Since the Interior Minister, Manuel Valls, revealed the law was temporarily suspended there have been a number of investigations into the actual road death statistics. It is interesting to look at how the French breathalyser law has affected road deaths in France and what we can learn from this.
Mr Valls stated that he wanted to wait until seeing a report from France’s Conseil National de la Sécurité Routière (their road safety authority) before making his final decision. He announced that the number of road deaths in France dropped by a little over 8 percent in 2012, which was actually the lowest amount of road fatalities since 1948. It’s worthy of note that this is the year that France actually started their record keeping too.
So, we can deduce from this that it has definitely had a positive effect on the awareness of drink driving and this is something we feel France is sorely in need of. The method of implementation was poor but this was never going to be easy. Motorists found it hard to buy the disposable test kits at first and stores across the country were often out of stock, initially. Even manuafacturers of the kits couldn’t keep up with the spike in demand.