While police enforcement increases during the holidays, a new report shows where the D.C. region stands on drunk and drug-related driving deaths and crashes.
It’s the holiday season, which usually means an uptick in drunk drivers on the roads. While police enforcement increases during the holidays, a new report shows where the D.C. region stands on drunk and drug-related driving deaths and crashes.
The good news?
“Drug and drunk driving fatalities on D.C. area roadways have gone down, not just a little bit, they’ve gone down by a double-digit percentage, 26% between 2023 and 2024,” said Kurt Erickson, president of the Washington Regional Alcohol Program.
Erickson said the new report by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments showed deaths fell from 100 to 74.
He said he thinks that D.C. police are increasing enforcement has helped.
“They’ve stepped up their efforts to identify and apprehend drunk drivers. They’ve done this through weekly traffic checkpoints. They’re not necessarily sobriety checkpoints, but they will catch drunk drivers, and also that they’ve stepped up their game in terms of training of officers to identify and apprehend drunk drivers,” Erickson said.
But while deaths were down, he said there’s still some work to be done.
“Drunk driving injuries are up, and drunk driving crashes are up, and that we’re still a region where, while DUI arrests are down, we’re still arresting somebody for drunk driving every 60 minutes … in the greater Washington area every single year,” Erickson said.
Impaired driving-related injuries rose by nearly 4% while crashes increased by 2%, according to the report.
“Each one of these fatalities, injuries, crashes, arrests, they’re all 100% preventable,” he said. “There’s an alternative to drunk driving between now and New Year’s, which is a free, safe ride — Sober RIDE program — a service that the nonprofit Washington Regional Alcohol Program has done since 1991, of which almost 100,000 people have taken advantage of.”
Find more information on the Sober Ride program here.
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