It has been solved in other countries, but the U.S. is ok with the right people driving while drunk so has decided to not solve it.
For example in Norway you can drink 1/4 of the amount that you can do in CA while driving, you get jail penalties at .05 and right from the start at .02 the fine is one month salary, meaning even if you are rich you will pay a meaningful amount. So in general Norwegians don’t drink and drive.
Out of curiosity, how do they determine the fine for people without a salary (students, retirees, self-employed, disabled, otherwise out of work, etc.)? Social safety net amount? Fixed minimum?
There is a minimum, it starts at ~$700 for 0.02 BAC. It is also possible to use less than a month salary for people with low income and/or high degree debt due to children etc. The intention of the law is that everyone faces meaningful penalties.
In my opinion, drunk driving is solved by city planning.
It's a fight and a half to convince most Americans that it's actually realistic for suburbs or even rural communities to have functioning public transit and walkable distances, even though towns and suburbs built that way exist in America (rarely, but they do exist).
Rural towns with functioning transit and walkable distances include a laundry list of college towns.
Suburbs with these features include a laundry list of inner ring and street car suburbs built before widespread automobile ownership.
Nothing grinds my gears more than hearing someone say "people need to stop moving into my town, the traffic is getting ridiculous." It's not the people that's the problem, it's the unsustainable forms of development that are just seen as normal.
That's a Scandinavian thing I love as well. I remeber that a Nokia CEO once paid the equivilant of a new Porsche 911 for a speeding ticket in Helsinki.
On the other hand, I like it when my tickets are basically only table change for me. Egoistics aside, scaling tjose fines with income would be much fairer than a flat fee.
Kind of gives police departments justification for profiling wealthier people. The country already has a serious problem with policing for profit, and you can bet it will only get worse if they can issue $10k+ tickets to individuals.
As it stands now, if you get a BS ticket from one of these towns[1], you're out a few hundred bucks. Scale it up to a month's wage. In a lot of these places, you can't even get a fair trial because the local court is in on the action.
California solved this by making speed limits not specified explicitly by the CVC unenforceable if they aren't backed up by a traffic survey. This will still result in places where the speed limit drops and local enforcement may try to profit from the drop. However, it stops local governments from reducing the speed limit arbitrarily for the purpose of creating a revenue stream.
Towns trying to juice out money from drivers happen at very least in Italy as well which is not Northern Europe at all.
At least in NE this scales up for the wealthy as well. In Italy's case if you are rich you can just ignore speed limits (to a certain degree, driving licenses have points and you lose some of them when caught doing something illegal).
Right now, due to probation fees and interest, it's in the police's best interest to ticket poor people who pay more and cannot fight back. Having the police target wealthier people is strictly better, since they have the power and incentive to fight back against BS
But we should also take steps to fight policing for profit.
in most us states, 0.08 is the "per se" limit. you can absolutely be convicted of DUI (or whatever it's called in that jurisdiction) below that BAC based on the testimony of the officer. at or above 0.08 just makes it automatic (you can only argue the validity of the test itself).
For example in Norway you can drink 1/4 of the amount that you can do in CA while driving, you get jail penalties at .05 and right from the start at .02 the fine is one month salary, meaning even if you are rich you will pay a meaningful amount. So in general Norwegians don’t drink and drive.