It's hard not to feel conflicted about our new driving laws, which this week ramped up penalties for "excessive speeders" and impaired drivers.
Obviously drunk and reckless drivers are a terrifying prospect - maybe particularly on the Sunshine Coast, where we're all herded onto Highway 101 and nobody has the dumb-but-still-vaguely-self-policing option of taking little-used side streets home after a night out at the pub. For myself, having read far too many local collision reports featuring the words "the vehicle crossed the double yellow lines," I know I'm constantly on hyper-alert for erratic drivers in the on-coming highway lane - particularly on weekend nights.
And to no one's surprise, both the government and police are hailing the new laws as great new tools to get dangerous drivers off the road.
But then there's the other side of it.
It's hard not to balk somewhat at new penalties for getting caught in the 0.05 to 0.08 blood alcohol range, which is about where you end up on two glasses of wine over two hours for a 120-pound woman or on four beers over the same time for a 180-pound man.
Think that through: we're talking dinner party fare hardly binge drinking.
Now previously, hitting that "warn" threshold resulted in a 24-hour suspension - which I don't think anyone's arguing with.
But under the new rules, first-time offenders in that range face an immediate three-day driving ban, $450 in penalties and fees and a possible three-day vehicle impoundment plus associated costs.
So imagine for a moment that you're off to a dinner party on the Coast. How can you protect yourself from penalties which are not just expensive, but could - as in my case as a reporter, if I couldn't drive - seriously undermine your ability to carry out your job?
Well obviously you can choose not to drink at all - and count yourself lucky if you're one of the Coast's rare teetotalers. But given that our population enjoys a higher-than-provincial-average consumption of wine, it seems unlikely this is going to appeal to many.
As a second failsafe choice, you can hop on a bus, snag a taxi, or catch a ride home with a teetotaler friend. But I think most of us know the limitations of the Coast's transit system, the rarity of taxis -and if you can find one, the often-prohibitive fares, given potentially long rides between Langdale and Pender Harbour - and the shortage of teetotaler friends.
Moving in to a riskier - but probably more likely - option, you can look up your theoretical drinking limit, using one of a range of on-line blood-alcohol calculators (I used the one on the Canadian Automobile Association site). But keep in mind that you've no guarantees that those numbers will keep you on the right side of the law; they don't account for a myriad of factors such as body type, fatigue, and food consumed.
And then let's throw in the fact that breathalyzers, like most devices, do malfunction and have been shown, for example, to register mouthwash as alcohol.
Add to that the fact that, as civil liberties groups are pointing out, these penalties can be decreed at a roadside police stop, without any charges or an option to argue the case in court. To use a rather tired line, our police become "judge, jury and executioner."
So them's the breaks under our new regime.
As for the new speed and reckless driving restrictions, let's hope you don't get your jollies doing doughnuts in empty parking lots, as I remember doing with a friend's bus driver father on top of Cypress Mountain one snowy night in my teens. Those days are over.
Here's hoping, as with the cell phone restrictions while driving, we just adjust and move on.
