Rhode Island could do a lot more to curb drunken driving, but instead it ranks among three states doing the least, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.

This week, the NTSB urged states that have been “unresponsive to previous NTSB safety recommendations” to make bolder moves in addressing drunken-driving accidents and deaths.

Rhode Island is among 25 states not doing enough to keep what the board calls “hard-core drinking drivers” off the roads, the NTSB said.

“It’s not doing well,” said Kevin Quinlan, chief of safety advocacy at the NTSB.

The NTSB says targeting those drivers –– who have a blood-alcohol concentration of 0.15 percent or greater or who have been arrested for driving while impaired within 10 years of a prior DUI –– is the key to reducing the number of people killed by drunken drivers. In the last 10 years, more than 92,000 people nationwide have died in crashes involving such drivers, according to the NTSB.

In a state where 50 percent of accident deaths on the road are victims of alcohol-related crashes, the head of the Rhode Island chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving said this state needs leadership at the General Assembly to make the kinds of changes the NTSB recommends.

“Where is our pride and our leadership?” MADD executive director Gabrielle M. Abbate said. “We need legislative leadership.”

Abbate said the General Assembly has lost some of its top legislators who fought for laws to curb drunken driving, including former Rep. Peter T. Ginaitt, who left the General Assembly last year when he took a top job with Lifespan, and former Sen. Joseph M. Polisena, who left in 2006 to become mayor of Johnston.

“We’ve always struggled with the leadership part,” Abbate said. “We’ve never had a leader yet of the House that has totally backed [legislation to curb drunken driving].”

Last year, the NTSB reports, there were 17,000 alcohol-related fatalities in the nation, which make up 41 percent of all highway deaths. Comparable figures for Rhode Island weren’t available.

The number of deaths last year attributed to an “alcohol-impaired driver” were 12,998 nationwide. In Rhode Island, that number was 25, down from 37 in 2006, Quinlan said.

The national alcohol-related fatality rate hasn’t changed significantly in the last 10 years, NTSB acting Chairman Mark V. Rosenker said Tuesday.

“After significant progress in the 1980s and early 1990s, we appear to have grown complacent,” Rosenker said at a news conference in Washington, D.C. “But complacency, when we lose 17,000 lives a year, is not acceptable. Crashes, injuries and deaths from preventable behavior are not acceptable.”

The NTSB, of course, cannot enforce any of its recommendations –– “it’s up to the states to take action,” Quinlan said. Sometimes victims prompt such changes, he said, but it also comes from interested legislators.

“And I think that’s really important –– an interested legislator that can convince other legislators that this is the right thing to do because people are dying unnecessarily and this is preventable,” he said.

In 2000, the safety board developed 11 recommendations for how states could reduce alcohol-related crashes and fatalities.

Rhode Island has enacted just 2 of those 11. Michigan and Montana are the only others in the union that have enacted so few, Quinlan said.

The NTSB highlights seven of its recommendations as “primary elements” and says states that have implemented them have evidence they reduce alcohol-related fatalities, injuries and crashes.

Those seven are: let police confiscate a driver’s license if the person fails, or refuses to take, a chemical breath test; “separate hard-core drinking drivers from their vehicles” with five vehicle sanctions; conduct sobriety checkpoints; require a state’s motor-vehicle agency to give police lists of drivers with suspended or revoked licenses; legislate that someone with a driving-while-intoxicated offense must maintain a zero blood-alcohol content while driving; find alternatives to confinement; and create legislation defining a blood-alcohol concentration of 0.15 percent or greater as an “aggravated” offense.

Rhode Island meets only one of those seven –– the 0.15 percent minimum concentration that triggers an “aggravated” DUI offense, Quinlan said.

Researchers have seen a 10-percent to 12-percent reduction in alcohol-related fatalities in states where the police can confiscate the driver’s license of someone who fails, or refuses to take, a chemical breath test, Quinlan said. Alcohol-related fatalities have been reduced as much as 20 percent in states that operate frequent sobriety checkpoints.

Sobriety checkpoints –– conducted in 38 states, according to the NTSB –– were challenged in Rhode Island in the early 1980s, Abbate recalls, and the state Supreme Court ruled 3 to 2 that the checks were unconstitutional. Abbate said it’s time for Rhode Island to reconsider something that’s saving lives in other states.

One legislator, Rep. Rene R. Menard, D-Lincoln, said he plans to resubmit legislation that failed last year that would have allowed arraignment officers to confiscate driver’s licenses when people refused to take a chemical breath test. After reviewing some of the NTSB recommendations, Menard said Rhode Island “is missing something.”

“And I do think we, the Assembly, should look at this report and try to protect the innocent,” he said.

The only other recommendation that Rhode Island meets, according to NTSB research, is the elimination of diversion programs that allow states to erase, defer or otherwise purge a record of a drunken-driving offense or to allow an offender to avoid a license suspension.

kbramson@projo.com