A free app designed to help drivers avoid a ‘morning after’ drink drive conviction has achieved more that 1,700 downloads since being launched earlier this year.
The app, produced as part of the ‘Morning After’ drink drive campaign, has achieved 693 downloads from the Google Play store and 1,011 downloads from the iTunes store, in the three month period April – June 2015.
The app, called the ‘Morning After Calculator’, presents a wide range of alcoholic drinks under the headings ‘beer & lager’, ‘cider’, ‘wine & champagne’, ‘spirits & alcopops’ and ‘cocktails’.
The user enters the drinks he or she is consuming (or has consumed) and the app calculates roughly when the alcohol will have passed through their body. It allows one hour for each unit of alcohol, plus an additional hour for the alcohol to enter the bloodstream, and then rounds up the calculation to the nearest half hour.
The app bases its calculation from the time the user stops drinking, not when they start drinking. While accepting this is perhaps over-cautious, the Morning After team says it would “rather be safe than sorry”.
The ‘hours before driving’ calculation is not based on any drink drive limit – it is the length of time when the alcohol in the drinks the person has consumed is likely to have passed through their body.
Sally Bartrum, Morning After project manager, said: “The app is not intended to help people work out how much they can drink on a night out before driving home. And it won’t help anyone arrested for drink driving.
“It simply enables people to calculate roughly when it will be safe for them to drive the morning after drinking alcohol. And it can help calculate roughly when to stop drinking alcohol if you have to drive the following morning.
“However, if you are drinking any amount of alcohol on a night out – even one drink – you should leave the car at home and make alternative arrangements.”
The Morning after campaign website continues to receive significant numbers of visits; in June 2015 the site received 27,595 visits from 19,742 visitors.
The Morning After team has recently unveiled its 2015 summer campaign which encourages people to download and use the new app.
The campaign and app are available for road safety teams to utilise – contact Sally Bartrum on 01379 650112 for more details, including costs.