3 reasons why a good person does such a bad thing ...
Brian Bazely
Fractional CEO or CFO (that's Chief Franchise Officer). Public speaker with a focus on franchise architecture, culture and leadership.
There are 3 reasons that good people do a horrible thing - consume alcohol or drugs then get behind the wheel of a 2000 lb automobile. After doing tens of thousands of trips as a Designated Driving company, we have a pretty good idea as to why customers who now use the service use to do what no one should.
1. Convenience. The customer needed their car at home tomorrow. There are 125 million trips taken by impaired drivers annually in North America and many of those do so because they have to go to work the following day.
2. Accessibility to options. Let's face it, if you go out for dinner with your husband or wife and have a martini, followed by a bottle of wine that you split, there hasn't been great options for how to transport yourself and your loved one home. You feel fine. You consumed 2 to 3 drinks over the course of a few hours so you expect that you are not legally intoxicated. However, without another option, what else can you do? The nights you head out and drink 6 or 8 drinks you opt for a taxi but on a night like this one, you feel justified in driving home.
3. Cost. This plays a role in every decision we all make. Taking a limo out for a simple dinner on a Friday night is excessive. Taking two taxi cabs (one the night of and one the next night) is not convenient and can be costly.
None of these are acceptable reasons for putting others at risk and for putting your license, yourself or your loved ones at risk. But they are what drives this behaviour.
As a result, we are creating the 3rd generation of our mobile app (MiiRyde) to address these three "reasons". Think for a moment, if a professional designated driver was accessible (order off your smartphone), convenient (minutes away) and if the service was cost effective (generally $5 below the cost of a taxi and always less than 2 taxi rides), wouldn't it just make sense?
Support our campaign for MiiRyde as we try and bring the model we now have operating in 200 communities to cites around the globe. We know how to do it but we can't do it alone. Follow us at the link below and share this story.
Brian Bazely is co-founder of Driverseat