During the rest of the holiday season, hundreds of police hours and thousands of tax dollars will be dedicated to setting up roadblocks in New York’s counties that stop cars indiscriminately hoping to find drunk drivers. This method, however, is not the most effective one to stop drunk drivers. And New York is not alone. The majority of the rest of the states also implement similar, inefficient initiatives. New York along with 39 other states employ roadblocks. But there are still 11 states — Alaska, Idaho, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Texas, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming — that don’t. Last year, those states averaged 7% fewer alcohol-related fatalities than the states that funneled scarce resources into checkpoint programs

A New York State Trooper, Greg Kalarchian, explained, “most DWI arrests come from [traffic] stops. They cross the double-yellow line, they weave, or they got stopped for speeding.”

A federal Department of Transportation study found that roving police patrols net nearly three times as many drunk drivers as roadblocks. Simply put, every dollar spent on roadblocks is one more lost opportunity for catching dangerous criminals.

Federal funding policy requires roadblocks to be “highly publicized.” So authorities regularly publish roadblock times and locations in advance, allowing veteran drunk drivers simply to drive around them. The word also gets passed around via the word-of-mouth and cell phone networks, which are similar to truck drivers who tell their friends about speed traps.

Testimony from an official at Pennsylvania’s Department of Transportation, Louis Rader, demonstrated that roving patrols, where cops swarm the roads looking for erratic drivers, are a superior tactic for catching drunk drivers. Mr. Rader testified that only 0.7% of all drivers stopped at DUI checkpoints are charged, while 7.7% of suspicion-based stops made by roving patrols yield charges. That’s 10 times more arrests per car stopped.

In the war against drunk driving, setting up roadblocks is like expecting the enemy to walk into your camp and surrender. It would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic.

Luckily, New York has made an effort to increase the number of saturation and blanket patrols on state roadways. That decision is reflected in the data. In 2005, state law enforcement arrested more than 200 people for impaired driving than they did the previous year.

Last year New York police officers cited more than 700,000 drivers for speeding. How many of those were caught at a checkpoint? Zero.

Newspaper headlines suggest that speeders aren’t the only dangerous drivers that roadblocks fail to catch. Over the summer, roadblocks in New York counties from Suffolk to Westchester Counties screened thousands of drivers and only had a handful of DWIs to show for it.

Everyone agrees that something must be done about drunk driving. Promising ideas include mandatory treatment programs, longer prison terms for convicted drunk drivers, and a system of graduated penalties. That way a man at 0.08% blood alcohol concentration, the legal limit in all 50 states, after two glasses of wine, isn’t punished as harshly as the guy who drives after 12 beers.

With limited resources, it’s important to put New York’s taxpayer dollars into programs that work. Continuing to funnel resources into highly publicized roadblocks will lead us down the road to nowhere. Fighting drunk driving isn’t complicated. Let’s arrest and punish truly drunk drivers.

Checkpoints may give traffic officials in New York a nice PR campaign. But — unlike holiday gift giving — when it comes to traffic safety, it’s not just the thought that counts.

Ms. Longwell is the managing director of the American Beverage Institute.