ESRA thematic report on driving under the influence of alcohol and drugs – international comparison of 32 countries

Background. Driving under the influence (DUI) of alcohol/drugs constitutes a main cause of road casualties. Public attitudes, legislation and enforcement measures influence the number of road accidents attributed to DUI. The ESRA survey (E-Survey of Road users’ Attitudes) provides recent data on DUI across 32 countries.
Objectives. The objective of this presentation is to give an overview of the ESRA thematic report ‘Driving under the influence of alcohol and drugs’, which will be released shortly before ICADTS conference. The report is based on the second edition of the survey (ESRA2), which is currently being conducted; the data and first analyses will be available early 2019.
Methods. In the descriptive analyses, self-declared impaired driving, related attitudes and opinions as well as enforcement experiences, and support for policy measures - all variables collected in the ESRA survey - are compared at the level of countries, gender and age groups. Logistic regression models explore underlying factors predicting self-declared DUI.
Results. At the time of submitting this abstract, data collection for ESRA2 is ongoing. Results from the first ESRA edition (ESRA1; N=38,738) showed, that drink-driving was reported by 30% of the drivers, drug-driving by 14% and driving after taking medication that carries a warning concerning the driving ability, by 25%. The national results differ substantially, ranging from 11-43% for alcohol, 3-24% for drugs, and 7-34% for medication. Different factors have been found to be associated with impaired driving, among others ‘gender’, ‘personal acceptability’ and ‘perceived likelihood of being checked for alcohol, respectively for drugs’.
Conclusion. There are notable disparities in the behaviours and attitudes towards impaired driving between the countries as well as between socio-demographic groups. The ESRA projects aims at monitoring these differences.