Unfortunately at the time when drunken people are returning home from pubs/bars (e.g. 2 in the morning) most public transport do not drive or at least is significantly limited.
This is a problem with North Americas suboptimal implementations of public transit. Most public transportation systems in the rest of the world do actually take care of this.
It’s 2023 and driving kills like 40,000 people a year.
We’ve been building trillions of dollars of public transit since about the same time as we started building the National highway system. So when exactly does public transit start saving all these lives?
A new train from SF to LA has been in the works since 1996. They are expecting partial completion for $30 billion by 2030 which is projected to carry ~15 million passengers * ~400 miles = 6 billion passenger miles per year.
The fatality rate for passenger cars is ~0.57 per 100 million miles, so eliminating 6 billion passenger miles could be reasonably expected to save about 60 * 0.57 = 34 lives a year out of the ~40,000 that are dying on the roads annually.
This is just rough napkin math showing the scale of the problem would require a roughly $30 trillion investment in public transit to appreciably shift passenger-miles away from passenger cars.
Public transit can be very useful. But it’s clearly not the solution to eliminating driving deaths.
It seems unfair to say that public transport doesn't have a role in reducing deaths caused by drunk drivers just because the hugely flawed and half-assed public transport systems in our cities (which were designed to make public transport ineffective) haven't yet delivered on that promise. In places where cities and public transportation systems are well designed and useful people do use them and those places see far fewer deaths from drunk drivers than the US does as a result.
You argue that it would be very expensive to fix the problems we've made for ourselves in order to get useful public transportation and that's certainly true. It's also very expensive to invent self-driving cars and part that cost has already been paid with lives lost and human suffering, but that hasn't stopped us from developing those systems. We could decide to invest instead in improving our cities and infrastructure. We just choose to let obscenely rich people kill innocent Americans while they play with their profit generating spying car tech instead.
Haven't many cities actually dismantled public transport that they had already built (or rather, sold it to car companies "to operate more efficiently", who then proceeded to dismantle it so it didn't compete with their cars)?
