With New Year’s Eve on the horizon, it is an opportune time to remind Tampa residents and other Floridians that driving below .08 blood alcohol content may help a person avoid a criminal charge, but it does not make a person a safe and sober driver.
It seems indeed that since the time we discussed this in a previous post from several months ago, others have picked up on the notion that perhaps even .08 is a little too much alcohol for a person to be a reliably safe driver. One state will be lowering its legal limit to .05 by the time people ring in the new year, while several states, but not Florida, are considering or have considered similar measures.
Indeed, depending on the circumstances, even a drink or two can be enough to contribute to an accident. For instance, a person at .02 BAC will have a harder time focusing his or her vision and will also struggle to do two things at once. Both focus and multitasking are important skills to utilize when operating a motor vehicle.
At .05, a person will likely show signs of limited coordination and a limited ability to make snap judgments. They will also experience difficulty tracking objects that are in motion and may have a harder time controlling one’s vehicle. This may contribute to an accident or, at least, make it very hard for a driver to respond to the occasion emergency that will inevitably come up while travelling Florida’s roads.
As we have said before, a victim of a drunk driving accident should not give up hope just because the other driver involved blew under .08 or somehow avoided a criminal case. With proper investigation and strategy, there may be ways of holding a driver who, practically speaking, had one too many accountable via the civil court system.
