The National Transportation Safety Board recommended states reduce the allowable blood-alcohol concentration by more than a third, from 0.08 percent to 0.05 percent, in a May 14 report.

This recommendation was just one of many in the safety report, titled “Reaching Zero: Actions to Eliminate Alcohol-Impaired Driving.” The report also included measures to revamp enforcement techniques and in-vehicle detection technology.

NTSB Chairwoman Deborah A. P. Hersman called the report a “cap stone” of a year of work and data collection. The purpose of the Board’s recommendation is to eliminate alcohol-impaired driving, Hersman said.

“Many people in the U.S. believe we have solved the drunk driving problem, but in fact, that is not the case,” Hersman said in a press conference. “We lose an average of 10,000 people to impaired-driving crashes every year.”

Other statistics included 173,000 people injured per year in alcohol-impaired crashes with 27,000 of those injuries resulting in permanently debilitating injuries.

The U.S. has a current legal limit of 0.08 percent in all 50 states. Hersman referenced Europe and Australia as regions with reduced crashes and deaths after lowering the legal BAC limit from 0.08 to 0.05 percent.

“We’ve seen reductions in the neighborhood of 5-15 percent, depending on what study you look at,” Hersman said. “There were almost 1,000 fatalities in the U.S. in 2011 involving drivers who had a BAC between 0.05 and 0.07, which is below the legal limit.”