If South Carolina Can Mandate Liquor Liability Insurance, Why Can’t Texas?
Good news, South Carolinians! Legislators in your state passed a law in June requiring bars and restaurants that sell alcohol past 5 p.m. to have liability insurance policies of at least $1 million. Under the new law, these businesses will need to show proof of such a policy before they are able to obtain or...
“Drinking then Driving” Isn’t the Same as Drunk Driving.
Time and again, I've talked about how dangerous drivers can be when they've had too much to drink. To make matters worse, some bars and restaurants are willing to help them reach that perilous state, ignoring dram shop laws. It's an insidious problem and it seems to get worse every year. Of course we'd never...
The Worst DUI Week of the Year Is Why We Need Dram Shop Laws.
Independence Day is statistically the most DUI-accident prone day of the year. People don't drink hard just on the day itself, though--it has become a week-long celebration for some. All that alcohol creates far more serious risks than the occasional finger-flaying lesson about fireworks, and yet some unscrupulous bars are comfortable with over-serving it to...
DUI or Don’t We: Drunk Driving in Amarillo is Worse than You Think
A recent drunk driving accident in Amarillo caught my attention and led me to research the relevant accident statistics for the area. As it turns out, Amarillo packs something even more alarming than hubcap-size steaks: an inordinate number of drunk-driving crashes given its overall population. The Accident That Prompted Me to Look Into The Numbers...
There Are More Daytime Drunk Drivers Than We Realized.
It's widely understood that the hours of midnight to 4 a.m. are a risky time to be on the road. It's not a baseless assumption; in Texas, our roads see an unfortunate number of drunk drivers taking to the streets around the time of last call. Indeed, this phenomenon is so well appreciated that most...
Are Passengers “Assuming the Risk” When They Ride with Drunk Drivers?
Everyone can probably agree that riding with a drunk driver is dangerous. However a passenger may have ended up in the vehicle (not knowing that the driver was intoxicated, or maybe even just drunk themselves) there's a significant measure of danger in sharing it with a drunk person behind the wheel. If we were to...
Texans Fighting Wrong-Way Driving With Smarter Signs
One such set of lines is the ones that divide the lanes of the road. Motor vehicles are obviously extremely dangerous, especially when operated incorrectly. The law does what it can to make sure people more or less understand this fact and keep it in mind when operating a vehicle, but drivers still make bad...
Who Pays When a Drunk Driver Hits a Pedestrian?
I realize that we have touched on this topic many times before, but there are still many people who believe that liquor liability, or dram shop, laws unfairly punish bars for the behavior of drunk drivers. The common perception is that a person goes out, decides to drink too much, hurts themselves, and then turns...
Austin PD Miss The Point By Blaming Reflectors Instead of Drunk Driver
For all their purported benefits to the environment and individual health, bicycles retain something of a bad rap as a means of transportation. Some of that may stem from their slightly-ambiguous status as a vehicle (should they stay on the sidewalk? Should they be in the road? In places without bike lanes, how much of...
Recognizing The Very Human Victims of Texas Drunk Driving Accidents
I wish I wasn't able to say this, but Texas endures far too many drunk driving accidents for us to be able to write about them all. In 2015, TxDOT reported 960 fatalities related to driving while intoxicated (almost 3 every single day), which unfortunately is too many to fully chronicle and examine. Furthermore, that...
Do Southlake and Grapevine, TX Have a Drunk Driving Problem?
A law-abiding bar won't serve a patron past a certain point, but it doesn't require stumbling and blackouts to reach the legal point of impairment. After reaching .08 blood-alcohol content (BAC), Texans can't get behind the wheel without breaking the law, and yet the statistics gathered by the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA)...
Texas Dram Shop Law Helps the Victims of Drunk Driving
For many people, an understanding of dram shop law begins and ends with the phrase "person sues bar." Many people have made it a point to object to this idea, considering it unfair that an establishment that serves alcohol should be held accountable for doing what they're paid to do--serving a patron. Without looking any...
A Quick Refresher on Temporal Proximity and Dram Shop Law
Few articles that we write are more contentious than those that touch on the topic of dram shop law, or liquor liability. These provisions of Texas law hold bars accountable for their role in drunk-driving accidents. Rather than spend time getting into the merits of such laws, I'll simply say that dram shop is the...
How Drunk is a .32 BAC and How Dangerous Is It?
The news is often full of people who seem to have disregarded the maximum legal blood-alcohol content (BAC) of .08, drinking so much they violate not just the law, but common sense itself. Their tox-screen results suggest that many people arrested for intoxication have a BAC in the range of .15 to .30--well over the...
Seeing the Signs: How We Spot Possible Dram Shop Accidents
Drunk driving appears to be a blind spot in our national consciousness. I cannot think of a single person, no matter how contrarian, who could compellingly argue that this practice has positive benefits. It's dangerous, it's illegal, and it flies in the face of common sense. I doubt I need to be worried about some...
Intoxicated Driving Study: Harris County, TX and DUI Crashes
The first reported drunk driving accident in the United States happened in 1904. Automobiles were still very new technology when these matters started to arise, and yet similar incidents started to be published with increasing frequency. Further evidence that people love to drink in exotic situations and locales, as though we needed any more confirmation....
A Quick Refresher on Texas Dram Shop Law
Texas dram shop cases are seldom cut and dried. It's an important element of tort law; after all, bars and restaurants that over-serve their customers deserve to be held accountable for putting profits before safety. While the intoxicated individual most certainly owns a significant share of the responsibility--failing to observe his or her own limits,...
The Case of Caden Nieneker: How Do Texas Dram Shop Laws Relate to House Parties?
On the surface, house parties tend to seem like a great idea. However, they can have downsides: With less room it's harder to escape a boring conversation, the bathroom line can be ridiculous, some people don't know when to stop drinking (often with disastrous results), and depending on your guest list there's a risk of...
The “Bad” Truck Driver in a Chehalis, WA I-5 Truck Accident
On January 6, 2017, there were two accidents on Interstate 5 in Chehalis, WA. According to reports, on the southbound side of the highway, an SUV collided with a pedestrian who was attempting to cross the road. In that accident, the 15-year-old pedestrian was killed. Naturally, this accident slowed traffic in both directions. A short...
Walk the Line: Pedestrians and the Texas Transportation Code
Texas is a pretty driving-intensive state, given its span of almost 270,000 square miles. Texans are used to sort of sprawling out horizontally, which means a lot of vehicular travel to get from living space to work space to activities and leisure destinations. That said, we're not without our share of pedestrians. They're not as...
