Late Finishes, Alcohol and Getting Home Safely

The decision is made before the event, not after

Nobody sets out intending to drive home over the limit. What happens instead is that a plan to have one drink meets a long evening, and at midnight somebody is standing in a car park making a judgement about how they feel. That is a poor moment for a decision with such serious consequences.

Booking a car in advance removes the decision entirely. It is the same reason people book a taxi before a Christmas party rather than after: the sober version of you is considerably better at this than the version at the end of the evening. It is also considerably cheaper than the alternative, in every sense of the word that matters.

What the limit does and does not tell you

The drink-drive limit in England, Wales and Northern Ireland is higher than the limit in Scotland, which was lowered separately. That alone catches people out on journeys that cross the border. More importantly, the limit is a legal threshold rather than a measure of whether you are safe to drive, and how any individual metabolises alcohol varies with weight, food, tiredness and time.

The morning after is the other trap. Alcohol leaves the body slowly, and an early start after a late night can still put someone over the limit at breakfast. If an event finishes at two and a meeting starts at eight, the car should be booked for both.

• A lower legal limit in Scotland than elsewhere in the UK
• No reliable personal rule of thumb for units and time
• The morning after as a genuine risk, not a theoretical one
• A booked car for the return leg as well as the outward one

Why the street is not a plan at one in the morning

In the UK, a private hire vehicle must be booked through a licensed operator in advance. It cannot legally be hailed in the street and it cannot be flagged down outside a venue, which is a legal distinction rather than a matter of policy. Licensed taxis can be hailed, but at one in the morning outside a busy venue there are not many free ones.

Ride-hailing applications work, until several hundred people request a car within the same ten minutes and the price and the waiting time both rise sharply. A pre-booked vehicle is committed to your journey rather than allocated by whoever is bidding at that moment. That difference is invisible at seven in the evening and extremely obvious at one in the morning.

Very late finishes and what they need

Events that finish after midnight need a little more thought than ordinary evenings. Meeting points that were obvious at eight in the evening can be closed and dark by one; a hotel lobby, a lit main entrance or a specific street corner is better than a vague location. Where a group is splitting up, it is worth knowing who is going where before anybody starts walking.

For very late collections the chauffeur is booked for that time rather than continuing from another job, which is an ordinary matter of a driver being genuinely fit to drive at the end of a long day. A collection at two in the morning is planned as its own piece of work rather than added to the end of somebody's shift.

Arranging the return before you go out

The most useful habit is to arrange the way home at the same time as the way there. It costs nothing extra in effort, it removes a decision from the end of the night, and it means the meeting point is agreed while everybody can still find it.

Bookings and messages on the night both run over WhatsApp on +44 (0) 7775 554 848. A message when you start putting coats on is worth far more than a booked time that the evening has already overtaken. Coats, cloakroom queues and goodbyes reliably take longer than anybody expects them to.

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