It’s 4am on the I-90 and a truck driver is 7 hours into his 10-hour shift. The 30-year-old father of 2 has taken this long-haul truck route before but has never had the opportunity to drive this route during the night schedule. With a can of empty monster in the cup holder and public radio playing the greatest rock ’n’ roll hits of the 80s, it has been a long night for the driver who ran out of candy 3 hours earlier. With nothing else to keep him occupied, the gradual warming of the heater warms the cabin and the flannel that he wears provides for great comfort before he slowly blinks himself to sleep. The sudden vibrations of a rumble strip awake the long-haul truck driver and he pulls off the interstate into a truck stop where he can stretch his legs and take a break before continuing his journey to make his delivery.
Not only did those rumble strips save the life of this man, they also made him a statistic in the study of a research experiment that was monitoring his ability to perform under a normal shift carrying a load of revenue-producing goods. In the article, "The Sleep of Long-Haul Truck Drivers," a study involving the amount of sleep truck drivers obtain was measured. The article sought-after sleeping data, monitoring four groups of 20 male truck drivers, as they traveled on their routine routes. Electrophysiological data collection methods were used throughout this research experiment. It was concluded that drivers averaged 5.18 hours in bed per day and 4.78 hours of sleep per day over the five-day study. During discussion of the experiment, it was also concluded that psychomotor performance was impaired if sleep was limited to five hours for two or more consecutive nights and that this type of sleep deprivation could lead to public safety concerns for truck-drivers behind the wheel.
In the article, Risks Associated with Drowsy Driving, it speaks of the elevation of potential for disastrous road events that can occur with little sleep or rest that a person has obtained. Driving while sleepy or drowsy is a top hazard that can most commonly result in collisions and fatalities that can lead to injury or death. The article also mentions that more recently collected data show that this concern is about as dangerous as one who is influenced by drugs or alcohol behind the wheel. “Impairment [having been awake for eighteen hours or more] is similar to having a blood-alcohol content of .05 percent. When individuals stay awake for 24 hours, they have an equivalent of a BAC of .10.” Given that the national limit for intoxication is .08, a completely sober driver who is deprived of sleep could be proved to be just as grave of a threat as a drunk driver. Statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration come to the same conclusion and stated that “Sleep deprivation and fatigue make lapses of attention more likely to occur, and may play a role in behavior that can lead to crashes attributed to other causes.” With a universal understanding for the necessity of sleep to perform and be alert, long-haul truck drivers from our original study still slept for about two hours less than their reported ideal time for sleep they need in order to be alert.
So, is there a necessity for better regulation to protect the long-haul truck drivers? Do we need to educate workers and schedulers about the importance of adequate sleep with respect to public safety? Being that 70% of all goods shipped in the US are carried via trucks, it is imperative that we somehow fix a problem in the part of the economy that relies on the individuals that pull nearly $719 billion in revenue. Tesla has recently announced the development of an ‘Enhanced Autopilot’ truck to go into production in 2019. They mention the statistics of truck-related collisions every year and the massive increase in safety that will come of semiautonomous technology in the future; but what effects will that have on the nearly millions of professional truck drivers in the U.S? All we can do is continue to monitor and enhance the safety of our current drivers behind the wheel while companies like Tesla make the effort to increase safety and minimize risk of what we understand to be drowsy driving.
Works Cited
“Facts and Stats.” Drowsy Driving Stay Alert Arrive Alive RSS, National Sleep
Foundation, 6 Dec. 2017. drowsydriving.org/about/facts-and-stats/.
Marshall, Aarian. (2017, November 17). What Does Tesla’s Automated Truck Mean For
Truckers. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/story/what-does-teslas-truck-mean-for-truckers/
Mitler MM, Miller JC, Lipsitz JJ, Walsh JK, Wylie CD. THE SLEEP OF LONG-HAUL
TRUCK DRIVERS. The New England journal of medicine. 1997;337(11):755-
761. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2430925/.
“Risks Associated with Drowsy Driving.” Edited by HG.org, Hg.org, 20 Nov. 2016,
www.hg.org/article.asp?id=40972.
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