Wow is it true that driving under the influence #DUI in the USA is an average of $6,500 for the first offence!? That would likely discourage folks from trying that as I think #SouthAfrica is probably a good 10 or 20 times less...
See https://twocents.lifehacker.com/how-much-a-dui-can-cost-you-1846086998
@danie10 in the UK (for alcohol, drugs or both) its normally at least a 1 year ban from driving, a fine, license points (or revocation for new drivers in probation period) as well as massively increased insurance premiums for 11 years afterwards, so its a similarly expensive penalty (but this only started being the case from around the late 2000s as testing and ANPR enforcement became more effective)
But then in the UK the enforcement is rather lenient - what I've been seeing in the pubs before lockdown, plenty of people drive after a few pints and they never get caught. You need to actually cause a collision or drive in totally suspicious way to get tested.
Which in my opinion is a reasonable attitude as in Eastern Europe "surprise checks" are common, yet don't really stop drunk drivers while mostly driving bribery.
in TVP and Metpol areas traffic cops are often busy with motorway incidents and other crashes (used to listen loads on the radio scanner in pre-Airwave days) - but CCTV and ANPR are used a lot these days as well as road layouts - if you are drunk, it is difficult to avoid clouting kerbs at the points deliberately put in to narrow the road and prevent speeding, also easy to end up going through a bus gate or other restricted area in town (which usually has ANPR)
On my first day after I moved to UK in 2013 the company who hired me did me a favour by renting me a car from the airport to a hotel in central Reading. The highway was fine (remember, driving on the other side for the 1st time), but then the center of Reading is rather terrible system of bus lanes, one-way streets and narrow surprise turns, so I must have triggered all these alerts a dozen of times - that was a nightmare... 😂
@kravietz @danie10
I think the bus gate and ANPR enforcement is fairly new, but Reading's road layout has been notorious for 40+ years (it was already over capacity by the early 1980s and unusually has many of the main roads still running right through the centre of the town rather than being bypassed...)