Georgia’s drunk driving numbers are down and my faith in humanity is up (slightly)

If you’ve been reading this column for any length of time, you’ve probably noticed that I have a few recurring themes. Character matters. The South can do better. And drunk driving is one of the most selfish, preventable, and inexcusable things a person can do in a world where you can summon a sober stranger to your exact GPS coordinates in under four minutes using a device you carry in your pocket.

I’ve written about drunk driving the way some columnists write about their fantasy football teams — with obsessive frequency, mounting frustration, and the sneaking suspicion that nobody is actually listening.

So you can imagine my surprise when somebody apparently was.

The Part Where Georgia Was Embarrassing Itself

For a while there, Georgia had developed what I can only describe as a cultural shrug toward drunk driving. The numbers were going the wrong direction in a way that was genuinely alarming. The state recorded 507 alcohol-impaired driving deaths in 2022 — a number that had more than doubled since 2013. Doubled. As in, we looked at the problem, thought about it, and decided to make it worse.

I wrote about this. My colleagues wrote about this. We pointed out that in a state where you can get a Chick-fil-A delivered to your front door, there was absolutely no logistical reason to get behind the wheel after drinking. The response from a portion of the population was essentially, “Hold my beer.” Which, given the context, was not the idiom anyone needed them to be reaching for.

The attitude was what got me. It wasn’t ignorance — nobody in the year of our lord 2026 is unaware that drunk driving is dangerous and illegal. It was apathy. A collective “eh” directed at the safety of every other person on the road. And for a while, a distressing number of Georgians seemed perfectly fine with that arrangement. When we would cover stories about teachers and principals getting DUIs, a certain segment of commenters would defend the drunk drivers. That was disturbing to me, until I realized that most of the people who comment on news articles are intoxicated at the time.

The Part Where I Eat a Little Crow — Happily

Here’s something I don’t get to write very often: Georgia got better.

According to a new analysis of federal traffic data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Georgia recorded 176 alcohol-impaired driving deaths in 2024, down from 259 in 2023. That is a 32% drop. That is 83 fewer empty seats at dinner tables. Eighty-three families who did not get a knock on the door. Eighty-three funerals that didn’t happen.

Georgia’s improvement ranked seventh among all states showing a drop in drunk driving deaths, and our share of national drunk driving deaths fell from 4.33% to 3.21%.

For context, neighboring South Carolina — which had similar numbers to Georgia in 2023 didn’t experience a drop anywhere near Georgia’s 32%. South Carolina only managed a 4.7% drop over the same period. We didn’t just improve. We improved significantly.

I want to sit with that for a moment, because I am a person who has spent considerable column inches operating under the assumption that humanity is on a slow but steady march toward doom from our collective foolishness. This data is forcing me to reconsider. Not entirely — one isolated piece of new data does not a total turnaround make — but enough to acknowledge that people can, in fact, learn things and change their behavior. I find this both encouraging and mildly inconvenient for my general worldview.

A Brief and Unscientific Theory

Now, I’ll be honest with you. I’ve been turning this over in my head, trying to figure out what caused the spike in the first place — because understanding the disease helps you appreciate the cure.

My working theory is that the dramatic rise in drunk driving deaths was, at least in part, a pandemic-era behavioral freakout. You remember those. This was the same period of American history in which otherwise rational adults paid $47,000 over asking price for a three-bedroom ranch house because someone on the internet told them real estate only goes up, and in which the entire nation apparently decided that the most important thing to stockpile before a respiratory virus arrived was toilet paper. Not food. Not medicine. Toilet paper. Forty-eight rolls per household, minimum, or you were clearly not taking this seriously.

People were doing strange things. They were making strange decisions. They were stress-eating, stress-drinking, stress-and buying houses in markets that made no financial sense. The pandemic scrambled something in the collective brain, and for a few years, a lot of people were operating on a frequency best described as “mildly unhinged.”

If that’s what happened, then the good news is that the freakout appears to be subsiding. The toilet paper is back on the shelves. The housing market has calmed down to merely unreasonable instead of deranged. And apparently, fewer Georgians are getting behind the wheel drunk. Progress, people. This is what it looks like.

Some Thank Yous Are in Order

To Georgia residents who changed their habits, made the call, handed over the keys, or simply decided that getting home alive, and letting everyone else get home alive, was worth the inconvenience of a rideshare: thank you. Genuinely. I know gratitude isn’t my most practiced mode, but 83 people are alive who might not have been, and that’s worth setting aside the cynicism for a paragraph.

To Georgia law enforcement, who spent the last several years making it increasingly clear that drunk driving would be treated as the serious offense it is rather than a minor inconvenience to be slept off: thank you. You did the unglamorous, thankless work of pulling people over, running checkpoints, and making the roads less deadly.

And to the local journalists who covered this problem relentlessly, who put names and faces and statistics to what could have remained an abstract issue, who refused to let the public look away from what was happening on Georgia’s roads: thank you. Journalism that draws attention to a problem and then gets to report on its improvement is journalism doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.

Georgia, you did something right. I’m proud of you. Don’t make me regret saying that.

Now, let’s see what we can do about health care, literacy, and education.

I’ll be watching.