Exactly this, but it should be made clear that this has nothing to do with the general safety of rural roads. In general there are dangers encountered when driv

Exactly this, but it should be made clear that this has nothing to do with the general safety of rural roads. In general there are dangers encountered when driving (especially at night) on rural roads which aren't encountered in urban environments, although the converse is also true. People always compare the US to Western Europe when this topic comes up, but that's simply an invalid comparison. For this topic, the US should be compared to Russia or possibly Canada. These countries have rural areas which are neither completely deserted (where drunk driving would be irrelevant even if it were likely to happen) nor support a large enough population to have reasonable transportation alternatives. I wish the US would recognize this fact and have two sets of drunk driving laws - one for urban areas (matching Western European conventions) and one for rural (matching current conventions). Unfortunately, this is probably impossible since it could be seen as permitting drunk driving.