Recently a study was conducted to see if people who use a FREE safe ride drank more.  We at safe rides believe that offereing FREE safe rides is not the answer since it leave people with more money and a greater incentive to start abusing alcohol.  The key is to find the right balance between making the rides as cost effective as possible, while still allowing people to enjoy the night out. below is the article that was found on ScienceDirect.com

Wayne M. Harding^{, , a, b}, Barry D. Caudill^c, Brent A. Moore^c and Kevin C. Frissell^c 

MADD is hogging the road

Requiring that even light drinkers use breathalyzers in their cars is going too far.

 By Sarah Longwell

Last week, the House transportation committee unveiled the details of a six-year, $450 billion highway bill. Buried within is a controversial sentencing requirement for low-level, first-time drunken-driving offenders: ignition interlocks.

These in-car breathalyzers prevent vehicles from starting if a driver’s breath registers above a preset blood-alcohol concentration. Because they are so expensive, intrusive, and prone to technical failures, this penalty has typically been reserved for the most extreme offenders.

If the bill passes in its current form, Mothers Against Drunk Driving will be one step closer to its goal of prohibiting responsible adults from having a glass of wine with dinner before driving home.

The hospitality industry has already been working with traffic-safety advocates to require ignition interlocks for repeat offenders caught with high blood-alcohol concentrations. We’ve succeeded in 27 states. But under the new transportation bill, those states will be penalized if they do not impose the devices on first-time offenders – even those just one sip over the legal limit.

A 120-pound woman can reach the legal limit of 0.08 percent after two 6-ounce glasses of wine in a two-hour period. Under this proposed mandate, if such a woman drives, she could be punished with an interlock device – for behavior that is, according to several studies, no more dangerous than driving while talking on a hands-free cell phone.

Mandating ignition interlocks for all drunken-driving offenders is a one-size-fits-all approach, inflicting the same punishment on that woman and the hardcore abusers who cause the vast majority of alcohol-related fatalities. It eliminates a judge’s ability to treat different offenders differently, and America’s criminal-justice system has a terrible record with mandatory minimum sentences.

Most state legislatures have already made it clear that they favor judicial discretion, rejecting mandates for low-blood-alcohol, first-time offenders, or passing ignition-interlock bills that target high-blood-alcohol, repeat offenders. Their decisions are supported by National Highway Traffic Safety Administration statistics showing that most alcohol-related fatalities involve offenders at more than twice the legal limit.

But, under pressure from MADD, the House is poised to force those legislatures to change their laws. To those who recall the debate over lowering the legal limit from 0.10 to 0.08 percent, it’s a familiar scenario.

In 1998, Congress approved highway-funding sanctions for states that would not lower their limits after MADD insisted that doing so would save thousands of lives. It didn’t: In 2007, the number of alcohol-related fatalities was roughly the same as 10 years earlier.

In 2006, MADD projected that ignition-interlock technology – set to prevent driving at blood-alcohol levels as low as 0.02 percent – could be “standard equipment” for all American vehicles within 10 years. Three years later, we are already on the verge of requiring the devices even for marginal offenders.

If MADD’s latest push goes forward unabated, it won’t be long until your car is forbidding you from driving home after a champagne toast at a wedding or a beer at a baseball game.

Safe Rides Unlimited founder Moe Sattar informed us that SRU will be joining forces with Favbars.com, a complete night club directory website that operates like myspace where clubs can create profiles.  General public can than become fans of their favorite clubs and receive updates automatically.  Secondly, SRU is also joining forces with Snapfoo.com, an extremely cool and efficient photo blogging site.  Snapfoo.com allows people to take pics via their phones and email them directly to their profiles on favbars.com or other networking sites.

Mr. Sattar stated he is extremely pleased with the prospects of partnering with the two sites.  He also said that together SRU and its partners will make nightlife information streamlined for the public.  Now people will have the ability to interact directly with the people that run their favorite venues.

Specific details of the partnership were not disclosed but Mr. Sattar assured the details will be made available in the near future.  So far we know that favbars.com is powering the new venue system on Safe Rides Unlimited website.

We look forward to see what comes out of this seemingly excellent partnership. Stay tuned…

Below is the Safe Rides Unlimited Site Traffic info as found on www.Alexa.com. According to them safe rides unlimited is growing at an extremely high rate and is ranked even higher than some club based sites in NJ. Safe Rides Unlimited website is currently ranked 143,236 in the United States of America.

Reach for Saferidesunlimited.org:

Percent of global Internet users who visit this site

Yesterday	1 wk. Avg.	3 mos. Avg.	3 mos. Change
N/A*	.00008%	.000051%	21%

Traffic Rank for Saferidesunlimited.org:

Alexa traffic rank based on a combined measure of page views and users (reach)

Yesterday	1 wk. Avg.	3 mos. Avg.	3 mos. Change
N/A*	955,71269	35147,141759,21095	475487,23787

Page Views per user for Saferidesunlimited.org:

The number of unique pages viewed per user per day for this site

Yesterday	1 wk. Avg.	3 mos. Avg.	3 mos. Change
N/A*	3	8.1	447.11%

Saferidesunlimited.org users come from these countries:

Saferidesunlimited.org traffic rank in the United States:

This is extremely important and will help safe ride grow and make its services available to everyone.  Please use the link in this post to read the petition posted by safe rides unlimited, if you agree with us please sign it so that we can gather as many signatures as possible. http://www.petitiononline.com/SRUSRU/petition.html

Safe Rides Unlimited and its staff greatly appreciates your support.

http://www.petitiononline.com/SRUSRU/petition.html

Thank you

Safe Rides Unlimited has been providing services to the greater New York and New Jersey area for over a year now. SRU’s growth can be credited mostly to word of mouth recommendations. SRU takes pride in the fact that it has been able to attract new users every day thru recomendations of other users. This proves without a doubt that SRU has a program that works and is extremely effective and efficient. SRU program is saving people money and providing them with a level of service and reliability they can not expect to recieve from any other safe ride system in the country.

