Drunk Driver Flashers

How well would this work? Drunk drivers have to put on their hazard flashers, but then they are allowed to drive. They are still liable for any damage they cause, they are still compelled to obey traffic laws, and so on. Possibly, they must comply with even stricter traffic laws than the ones that normally apply, like a lower speed limit. But 1) everyone knows they are a drunk driver and 2) knowing 1) those drivers anticipate extra scrutiny and force themselves to drive more carefully.

Some obvious problems come to mind. A drunk driver can still be dangerous even if everybody knows they’re a drunk driver. A drunk driver can still fall asleep at the wheel, for instance.  Some drunk drivers may forget to put their flashers on, or some might fail to because they underestimate their own inebriation. Cops might target drunk drivers who are trying to honestly do the right thing; the flashers just make them an easy mark for cops looking to fill a monthly quota. This might discourage some people from using their hazard flashers, knowing that the extra scrutiny isn’t always fair. Some people might drink and drive more often knowing that "drive with flashers on" is an option. Of course some of these objections are in tension with one another. If drunks have no intention of using their flashers on the drive home, the moral hazard problem of being more likely to drive drunk goes away.

Problems aside, compare it to what we currently do. We take a random subset of drunk drivers and impose fairly serious punishments on them. Usually not jail time, but the public tarnishing of their reputation, loss of driving privileges, and a criminal record (that most drunk drivers unfairly evade). To make legal penalties against drunk driving more effective, you have to increase the probability of detection, not just the severity of punishment. I don’t know a good way to do that. But just as harm reduction with respect to drugs requires bringing them out in the open, in a transparent, legal market, maybe reducing the harms of drunk driving require making those drivers more visible. I think we see the same kind of problem with drunk driving sanctions that we see with penalties against drug use. High-severity, low-probability punishments are effective against normal, risk-averse people with a lot to lose, but aren’t quite as effective against people with poor judgment and impulse control problems. We want laws that produce effective deterrents for everyone, not just nice, normal people. We certainly don't want laws whose incentives miss the people who are causing most of the problem!

There is a wicked tension here between “Insisting that a problem behavior never, ever happen!” and “Admitting the reality that it will happen and doing something about it.” Just to be clear, I’m not sure which one is more appropriate in this instance.