The Road Safety Act had a dramatic impact on Britain’s drivers. In the three months after it took effect, traffic fatalities dropped 23 percent in Britain. In the first year of the act, the percentage of drivers killed who were legally drunk dropped from 27 percent to 17 percent.
These general trends mask several specific changes in British drinking practices. Research showed that the act did not significantly change the amount people in Britain drank. Rather, the act seems to have affected a very narrow slice of behavior—the custom of driving to and from pubs, especially on weekend nights. After the act took effect, many regular customers took to walking to pubs. Pub owners raised a considerable outcry, and a number of less conveniently located pubs closed.
Unfortunately, the successes of the act were relatively short-lived. Within a few years, traffic fatalities again began to climb. By 1973 the percentage of drivers killed who were drunk was back to its pre-1967 level. By 1975, for reasons still unknown, this percentage had risen to 36 percent, considerably above what it was before the act.
Research has also shown that efforts to impose tougher penalties in America have not had much effect. In part, this seems to be caused by people’s belief that “it can’t happen to me.” “After all,” Reed observes, “those who currently drive drunk are not deterred by the small risk of a very severe penalty—accidental death.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK217455/
People gonna people.