Can you afford to take a $330,000 micro-nap? Didn’t think so. But that, according to estimates from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, is the average cost of an injury suffered in a wreck involving a medium- or heavy-duty truck. And the price tag rises 10-fold, to more than $3 million, if that wreck results in a death.
This week, Nov. 5-12, is National Drowsy Driving Prevention Week. Though it lacks the high profile visibility of the drunk driving issue, drowsy driving very likely is a more frequent — and potentially just as deadly — problem today.
The Centers for Disease Control estimated that there are about 111 million cases of drunk driving annually in the United States (only about 1% of which result in arrests and convictions). Yet virtually everyone agrees that incidents of drowsy-driving or driving-while-asleep far out-number the incidents of drunk driving.
That’s why it’s it doesn’t take much stretch of the imagination to conclude that one of the factors contributing to many commercial truck crashes each year is drivers unintentionally dozing off behind the wheel for only a second or two, or, just as bad, stubbornly continuing to drive while fighting drowsiness.
Driver fatigue as a cause of crashes is likely under reported
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration conservatively estimates that 100,000 police-reported crashes are the direct result of driver fatigue each year. This results in an estimated 1,550 deaths, 71,000 injuries, and $12.5 billion in monetary losses. But that’s likely just the tip of the iceberg, since it is almost impossible to determine to what degree sleepiness played a role in specific crashes.
Nor is it possible to know just how frequently drivers, including professional commercial truck drivers, somehow avoid getting into a wreck even though they dozed off briefly behind the wheel or continued to drive while heavily impaired by their own drowsiness. Such events don’t get reported to police or safety monitoring organizations. But both logic and experience tell us that the difference between “mere” drowsy driving events and actual asleep-at-the-wheel crashes typically is only a second or two.
But we do have a pretty good idea of how common a problem driving-while-sleepy is. According to the National Sleep Foundation’s Sleep in America poll in 2005, 60 percent of adult drivers — about 168 million people at the time — said they had driven a vehicle while feeling drowsy in the previous year, and more than one-third reported that they actually had fallen asleep at the wheel. Indeed, of those who said they’d nodded off while driving 13 percent said they had done so at least once a month in the previous year. Four percent — approximately 11 million drivers — admitted to having an accident or near accident because they dozed off or were too tired to drive.
And there’s zero evidence that the problem as abated in the 12 years since that time.
Regulations and technology trying to combat drowsy driving
Yes, tougher federal, state and corporate rules on driver duty time are efforts aimed, at least partially, at reducing drowsy driving. And one of the explicit motivations for the federal electronic logging device (ELD) mandate that will take effect on Dec. 18 is the reduction of drowsy driving. But Hours of Service mandates that drivers be off the road for set periods of time. It cannot force them to get the proper amount of sleep during those off-the-road hours in order to be fully alert drivers when they go back on duty.
Increasingly, however, drivers and trucking companies have access to technology tools that can help them determine when they, or some other driver can expect to struggle or drowsiness or, in fact, to determine in real time that they are fighting sleep. Onboard sensors and/or video camera systems can be used (either in review or in real time) to help spot the tell-tale signs of a driver struggling to stay awake: lane drifting and frequent unintentional lane departures; difficulties maintaining a steady speed in open highway conditions; heavy braking related to tailgating; improper gear selection relative to terrain and/or curves and congestion.
Common objections to using such equipment typically include the cost and concerns about drivers being put off by “micro-management.” But given potential for drivers being ticketed, injured, or even killed — and the potential costs related to crashes involving injuries or fatalities — the use of such monitoring technology is both cheap and a strong expression of management’s concern for lives, including drivers’ lives.