On open-container laws
Matthew Martin
11/07/2014 10:03:00 AM
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Just so you don't think I'm barking at windmills, here's a survey showing that an expert panel of alcohol experts expressed a consensus that open-container laws were highly effective (three out of three stars) at reducing drunk driving, though they rated the evidence as weak.
There is no federal law prohibiting open alcohol containers in vehicles per se, but there are strongly coercive incentives in the transportation budget designed to force states to enact laws prohibiting open alcohol containers in vehicles. 39 states and the District of Columbia have done so, and not all at the same time, so that we have a reasonable instrument for studying the effects of this prohibition. The actual data contradict the expert opinion. Open container laws do not reduce drunk driving.
Let's start with an older paper Chaluopka, Saffer, and Grossman (1993) from the Journal of Legal Studies:
Their results have held up extremely well over the years. Whetton-Goldstein et al (2000) in Accident Analysis and Prevention found essentially no effect of open container laws on traffic fatalities, alcohol-related or otherwise--the correlation was actually positive, but not statistically significant.
More recently, Chang, Wu, and Ying (2012) also in Accident Analysis and Prevention, did find a statistically significant effect of open-container laws on fatalities, especially alcohol-related fatalities:
There was only one study I found that suggested open-container laws have any benefits at all. Markowitz et al (2012) in the German Economic Review looked at the correlation between self-reported victimization for violent crimes and various alcohol-related policies, one of which was the open-container law.
"However, our price effects are only significant at conventional levels when considering the probability of an alcohol- or drug-involved assault. Few conclusions can be drawn for the other alcohol control policies."So despite the statistically significant result for open container laws above, "few conclusions can be drawn" about this policy from this evidence--I agree. Moreover, in their methods section:
"In interpreting the results, we caution that there may be potential endogeneity problems with all the price and alcohol policy variables, to the extent that unobserved, time-varying factors may be in the error term and correlated with both the policies and criminal violence. The fixed effects will help mitigate any time-invariant correlation, and the TCPA also minimizes this potential correlation. Nevertheless, our results should be treated as associations."That is, they caution against a causal interpretation of their results. My guess is the one stray result was merely spurious correlation: non-alcohol violent crime rates were falling over the period they examined, so that people did report fewer victimizations after the laws passed than before, but not as a result of the law itself.
Overall, there's pretty strong evidence in the literature, both old and recent, that open-container laws do not decrease drunk driving, and may actually make it worse. No study I found actually showed any decrease in drunk driving at all as a result of the prohibition, and there is no convincing theory why this should even be expected. The law inconveniences many at no gain and possibly significant cost, so I don't understand why there is so much consensus with the status quo.

Anonymous
4/22/2015 04:02:00 PM
Earth Day, 2015. NH has an open container law but no deposit on containers. Consequently there is a strong incentive toss empties out the window when driving and drinking. Sadly, there is no shortage of blue beer cans along our roadsides. One wonders... At what 'price point' (i.e., deposit) is there a greater incentive to keep an empty in the vehicle vs tossing it out?