The Delaware Office of Highway Safety’s Sober Rides initiative helped more than 900 Delawareans get home safely during the last year.
The program that provides discounted Uber and Lyft rides to prevent impaired driving during the popular drinking holidays saw an almost 50% utilization rate.
1,820 Sober Rides vouchers were made available on Thanksgiving Eve 2025, New Year’s Eve 2025, St. Patrick’s Day 2026 and July 4th 2026.
"Overall, we are at 904 Sober Rides taken,” said Caitlin Reed, community relations officer with the Delaware Office of Highway Safety. “New Year's Eve was our best holiday with our utilization rate of 54%. So that's the highest that we've seen so far. So great numbers for the year."
On Thanksgiving Eve, there was a 47% utilization rate, St. Patrick’s Day had a 51% utilization rate and July 4 had a 43% utilization rate.
"We changed up some of the ways that we distributed the vouchers in intervals, to make sure that they're not all getting claimed, right when the vouchers open up and we found success in that, and we're looking to hopefully, depending on sponsor funds, be able to expand on the high risk holidays that we are able to provide vouchers for," said Reed.
The program will return Thanksgiving Eve and include the same holidays as the past year.
Reed notes expanding to more holidays depends on getting more sponsors since they make the program and the discounted vouchers possible.
OHS, Delaware State Police and local law enforcement also recently conducted a DUI checkpoint.
The July 10th checkpoint in Sussex County saw 983 vehicles pass through resulting in four DUI arrests.
