KEY POINTS:
Auckland's transport strategy body is supporting a police-backed campaign to cut the blood-alcohol limit for drivers.
The Auckland Regional Land Transport Committee yesterday voted to support a push by the Point Zero Five Group - which includes Alcohol Healthwatch, the police and the Brain Injury Trust - to reduce the limit for adult drivers to 50mg of alcohol for each 100ml of blood.
The existing limit for adults is 80mg, although the legal maximum blood-alcohol concentration for drivers under 20 is 30mg.
Although the Government resisted a similar push several years ago, Alcohol Healthwatch says it is gathering strong support from local bodies, including Auckland and North Shore cities and Rodney District.
But Automobile Association spokesman and transport committee member Simon Lambourne voted no, saying the AA first wanted more information about the blood readings of over-the-limit drivers involved in 1443 crashes in the Auckland region in the five years to the end of last year.
Those accounted for 9 per cent of a total of 16,128 crashes, but Mr Lambourne said after the meeting he suspected many of the miscreants would have been well over the limit.
The highest proportion was in Manukau City, where 12 per cent of the territory's 3151 crashes involved excess alcohol.
Waitemata road policing manager Superintendent John Kelly, whose beat includes Auckland's motorways, acknowledged to his fellow committee members that it was unusual for the police to advocate a change to the law, rather than simply enforcing it.
But they were making an exception because, after starting to win "the battle against drink-driving" in the late 1990s, they were losing it again.
"Make your own conclusions, but something happened in about 1999, when the drinking age was lowered."
Drink-drive prosecutions had jumped from about 22,000 to 23,000 a year in the late 1990s to about 33,000 now. Crashes to which alcohol contributed in 2006 claimed 109 lives, and caused 2324 injuries, of which 556 were serious, Mr Kelly said.
That put pressure on the public health system, lengthening hospital waiting lists for everyone seeking elective surgery.
The number of liquor outlets in metropolitan Auckland had grown meanwhile to about 3500, making alcohol cheaper for youngsters to buy and putting pressure on retailers to stay open longer.
"With territorial local authorities handing out licences willy-nilly and the higher number of outlets having to stay open longer to make a profit, we have created a problem on our own back-doorsteps."
Cheaper cars had also increased the mobility of young people, who were learning to drive at the same time as learning to drink, in contrast to the traditional practice of learning to drive before reaching the drinking age.
He denied that the lower limit would put an unreasonable damper on people's social lives.
"I still think the best way to drive is stone-cold sober, but it won't stop you having a glass or two with dinner."
Researchers had found that people above the 50mg alcohol threshold tended to lose the ability to decide not to get behind the wheel.
"So we get people too drunk to make these decisions before we ask them to make them."
Countries with a 50mg limit included most members of the European Union and Australia, where a 18 per cent reduction in fatal crashes had been reported in Queensland.
Taking international crash statistics into account, Alcohol Healthwatch had estimated that 14 to 72 lives could be saved each year by reducing the drink-drive limit, and 640 to 1280 injuries prevented.
A Manukau City councillor on the committee, David Collings, said local bodies were prevented by the liquor legislation from blocking licence applications and "we don't hand them out willy-nilly".
