Gov. Josh Green and safety advocates urged lawmakers on Thursday to pass a state bill lowering the legal threshold for drunk driving offenses.
Currently, a person is considered guilty of driving while intoxicated in Hawai‘i if their blood alcohol content is measured at .08 grams of alcohol per 100 mL of blood. House Bill 1827 and Senate Bill 2463 would reduce that threshold to .05 grams.
Green appeared at a press conference held by nonprofit Mothers Against Drunk Driving to support the bills, citing last year’s spike in traffic fatalities compared to previous years.
“Many, many, many of those accidents that resulted in fatalities were preventable,” Green said. “Our transportation director [Ed Sniffen] shared with me that as many as 80% of those fatalities could be prevented, maybe even more.”
Rick Collins, project director for the Hawai‘i Alcohol Policy Alliance, told Aloha State Daily that similar laws were attempted in previous years; a bill introduced last year failed to pass, which he said was because some lawmakers were unsure of whether lowering the DUI threshold would actually prevent crashes.
However, last year the legislature did pass a resolution that established a working group to research potential impacts of a .05 BAC law.
According to a report by that working group, 39 of Hawai‘i's 93 traffic fatalities in 2023 — the most recent year with complete toxicology data, the report states — involved drivers above the .08 BAC limit. From that data point, the report extrapolates that more than 150 of 2023’s 524 crashes that involved serious injuries may also have involved drivers above the legal limit.
The report does not include data on how many Hawai‘i crashes involve drivers between .05 and .08 BAC. But Collins said that, based on other places that have adopted a reduced DUI threshold, such a law would reduce alcohol-related crashes.
“No one really knows their BAC level when they get in the car,” Collins said. “I’m going to be less likely to drive impaired because I know that it’s lower and so I know that I can’t be impaired when I get in the car.”
According to the report, Utah — so far the only U.S. state to successfully adopt a .05 BAC threshold — saw a 10% decrease in crashes causing injuries or fatalities in the first year after passing its DUI law. During the same time period, crashes nationwide only decreased by 5.6%.
The report also cites a 2017 paper estimating the effectiveness of reducing the BAC limit to .05, based on the results of other countries doing the same. That paper found that lowering the BAC limit to .05 or lower reduces fatal alcohol-related crashes by 11.1%, and estimated that 1,790 lives would be saved each year if all U.S. states did so.
Sen. Karl Rhoads said at Thursday’s press conference that many other nations have adopted DUI limits at .05 or lower. Most European countries, for example, have limits at .05 or below, while Mainland China’s limit is .02.
The working group report also predicted that restaurants and bars can implement practices to minimize any economic losses caused by the bills — for example, promoting non-alcoholic drinks “highlighting the unique flavors of Hawai‘i” — but it added that there is insufficient public data to determine whether alcohol sales in Hawai‘i would be significantly impacted.
Green said that, in the future, technological solutions may eliminate drunk driving entirely, but until then, legislative solutions are necessary.
“The interlock system where you have to blow into a little device so that you can’t start your car if you’re drunk — that’s coming,” Green said. “There’s going to be a lot of vehicles out there that drive us places and we won’t have to drive. That may be the future but the present requires that we be safe with our loved ones.”
So far, both bills have been referred to committees in their respective chambers. The Senate Transportation Committee has scheduled a discussion of SB 2463 for Feb. 3; no other committee has done so yet.
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