The morning after drinking is no safe zone. Police caught 19 traffic violations, including two cases of drunk driving, during a one-hour crackdown outside an elementary school in Seoul's Songpa district.
The Songpa Police Station said on the 22nd that officers had conducted an intensive crackdown on drunk driving and traffic violations in the school zone outside Shinga Elementary School for about an hour starting at 8 a.m. that day. The operation turned up 19 cases in total: two drunk-driving cases serious enough to warrant license suspension, 10 traffic violations and seven warnings.
Four patrol cars lined up with their emergency lights flashing, and more than a dozen officers carrying breath-detection devices stopped vehicles one by one. When a detector picks up signs of alcohol, officers guide the driver to the shoulder, have the driver rinse out his or her mouth and then test again. If the second reading is the same, officers measure blood alcohol concentration with a breathalyzer. A reading of 0.03% or higher but below 0.08% brings a license suspension, while 0.08% or above means revocation.
"I Didn't Feel Hung Over" — A Bottle of Wine the Night Before, a Suspended License in a Morning School Zone
A woman stopped at about 8:37 a.m. first said she had been drinking a sports drink in her car, then admitted just before the test that she had had two glasses of beer the previous night. Her blood alcohol concentration was 0.053%. Police said that amount of drinking is more than enough to register on a detector.
About 10 minutes later, a man driving home after dropping his child off at school tested at 0.034%. He said he had drunk a bottle of wine the night before but had no hangover and had not expected to be caught. Both drivers filled out paperwork at the scene and were sent on their way; they will later be summoned to the police station for questioning. Their licenses will be suspended for 100 days.
In some cases, the detectors reacted to substances other than alcohol. Police said mouthwash and sponge cake can also set off a detector, and that in some cases no alcohol is detected once the driver rinses out the mouth and is tested again.
Hangover driving is not a problem confined to one school. Data obtained by Seoul Economic Daily from the Korean National Police Agency in May through the office of Rep. Ko Dong-jin of the People Power Party show that 11,816 cases of hangover driving were caught last year between 7 a.m. and noon. Of those, 6,071 were at 0.08% or higher, the threshold for license revocation, 196 were refusals to be tested, and 5,549 were at 0.03% or higher but below 0.08%, the threshold for suspension.
In Seoul, 138 cases of drunk driving were caught in school zones during morning commute hours between March and December last year, including 28 that led to license revocation and 110 to suspension. According to the police agency, drunk-driving accidents in school zones also rose to 10 last year, with 16 people killed or injured, from two in 2024, with three killed or injured.
Lee Kyung-jin, head of the traffic division at Songpa Police Station, said driving through a school zone while still under the influence after heavy drinking the night before poses an even greater danger to children, and that the crackdown would continue through the winter school break. Because alcohol remaining in the body can trigger a positive test even after a night's sleep and without any sense of a hangover, school-zone enforcement during the morning commute is expected to continue for some time.