Can I get a DUI in a private parking lot or on a private driveway in California?

Yes. California’s DUI law is not limited to public roads. The chapter of the Vehicle Code that contains the DUI statute applies on highways and everywhere else in the state unless a particular provision says otherwise, and the DUI statute contains no location limit. A published appellate decision upheld a DUI conviction for driving only inside a gated, private storage facility. A parking lot, a private driveway, a gated community, or a golf cart does not put you outside the law.

What the statutes say

Vehicle Code section 23152 makes it unlawful for a person who is under the influence, or who has a blood alcohol level of 0.08 percent or more, “to drive a vehicle.” Neither that wording nor the statute’s other subdivisions, covering drugs, commercial drivers, and passengers for hire, mention a highway, a street, or any other place.

Section 23152 sits in the Vehicle Code’s chapter on public offenses, and that chapter opens with Vehicle Code section 23100: “The provisions of this chapter apply to vehicles upon the highways and elsewhere throughout the State unless expressly provided otherwise.”

Why the “highways only” rule does not help

A broader section, Vehicle Code section 21001, says the provisions of the division that contains the DUI law “refer exclusively to the operation of vehicles upon the highways, unless a different place is specifically referred to.” That default is the argument people sometimes raise, and it has been rejected.

In People v. Malvitz (1992) 11 Cal.App.4th Supp. 9, a man under the influence of alcohol drove only on the privately owned, paved grounds of a locked storage facility that was not open to the general public, and he relied on section 21001. The appellate department of the Orange County Superior Court affirmed his conviction. It read section 23100 to mean that the chapter’s provisions apply anywhere a vehicle can be driven unless a specific provision limits itself to a location, and it noted that section 23152 has no such limit and that a 1982 amendment deleted the location language that had appeared in the statute’s blood-alcohol subdivision. Malvitz was decided by a superior court’s appellate department rather than the Court of Appeal or the California Supreme Court, but its reading follows the plain words of section 23100.

Offenses that are limited by place

Some offenses in the same chapter do limit themselves, and Malvitz pointed to them as the contrast. Reckless driving covers driving “upon a highway” (Vehicle Code section 23103(a)) and, under a separate subdivision, driving in an offstreet parking facility as Vehicle Code section 12500(c) defines that term (section 23103(b)). Speed contests and exhibitions of speed are likewise prohibited only on highways and in offstreet parking facilities (Vehicle Code section 23109(a), (c)). Whether a particular lot qualifies can matter for those offenses. It does not matter for DUI, which has no location limit to meet.

Golf carts and similar vehicles

Section 23152 applies to driving “a vehicle.” The Vehicle Code’s definition of a vehicle leaves out only devices moved exclusively by human power or used exclusively on stationary rails or tracks (Vehicle Code section 670), and a golf cart is defined as a “motor vehicle” with limits on its wheels, weight, speed, and passengers (Vehicle Code section 345). A golf cart on a course, in a gated community, or on a private road is covered the same way a car is.

What decides a private-property DUI case

Do not assume that being in a parking lot, on a driveway, inside a gated community, or on a golf cart puts you outside DUI law. The contested questions are the ordinary ones: whether you drove, and whether you were impaired, or at 0.08 percent or more, when you did. The DUI jury instructions list only those two elements and no location (CALCRIM Nos. 2110 and 2111). Driving means volitional movement of the vehicle, though the movement may be slight (CALCRIM No. 2110, Related Issues), which can become the real issue when someone is found in a parked car on a driveway.

Public intoxication is a separate charge with its own rules about public places; see our page on public intoxication. For reckless driving in a parking lot, see our reckless driving page.

If you were arrested somewhere other than a public street, or while driving an unusual vehicle, the Law Offices of David S. Chesley can look at the location, the vehicle, and the evidence that you drove. Call (800) 755-5174 to talk it over.