Saint Patrick’s Day, an Irish holiday celebrating the nominal St. Patrick, is typically a day of fun and drinking. However, the celebratory mood can quickly be ruined with a drunken car accident.
According to trafficsafetymarketing.gov, on St. Patrick’s Day in 2023, drivers between the ages of 21 and 34 were responsible for 35% of alcohol induced fatal car accidents, the highest percentage that night.
Sergeant Scott Geeting and Public Safety Officer Nicholas Herman of the Oregon State University Department of Public Safety both explained how the DPS tries to ensure driving safety by putting out messages on their reader board to encourage safe driving.
“We can put (a message) on a reader board in a high-traffic area so people are seeing that and kind of getting that constant reminder,” Herman said.
The DPS also releases messages regarding safety on the road using posts on their social media, the captions of which they like to tie to a holiday theme. Herman referenced one of the captions written for a St. Patrick’s Day post, “Get a sober ride home to your pot of gold.”
Geeting and Herman said another way the DPS tries to prevent drunken car accidents on St. Patrick’s Day is by patrolling the campus and nearby areas for signs of impaired drivers to prevent an accident before it occurs.
“If you’ve intervened and stopped an impaired driver, the law of average says it’s a lot less likely there’s going to be an accident now,” Geeting said.
According to Geeting and Herman, the DPS also tries to encourage students to drive safely throughout the year with the help of presentations. They hold these presentations at times when they feel that drunk driving is more likely to occur.
“We had one where there was Mario Kart racing with drunk goggles on just to give a little bit of a vibe,” Herman said.
Geeting and Herman explained there are plenty of resources on-campus and beyond available for students to help make sure they get home safely. These resources include public services like the Beaver Bus as well as rideshare service apps such as Saferide, Uber and Lyft.
One detail Geeting and Herman stressed about driving safety was making sure your designated driver –the person who volunteers to drive a group home after a night out– does not drink.
“A common thing I see is people will get a designated driver, but then the designated driver has a few and it’s like ‘That’s not really what the designated driver is for,’” Geeting said.
Geeting and Herman both said the best way to ensure safe driving on St. Patrick’s Day is by planning, making sure you’re well rested before you drive and avoiding driving under the influence of any substance —not just alcohol.
“It’s not just their lives that are at stake when people make the decision to get behind the wheel intoxicated; it’s everyone else around them,” Geeting said. “That is the real danger: harming somebody else and completely changing the trajectory of not only your own life, but somebody else’s.”