Shanghai twice as likely to drive drunk than rest of China

Shanghai Daily has some startling statistics about drunk driving in our city - according to a study released yesterday, we have almost double the amount of fatal road accidents related to DUIs (8.3%) than that of the national average (4.16%). Last year, over 6% of traffic accidents in Shanghai were caused by drunk driving.

Since the crackdown in August, police have detained 158 people for high-level drunk driving. They've also figured out a strange scheme:

City traffic police said yesterday that while fewer people were caught drunk driving as daily checks continued, a disturbing new practice had been uncovered.

To avoid police drunk driving checks, some motorists were swapping their vehicles with taxi drivers and getting back into their own cars after passing checkpoints.

Taxi drivers involved in the car-exchange scam face fines of up to 5,000 yuan (US$732), according to the city's vehicle management authorities.

WHAT? That sounds incredibly complicated for drunk people to pull off. We know that when we've had a couple of pints down the hatch, the last thing we'd be doing is trying to complicate things by hiring someone to drive us past a checkpoint, then stumbling to our own cars. How is it not easier just to have the dude drive us all the way home?