Comparing the cost of alcohol-related traffic crashes in rural and urban environments

Spatial relationships between alcohol-related road crashes and retail alcohol availability

“…Fourth, the different spatial structures for urban compared to rural areas may mean our results cannot be generalized to rural settings (Morrison, 2015). Further investigation of these relationships in rural areas is warranted, as per capita crash rates are substantially higher in rural areas (Czech et al, 2010). …”

The Effectiveness of Community Action in Reducing Risky Alcohol Consumption and Harm: A Cluster Randomised Controlled Trial

“…First, unlike existing randomised trials of alcohol community action [4]–[9], the AARC project showed that it is possible to use routinely collected data to measure the impact of community-based interventions, and to identify rates of different types of alcohol-related harm in different communities [19],[47], although the data may need to be tailored to measure a specific outcome (e.g. measuring alcohol-related serious assaults only) and to the psychometric properties of the specific measure examined [25],[37].…”

“…The intervention costs (Table 2), for example, highlight that communities could implement all 13 interventions for approximately AUD$61,000 (total cost of AUD$608,102 divided by ten experimental communities). Despite the interventions being feasible for communities to implement, the modest outcomes suggest that legislative approaches that are beyond the direct control of communities, such as pricing mechanisms [48], restrictions on alcohol availability [19],[48],[49], and drink driving laws targeting young people [47],[50], may be more cost-effective than community action in actually reducing a wide range of alcohol-related harms, as opposed to limiting the rate of increase of a subset of harms. Indeed, the general increase in alcohol-related crime over time in both the experimental and control communities (Figures 1 and 2) may reflect the current strength of alcohol legislation in Australia.…”

Does Increasing Community and Liquor Licensees’ Awareness, Police Activity, and Feedback Reduce Alcohol-Related Violent Crime? A Benefit-Cost Analysis

“…Recent evidence that types and rates of alcohol-related crime differ significantly across communities in Australia [31,55,56] provides a clear rationale for community involvement in recognising and responding to the specific nature of their own alcohol-related crimes [57,58,59], an approach that has also been shown to be highly acceptable to communities [21]. This study presents one method of engaging with communities to design, implement and evaluate a multi-component intervention, tailored to those weekends which have historically been most problematic for each of them in terms of violent crimes associated with alcohol.…”

“…It is most likely that optimal reductions in rates of violent crime associated with alcohol would be achieved by a combination of legislative-based policies and community-based action, which would recognise evidence that prevention-focused legislative approaches are highly cost-effective [62] and evidence that the types and rates of alcohol-related crime differ significantly between communities, even within a common over-arching legislative framework [31,55,56]. This study suggests that community-action approaches, in isolation from complementary legislative approaches, will have a modest impact on rates of violent crimes associated with alcohol, both in terms of reduced incidence and economic benefits.…”