Drink driving in Belgium: results from the third and improved roadside survey.

In 2003, the Belgian Road Safety Institute organised the third national roadside survey to estimate the proportion of drink drivers and their profile. The objective of this initiative is to gather data as a basis to formulate theory- and research-based recommendations to policymakers with the intention of decreasing the number of alcohol related accidents and victims on Belgian roads. Almost all Belgian police forces agreed to participate in a stratified two-stage cluster sample. First stage of the survey consisted of randomly selecting road sites (m = 449) in each region using a Geographical Information System (Arcview). Second stage of the survey consisted of randomly stopping drivers of personal cars (n = 12,891) during October and November 2003. All stopped drivers were asked by the police to perform an alcohol breath test. In addition, the police invited all sampled drivers to participate in a short questionnaire with individual variables (gender, age, etc.). Questionnaires with aggregated variables for road sites (traffic flow, intensity of stopping drivers, etc.) were also completed. The percentage of drivers who were found to have a blood alcohol concentration at or above the legal limit of 0.5 g/l during weekend nights (7.68%) is significantly higher than all other time spans. These percentages for the remaining time spans do not differ significantly (weekdays: 1.76%; weekday nights: 2.99%; weekend days: 2.98%). A multilevel logistic model for Belgium was successfully fitted.

[1]  Tx Station.  Stata Statistical Software: Release 7. , 2001 .

[2]  Harvey Goldstein,et al.  Multilevel modelling of health statistics , 2001 .

[3]  H. Goldstein.  Multilevel Statistical Models , 2006 .

[4]  R. Bangert-Drowns,et al.  Final results from a meta-analysis of remedial interventions with drink/drive offenders. , 1995, Addiction.

[5]  Z. Šidák.  Rectangular Confidence Regions for the Means of Multivariate Normal Distributions , 1967 .

[6]  Stanley Lemeshow,et al.  Sampling of Populations: Methods and Applications , 1991 .

[7]  J P Cauzard,et al.  European drivers and road risk: SARTRE 3 reports: part 1: report on principal analyses , 2004 .

[8]  H M Simpson,et al.  Hard Core Drinking Drivers , 2004, Traffic injury prevention.

[9]  Noreen Goldman,et al.  An assessment of estimation procedures for multilevel models with binary responses , 1995 .

[10]  Ingmar H. A. Franken,et al.  Selective Memory for Alcohol Cues in Alcoholics and Its Relation to Craving , 2003, Cognitive Therapy and Research.

[11]  Harvey Goldstein,et al.  Improved Approximations for Multilevel Models with Binary Responses , 1996 .

[12]  James Maskalyk,et al.  Drinking and driving. , 2003, CMAJ : Canadian Medical Association journal = journal de l'Association medicale canadienne.

[13]  D J Beirness,et al.  International Symposium on Enhancing the Effectiveness of Alcohol Ignition Interlock Programs , 2003, Traffic injury prevention.

[14]  Rainer Christ,et al.  GADGET: GUARDING AUTOMOBILE DRIVERS THROUGH GUIDANCE EDUCATION AND TECHNOLOGY.. , 1999 .

[15]  Ward G. M. Vanlaar.  RESULTS OF THE BELGIAN DRINK DRIVING ROADSIDE SURVEY , 2002 .

[16]  D. Brooke.  DRINKING AND DRIVING: ADVANCES IN RESEARCH AND PREVENTION , 1992 .

[17]  Max Cameron,et al.  A REVIEW OF MASS MEDIA CAMPAIGNS IN ROAD SAFETY , 2004 .