. Indeed, Apple and BlackBerry banned them from their stores. Nonetheless, you can still get some form of DUI checkpoint app from Google. As the name implies, users input the location of any new sobriety checkpoints, which is then fed into a database that all users can access.
Of course, their only purpose is to give licence to drinking and driving, so it’s no wonder such apps were specifically condemned in one session of the U.S. Congress.
These checkpoint apps, of course, take the moral dilemma of drinking and driving to an all-new low.