If somebody was riding a bicycle or horse drunk, could they be ticketed for drunk driving?

This is probably a really stupid answer, but I remember an episode of Three’s Company where Jack brewed some homemade beer and got arrested for riding his bike. I have heard indeed that riding a bike, a tractor, a riding lawnmower, basicaly anything “mechanical” that moves will get you a DUI if you are drunk. I don’t know specifically about a horse though. And I would use one caveat here. Each state sets its own driving laws, so it almost definitely depends from state to state (unless all 50 states just happen to consider bikes and/or horses to be subject to DUI laws).

Yes. I know people who have received tickets in both cases (horseback, bicycle).

Found an interesting quote from a judge ruling on DUI for folks in wheelchairs…
—

Judge Peyton Heyslop said the case raised numerous questions about fairness.

“While sitting at home in a wheelchair taking prescribed medication, a person could be charged and convicted of DUI,” said Hyslop. “A wheelchair-bound person overindulging in alcohol at a wedding, in a restaurant, at a professional football game or in the sanctity of her own home would also be subject to arrest for DUI.”

—
Poor folks bound to their horses who must drink Everclear for medicinal purposes in the sanctity of their own home are on their own, I guess.

Absolutely. Stick with a skateboard.

I read about a man arrested for drunk ‘driving’ while on a riding lawn mower.

Yes indeed, conducting any type of vehicle while intoxicated is a punishable offense in many areas. I know of people who have gotten drunk biking tickets.

yup just a couple months ago this guy was given a ticket for riding his bike drunk in California.

You can get BUIs (or biking under the influence) here in Memphis too.

Yes, in Germany it is quite common to be pulled over for a DUI on a bike, not sure about horses specifically but bikes for sure.
I recommend leaving your licence at home and then telling them you don’t own a car licence. Works in most cases, at least in Germany.

The law has a lot of little technicalities it can get you on. Like did you know that in most states, if you performed in a porno, you could be arrested for prostitution, because you are indeed engaging in sex for compensation? Another fun little fact you can share with your roommate!

Certainly could get ticketed or arrested for public intoxication.

My friends mom told me about a friend of her, thinking he would take the bicycle because he was drunk. he then drove out of the road and broke his arm, got to the hospital and got a fine of 1000NOK (~$100)

It depends on where you live, but in norway, no. Except for this weird story lol

A friend of mine crashed her bike and broke her clavicle. She was taken to the ER but before she got in the ambulance the police cited her for drunk bike riding.

Here’s an insight on equestrian drunkenness.

The general idea is, the horse generally knows where he’s going. Getting the horse drunk would be another story.

Bicycling citations are pretty much de rigeur.

Yes. In Davis you can legitimately get a BUI (biking under the unfluence). I know several people who have gotten them before.

From my understanding of my local law, either riding a bicycle or horse while intoxicated could result in a public intoxication ticket, but not drunk driving. The only way an officer in the area would give a PI ticket for a bike or horse would be if you were acting in a stupid or dangerous manor. Not many people would be riding a horse drunk through town these days though… so I think it would be more likely to get a PI ticket for the bicycle situation.

yes but that law should be repealed.especially riding a horse drunk! thats just the natural way to ride a horse… ask a cowboy or a knight

Hahaah, ncie madcapper. If thats’ the case, I’d be completely fit to ride a hores right now.

hee hee, you said “hores”

Oops.. horse*

riiiiiiiiight.

hee hee hee Freudian slip

It’s a leading cause of cycling deaths, just as it’s a leading cause of driving deaths.

http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/pubs/344.pdf

The article referenced above states that in about 1 in 6 bicycling fatalities, the rider had a BAC of 0.10 or more.

So yes, you can get a ticket if you ride drunk. And you deserve it.

@Ichthe – re “deserving” a ticket for drunk biking, I have a slightly different opinion.

I’m all in favor of letting natural selection take its course. So, if you do something like get on a bike when you’re drunk and then try to ride in traffic or in a situation where you should really have control of your faculties, and you pull in front of a speeding car, I just think that’s thinning out the herd. Let’s face it, when a car collides with a bike, the driver ain’t gonna die, unless his ticker was just looking for that one thing to make it explode.

Now, the reason I don’t apply the same logic to drunk driving of a motorized vehicle, something which I think should get you a damn sight more than just a ticket to be perfectly honest, when you’re riding a bike you’re just endangering your OWN life, when you’re in a car, you are pretty much behind the wheel of a huge metallic weapon. Ergo, you are risking the lives of everyone else on the road with you. I find the morals written within our penal code to be a bit out of whack with my own standards, and hey, maybe I’m the crazy one. But here’s where I draw my moral standards:

1) If you endanger your own life, that’s your right, I would therefore not have any laws against suicide, not wearing seatbelts, not wearing safety helmets, etc….your choice if you want to be stupid, and good riddance when you’re gone from the gene pool.

2) If you endanger someone else’s life, and by this I mean “purposefully”...which is not to say that you intellectualize the fact that you are about to endanger the lives of others by getting behind the wheel of a car when drunk, but based on the fact that the knowledge is readily available that drunk driving = endangerment of lives and therefore that makes the act “purposeful”, then essentially you are acknowledging that you might kill someone “accidentally”. To my way of thinking, that is no different than “attempted murder”. Though you are not making a decision to attempt to kill a particular individual, you are making a decision which you know could result in the unintentional death of another individual, and therefore, you are intending to act in a way that could bring about the death of another person, and are doing so purposefully as you have the knowledge to prevent yourself from so doing. Ergo, I would consider drunk driving to be a crime along the lines of attempted murder.

