Rhode Island Once Again Makes the Wrong End of a National Ranking. But This Time, Who Can Blame Us?
Between the bad roads and the bad politics, no wonder:
The study says about 30 million Americans admit to driving drunk every year, according to a new federal study, and 10 million say they drove while impaired by illicit drugs.
Remarkably, those numbers are down from about five years ago. Rhode Island was found to have the highest percentage of people driving under the influence of drugs in the nation.
Well it makes sense, looking at the combination of ignorant, apathetic Rhode Islanders who are on drugs and the politicians they elect who drive the rest of us to drink.
Rhode Island has some fundamentally different stuff going on compared to other states. We are super-densely populated, for one thing. You can also get around easily without using the highway. If I recall correctly, our drunk-driving-fatality-per-mile rate is lower than average (so we might be drunk driving more often, but for distances short enough to totally offset the frequency), and our overall road fatality rate is very favorable compared to other states.
It’s not politically correct to say, but there’s a -big- difference between ten people drunk-driving home three miles each on 25MPH side-roads vs. three people drunk-driving home fifty miles each on 65MPH highways.
That said, I’m -very- happy to live in the city, where I’m able to walk (stumble?) to and from various watering holes, or cab home with neighbors.