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Prior to TEA-21, Congress had enacted 23 U.S.C. Section 410 (the Section 410 program) to encourage states to enact and enforce effective impaired driving measures (including open container laws). Under this program, states could qualify for supplemental grant funds if they were eligible for a basic Section 410 grant, and they had an open container law that met certain requirements. TEA-21 changed the Section 410 program and removed the open container incentive grant criterion. The conferees to that legislation had intended to create a new open container transfer program to encourage states to enact open container laws, but the new program was inadvertently omitted from the TEA-21 conference report; the program was included instead in the TEA-21 Restoration Act. (Information presented in this report about TEA-21 and the open container regulations, was obtained from the TEA-21 website, maintained by the U.S. Department of Transportation, www.fhwa.dot.gov/tea21.)
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