Hoping to reduce the terrible toll of drunken driving accidents, the National Transportation Safety Board has suggested lowering the legal limit for blood alcohol while driving to .05, down from the current .08 level. The BAC limit was lowered to .08 from .1 in the early 2000s and the percentage of traffic fatalities involving alcohol fell from about 50 percent to about 35 percent.

Still, with one-in-three traffic fatalities tied to alcohol-impaired drivers, doing something else is warranted.

The NTSB wants to produce a drop in the nearly 10,000 people killed in drunken driving accidents each year in the United States. But it’s not clear that lowering the BAC is the most effective way to reduce drinking driving deaths.

The NTSB also made other recommendations, including more high-visibility enforcement efforts and greater use of ignition interlock devices that prevent drivers from starting their vehicle if they are drunk.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the national organization most often associated with fighting drunken driving, says it has not yet taken a position on lowering the legal BAC level.

As expected, the alcoholic beverage industry and associations representing restaurants and bars oppose lowering the BAC. They claim, with some justification, that a BAC limit of .05 will cause responsible drinkers to receive citations, while not preventing the chronic violators that repeatedly drink and drive with blood alcohol levels two or three times the current legal limit.

It’s thought that the new limit would mean an average-sized woman could have just one drink within an hour while also having food before hitting the new BAC limit, while an average size man could have two drinks. The current BAC suggests it is safe for a woman to have two drinks, while a man can have three.

While some traffic accidents involve drivers just above the legal limit of .08, more often than not, the impaired driver has a blood-alcohol level well above the current legal limit.

It’s doubtful that lowering the legal BAC to .05 would change the behavior of chronic drunken drivers. The other NTSB recommendations, such as more high-visibility sobriety checkpoints and more aggressive enforcement would probably have more impact.

Keeping chronic drunken drivers off the road remains a huge challenge. Every few months, the Butler Eagle includes a report of another driver facing a court hearing for a fourth, fifth, sixth or seventh DUI charge. Why are these people still driving?

Some of these people are sentenced to treatment programs, but those programs are not always effective. Some DUI cases result in suspension of a driver’s license, but many continue to drive — drunk.

One idea worth considering is vehicle confiscation. Law enforcement officials can seize property of people involved in the illegal drug trade. Why not something similar after multiple DUI convictions?

If laws were passed allowing vehicles operated by a convicted drunken driver to be confiscated, after one or two DUI convictions, maybe habitual drunken drivers change their behavior.

And borrowed cars would also be subject to confiscation. That might prevent friends or relatives from loaning cars to people with multiple DUIs.

Reducing highway deaths caused by impaired driving ought to be a priority, but there should be more research and debate about the best ways to do that. It’s not clear that lowering the BAC to .05 would be the most effective way to get the most dangerous drivers off the roads.