Where do drunken-driving accidents happen most often in Lancaster County? And why?

DUI enforcers say those questions, like the drivers, are loaded.

And the answers are many.

"Speed is the number one cause of crashes" of all kinds, said Ross Deck, who coordinates DUI sobriety checkpoints for the county.

So it follows that a busy county highway, Route 222, was the scene of 134 smashups and six fatalities from 2003 through 2007.

That was the highest toll on a county artery during those five years, according to state Department of Transportation data.

Route 272 south of Lancaster also was the scene of half a dozen fatalities during the period, and 38 crashes.

"That's a big road race," Deck said of the Solanco highway. "Everybody flies down there."

But speed is just part of the DUI cocktail.

Many of the DUI hotspots cited by Deck are right in the thick of cities and towns. King Street in Lancaster. Main Street in Mount Joy. Route 462 in Columbia.

"Most of your DUI crashes in the city involve hitting other vehicles," Deck said.

Again, he added, the explanation is logical. "You've got high traffic volumes on narrow streets that have lots of intersections."

Enforcers know well where to set up checkpoints.

Police have "continually hit the same roadways" since 1995, Deck said. Although overall DUI arrests are up, Deck said, "We have seen a reduction [in arrests] in every [checkpoint] location."

Meanwhile, he said, PennDOT's DUI accident map of the county remains thoroughly peppered with crash symbols.

There are 500 to 600 DUI crackups a year, "which is way too many."

Road to percussion
Driving rural roads is riskier overall than driving urban ones, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

But if you've been thinking of charting a safe, DUI-free path through the county, forget it.

Drinking-related crashes happen everywhere, according to Deck, who cited Manor Township as an example.

The municipality has a high number of DUIs, he said, yet it's so big and spread out that there are no discernible accident clusters.

Deck said he could set up a checkpoint on any county road at any time of day and catch drunk drivers.

Still, a significant share of the community's DUI crashes happen on busier roads.

Over the above-noted five years, in descending order by volume, the state reported 522 DUI wrecks and 27 fatalities on routes 222, 30, 272, 23, 501, 324, 283, 372 and 472.

(The same number of crashes, 89, were reported for routes 30 and 272.)

PennDOT reported 126 DUI accidents and eight fatalities on those nine state routes in 2007.

Deck said more accidents actually take place, as PennDOT quantifies only those resulting in death, injury or towed vehicles.

Lt. David Presto, the Lancaster-based patrol commander for Troop J, said state police consider county arteries, such as routes 30, 41, 272, 222 and 372, to be their key DUI trouble areas.

"People always use main roads to come home" from bars and parties, he said.

And more of them party in the two weeks preceding Christmas than any other time of the year, Presto added.

Paradoxically, reports Tom Vanderbilt in his new book "Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)," cruising home on the four-lane can be more dangerous than negotiating twisty, narrow terrain.

People perceive smooth, wide-open roadways to be safer, Vanderbilt writes, and so they chat on their cell phones or fiddle with the radio and let their minds wander. A kind of hypnosis can set in.

Drinking alcohol magnifies such foibles, said George Geisler Jr., the eastern Pennsylvania law enforcement director for the Pennsylvania DUI Association.

Tool over the easy rollers in the Southern End, he said, "and you think you can rock and roll."

And then... bam.

Police say Solanco accidents often result in vehicle rollovers and sudden impacts against trees, utility poles and guardrails.

How much do police have to crack down to deter DUI driving?

"The answer is, that depends," Geisler said. "It's a real balancing act and you really have to pay attention to those numbers."

You have to closely track where the pileups take place.

While statistics seem to paint some roads as more lethal than others, Deck pointed out, hazard levels vary from spot to spot along the corridors.

PennDOT DUI maps signify accident clusters with red, blue and green markers. The department declined to make the maps available to the media.

According to Deck, "You can have one segment that's red [indicating the highest DUI accident level] and, two miles on either side of it, there hasn't been anything."

Deck said the county's DUI Task Force has conducted two sobriety checkpoints since the start of the 12-month enforcement cycle on Oct. 1.

A total of at least a dozen checkpoints, 12 roving patrols and, in all likelihood, 12 underage drinking details are planned for the year.

Cutting-edge technology and training that helps officers recognize drug-impaired drivers will boost DUI arrest numbers in 2009, Deck predicted.

He said the latest weapon wielded by police here is the EyeCheck pupillometer, a scanning device that resembles a pair of binoculars.

Pupillometers help DUI enforcers pinpoint impairment by drugs, alcohol or biochemical inhalants, Deck said.

"We'll be able to more or less narrow down what we're looking for."