In recent years, ride sharing companies have become an increasingly popular way for people to get home from bars and nightclubs when they are too intoxicated to drive home. This is largely because of the expense of taking a taxicab and public transportation options being limited in the early morning hours in Boston. While many young people have chosen to take the T’s Night Owl bus home from the bars in Government Center at least once, the experience of being on a bus with 49 drunk people is not one many people care to repeat.
brAccording to recent news feature from ABC News, Uber, a successful ridesharing firm, has tested a new program/marketing campaign where they operate kiosks that function as alcohol breath testing devices to tell people if they are too intoxicated to legally drive home.
This program called “You Drink, We Drive” was first tested in Canada. The kiosk was designed to dispense a disposable straw into which the user must blow for six seconds. The device then uses what is either a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer (GCMS) device or an infrared mass spectrometer to calculate users blood alcohol content (BAC) and will display the result on the screen.
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