On Friday Aug 22, 2008 Safe Rides Unlimited founder/president Amanat Moe Sattar informed that Safe Rides Unlimited has entered into contract with Cablevision subsidiary Rainbow Advertisments. The purpose of this contract is to bring the message to the masses by conducting a year long tv ad campaign. According to Mr. Sattar SRU is entering this contract because of tremendous success of the program and its ability to serve even more users every week. He hopes this campaign will help spread the message of a real available alternative to drunk driving faster and to a larger audience. This tv ad campaign will air over 50 ads per week starting with Northern NJ. Networks that will air ads include MTV, VH1, E, FX, Comedy Central and a few other popular channels. Mr. Sattar says he is very optimistic about the results from this campaign.

SRU currently provides over 500 people with safe ride services. Thats over 500 people that utilize the life saving roundtrip safe rides, pay no cover charges at clubs and don’t wait on any lines. According to Mr. Sattar, SRU safe rides require a per person donation of usually what most clubs charge for cover. In simpler words SRU rides are practically free if you consider that you would have to pay cover charge and/or wait on lines if you did not use SRU safe rides, not to mention SRU helps avoid all the other hassels that come along with driving if your going for a night on the town.

Safe Rides Unlimited and its staff started the year with extreme optimism and for good reasons. Safe Rides Unlimited had just finalized the pilot program that had been running for a little over 2 years. SRU’s innovative methods are proving to be extremely effective.

The idea that people can now get round trip luxury safe rides that cost normally as much as what someone would pay for cover charge at club. This makes the ride practically free since SRU users do not have to pay the covers or wait onlines at SRU member venues.

SRU’s initial obstacles were due to the fact most individuals could not believe they can prevent themselves from driving drunk and save money at the same time. It was hard to believe it can be so much fun to get the VIP experience as a reward for making the right choice. SRU utilized the support of its member venues to help spread the message. According to Amanat Moe Sattar Safe Rides Unlimited Founder/President; SRU would not be successful if they did not receive support from venue owners and individuals like Joe Barcelona (owner of Bliss formerly known as Joey’s) Sergio Tiggs and Tommy D who offered their guidance and help bring the program to the masses.

Today SRU is proud to say that its user base has grown to numbers that exceed all expections for a program just introduced to the general public. The results from pilot program were good but no one expected to providing over 500 safe rides a week as soon as they launched. Safe Rides Unlimited is looking forward to having an amazing and successful second half of the year.

To whomever is reading this,

I would like to take this opportunity and introduce myself as the founder of Safe Rides Unlimited. If you got a late night phone call, as I did, informing you that a dear friend, or perhaps someone in your family had just died in an alcohol related accident I can only imagine how distraught you might be at that point. When this happened to me I was devastated! For days I couldn’t think straight, I couldn’t work effectively, and I crawled into a hole. I realized though there are many organizations providing victim services there were none or very few that were physically and effectively preventing the tragedies from happening. Then, I decided to “make lemonade out of a lemon.”

I formed the Safe Rides Unlimited a not for profit organization with several friends in 2004. Until now then there had not been an organization that is able to produce results like SRU. Already we keep more then 300 drunk drivers off the road every week! That’s over 1200 people we physically prevent every month from driving drunk by providing them with sensible, efficient and cost effective safe ride alternatives. AND THE NUMBERS ARE GROWING!!!

The SRU Program works like this:

• Our current safe ride users and new users going out to a restaurant, bar, or club call our 888 number and arrange to be picked up by SRU approved transportation from their house and delivered to their particular establishment and then back home later. The transportation is provided by a network of transportation affiliates at an extremely discounted rate to make it cost effective and appealing as an effective alternative. What makes this most effective is that SRU works with the establishments to offer incentives for using safe rides. Incentives such as no cover charges at some of the most popular bars/clubs in the tri-sate along
with avoiding to wait on lines. This is a simple and direct (practical) program that, thus far, has met with great success. But, we can and must do better!

Benefits:
1. The roundtrip completely eliminates their vehicle from their plans of night out.
2. Safe Ride Users Save money by not paying for gas, cover charges, parking, tolls etc.
3. SRU helps people to plan ahead with their friends and make all arrangements for them.
4. Bars are able to offer this to their current customers to utilize and to others that now can come to their establishment without the worries of drunk driving.

To any reasonable person the benefits are obvious as there are way too many to list.

The mission I undertook was not an easy one. I started this organization with a vision and a promise made to myself of never loosing the dedication to find alternatives to drunk driving that could save lives now and in the future. I had to make many personal sacrifices but I personally assure you I have not lost my drive. Today I can walk with my head high knowing how many of my peers appreciate these sacrifices, and show their appreciation by making the right decision for themselves and using safe rides with their friends.

Thank you,
Amanat M. Sattar
Founder
Safe Rides Unlimited
O. 888-656-SAFE
F. 973-582-0595
www.SafeRidesUnlimited.org

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