Illinois DOT Gets Creative To Stop Drunk Driving

The Illinois Department of Transportation (DOT) is well known for cracking down on drunk driving by partnering with law enforcement for the “Drive Sober Or Get Pulled Over” campaign. This campaign, a crackdown occurring on popular drunk driving periods like Labor Day and the Christmas holidays, focuses on upping law enforcement and pulling people over when the roads are clogged with drunk drivers.

But Drive Sober is just one of the unique ways the Illinois DOT is trying to pull drunk drivers off the roads. They’ve also spent some time and energy creating some pretty funny video campaigns that they’re hoping will help connect with people who might consider driving drunk.

Turns out in Illinois a whopping 40% of people who die in an alcohol-related crashes are males between the age of 18-35. The Illinois DOT wants to relate to this demographic, so they created a classic parody of 1970 police officers on the job.

Take a look at one of the trailers for the series below.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8R-1JzdkhUY]

This isn’t the first year the Illinois DOT have used humor to connect to younger drinking drivers. Last year they took a page from the Walking Dead and created the video “Driving Dead.” There are multiple episodes of this series, and they’re full of fast cars, gunfire, and you guessed it, zombies. With over 700,000 views on a single episode, this video series is one that’s definitely hit its mark.

Using out-of-the-box campaigns to fight back against drunk driving is a great idea. They get people thinking about drunk driving in an entirely new way, and they get attention in an entertaining format that a lot of people can relate too. With the war against drunk driving decades old and no end in sight, anything that works to stop people from getting behind the wheel after drinking is a good thing.