3) I draw no moralistic distinction between attempted murder and actual murder. Though the results are dramatically different, the intention of the criminal is the same in either case. I fail to see how it is a worse crime (I understand it is a worse result/consequence) if say you point a gun at someone and pull the trigger with the intention of murdering that person, if you actually HIT the person, but not if you MISS (but our legal system allows you to be considered far less of a criminal just because you have bad aim?). Ergo, I would liken drunk drivers to attempted murderers, and I would liken attempted murderers to murderers.

It is my opinion that anyone who willfully engages in an act for which the information is readily available so that the person should reasonably know that the act in which they are engaging could bring about the death of another person, then intellectually, these people are the same as murderers and should be executed. Fuck you, one strike and you’re dead.

Now, I would not apply that standard in a blanket fashion to everyone right now, our society has been conditioned to think that hey, everyone makes mistakes, everyone deserves a second chance, we liken drunken driving to a fuck up, and only when it becomes habitual do we really seek to do anything about it (though often in ways that are so innefectual that I could readily find a handful of examples where a drunk driver has killed someone after having been stopped 20+ times in the past for DUI). I believe we should mount a huge education campaign to say look, in 10 years, this is going to become the law of the land, you drink, you drive, you die. Break our permissive treatment of people who get away with not caring about human life under the guise of a slight problem with responsibility.

I’d say that would be harsh, but it would be just, and it would result in far fewer unintended deaths, and far more of the variety of the drunken bicycle rider….natural selection helped along by mankind!

OK, I’ll get off my soapbox.

dalepetrie, you raise some interesting points.

The opposing viewpoint would be this:
Hospitals don’t turn down people with no insurance. If someone was to put themselves in a coma (by drunkenly colliding with a car), this means that there’s suddenly a huge drain on the taxpayers to help pay for this person over the course of the next 30 years.

I actually agree with your viewpoint to some extent but for your arguments to be valid, we would have to go up to each injured drunk person who had just collided with something and shoot them several times in the head. This is the only way death can be assured.

If taxpayers really wanted to nip this problem off at the onset, they would put their money into free night-time taxis (or similar) for drunks. This proactively solves a large part of the problem. This makes your fiscal responsibility much less then if you were to use taxpayer dollars to try and clean up the mess after a non-fatal drunk driving accident.

I’d completely support providing free breathalizer kits to anyone who needed them (or perhaps installed at the exits to all drinking establishments, with a requirement that the drivers BAC be tested before they leave). I would couple this with funding for a mass transit system specifically designed to take people home if they were intoxicated. I would fund it by an increase in the tax on alcohol served in drinking establishments. I would not give completely free taxis to everyone however, it seems to me if you can afford to spend $100 at the bar getting shitfaced, you can afford 20 bucks for a cab to drive your drunk ass home. People who go out, get drunk and then drive home because they ‘can’t afford’ a cab are full of shit. And hey, I’d have no problem with an instantaneous death penalty if it could be demonstrated that you were driving a vehicle, and that your BAC was over the legal limit…be it firing squad, lethal injection, hanging, the electric chair or whatever, just do society a favor. It would take some time to go from where we are to where we ought to be, but it could be done arguably in a way that would save the taxpayer money.

@Dale, another issue here is, you can’t presume that a drunk cyclist is no threat to anyone other than himself. Motorists generally do not like to hit objects, living or otherwise, and tend to swerve in order to avoid doing so. What if a motorist swerves into oncoming traffic to avoid a drunken rider and ends up killing someone else?

A second point: cyclists can and do collide with pedestrians and other cyclists. A good friend of mine has had multiple surgeries on his leg, and still can’t walk straight, because of a collision with another rider who, although he wasn’t drunk, recklessly took him down.

If you don’t ride a bike, you don’t see these things. I do ride a bike, and I see way too much of it.

Well then, we balance the risk to society. I would say though that even though there is a “what if” factor to drunk biking, I haven’t ever heard of anyone dying indirectly as a result of avoiding a bicyclist…I’m sure it may have happened a very small handful of times in human history, but I really don’t think it’s generally nearly as dangerous an activity as driving a vehicle.

And I’m well aware of the dangers…I’ll equate a drunk bicyclist to inattentive kids. A few years back, I was on my way home after work, and 3 stupid ass kids who should have gotten their asses beaten until they were bloody, just pulled their bikes right out in front of my oncoming car…I had to break HARD right not to kill at least one of them, and I hit the curb so hard, my tire burst. They were GONE before I was even out of the car.

I think in my proposed system, I would extend the right to get one of these subsidized rides to anyone regardless of their mode of transportation, and I would certainly have bike racks on the bus that would drive them home.

Now as for the injury to others factor, I’d say we’re not looking at equating that with murder, but I’d draw the same parallels to assault. If you beat someone up, or cause them bodily harm, you’re charged with assault…in my opinion if you try to beat someone up but they kick YOUR ass, you still had the intent to beat someone up and you committed no less of a crime. Ergo, attempted assault is the same as actual battery. Then state that you can reasonably know that if you get on a bike drunk, you might injure someone, ergo that is the same as attempted assault (same intent), which is the same as assault. And of course I would make sure that it was easy to determine if you were impaired whenever leaving anywhere alcohol was served, I’d make sure it was cheap and easy to get a ride home whenever you were impaired, and I would then say no excuses, you are completely liable for your actions. Drive drunk you die, bike drunk you go to jail, either way you (or your estate) pays restitution if there’s a victim.

An intoxicated person can be arrested if just sitting behind the wheel of a vehicle (or even sleeping on the front seat) if they have keys to the vehicle on their person.

You will not get a ticket for drunk driving, but depending on what state you are in, you can receive other citations such as those for for breaking traffic laws or for drunk and disorderly conduct. Here’s an article on the consequences of drinking and riding bikes: http://www.cowanlawfirm.com/articles/drinking-and-riding-a-bicycle/