6 - SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

Four underage drinking prevention programs that began in the mid-1990s were examined, and their impact on surrogates of alcohol-related crashes estimated. The programs and their locations were:

  • Safe and Sober Youth (SASY) - Chesterfield County, Virginia
  • Project Extra Mile (PEM) - Omaha, Nebraska
  • Salt Lake City Underage Drinking Prevention Project (SLCUDPP) -
    Salt Lake County, Utah
  • Travis County Underage Drinking Prevention Program (TCUDPP) - Travis County, Texas

Three of the programs (SASY, PEM, and TCUDPP) emphasized public in-formation and education (PI&E) strategies, with the PEM program also including an active legislative component and an enforcement component. None of these programs was found to have any impact on surrogates of alcohol-related crashes involving underage drivers.

The fourth program (SLCUDPP) emphasized enforcement of laws prohibiting sales of alcoholic beverages to underage youth, supported by youth peer pro-grams. A possible increasing impact, starting about a year after program initiation, was found for that program. The number of nighttime crashes involving an underage driver gradually decreased in the program’s jurisdiction (Salt Lake County, Utah), with the decrease amounting to about 20 crashes per month (about 14%) at three years after program initiation (p=0.10).

These findings suggest that, to have a highway safety impact on the target group in the short-range future, PI&E alone is insufficient and that initiatives aimed at reducing the availability of alcoholic beverages, and/or at deterring driving after drinking, may be necessary. Similar findings with respect to drinking-drivers in general have been reported elsewhere (Jones and Lacey, 2001; Wagenaar, Murray, and Toomey, 2000).

We note that positive effects other than reduced crashes may have occurred in the three jurisdictions that had no significant effect on the crash measures examined here. Such effects include, for example, reductions in youth drinking and development of a community-based organization to address the problem. Further research will be needed to determine the extent of any such other effects. Also, it is possible that the available data were not sufficient for detecting a traffic-crash impact in some of the jurisdictions studied, especially in light of the small number of youth-involved traffic crashes that occurred in some jurisdictions.