Data Analysis on The Efficacy of Alcohol Prohibition
Do counties which outlaw the sale of alcohol decrease impaired driving accidents?
Motivation
There are reports which claim that counties which outlaw the sale of alcohol have a higher proportion of alcohol related crime and traffic accidents caused by impaired drivers. Some theories suggest that this increase in drunk driving incidents cases occurs because residents will drive to bars in neighboring counties and drive home drunk.
This analysis will examine counties in the state of Arkansas, which has a high number of dry counties. We will attempt to answer the following
- Do dry counties have more DUIs per capita?
- When are these accidents more likely to occur?
- Is there another correlating factor which could explain the rates we see in each county?
This analysis is an independent fact check on claims which the ordinary person does not bother to verify. It shows how anyone can openly source a report using public tools. More importantly, this project is important because it demonstrates how we can use publicly available data provided by the government to determine whether certain legislature is more effective or harmful.
Data Sources
Census Demographic Data
We begin by collecting census demographic data by every county in Arkansas in order to create a base dataset. This gives us a complete list of all 75 county, and it provides us with population variables which we allow us to characterize each county and determine the proportion of drunk driving accidents per capita.
We will use the census API to request Data Profiles from the American Community Survey (ACS) to retrieve population estimates for several characteristics such as age, sex, race, and housing units for the year of 2019. This is retrieved in json format.
Variable names for these characteristics can be found here.
Alcoholic Beverage Control — Rules and Regulations Data
In order to retrieve a list of wet and dry counties, we must go to the Alcohol Beverage Control’s (ABC) page on Rules and Regulation on Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration website. Since there is no convenient download file, we will scrape the table on “Wet Counties with Their Respective Exceptions” which 42 counties without no alcohol prohibition and exceptions within each county.
Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) Traffic Accident Dataset
“The Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) dataset is as of December 18, 2020, and is part of the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT)/Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) National Transportation Atlas Database (NTAD). This current dataset is for FARS 2019 data.”
“FARS is a census of fatal motor vehicle crashes with a set of data files documenting all qualifying fatalities that occurred within the 50 States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico since 1975.”
We will use the API provided at by data-usdot.opendata.arcgis.com to retrieve the FARS dataset for the state of Arkansas. No documentation is available, but we are provided with an API query generator which allows us to filter this data to the state of Arkansas.
This API will provide us with a dataset which includes 467 traffic accidents in the year of 2019 for the state of Arkansas. It retrieves a json which wraps the table data under the [‘features’] key. Notable variables for each traffic accident include county, time and date, environmental conditions, and the number of drunk drivers.
