You’re done with your shift. It’s time to go home. How many hours have you worked without sleep? If you haven’t slept at least five hours in the last 24, when you get behind the wheel your drowsiness could
You’re done with your shift. It’s time to go home. How many hours have you worked without sleep? If you haven’t slept at least five hours in the last 24, when you get behind the wheel your drowsiness could pose a very real danger to you, as well as others on the road. In fact, you are six times more likely to be involved in a crash. Drowsy driving is a very real thing, just like drunk driving.
- Every year 100,000 police-reported crashes involve drowsy driving, resulting in 1,550 fatalities and 71,000 injuries.
- However, a study by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety suggests that the real number of drowsy driving crashes is more than triple that number – 328,000 crashes with 6,400 fatalities and 109,000 injuries.
- The Governor’s Highway Safety Association says that more than 5,000 people died in drowsy driving crashes in 2015 alone.
The National Safety Council makes no bones about it:
- If you are driving after more than 20 hours without sleep, it is the equivalent of driving with a blood-alcohol concentration of 0.08% – the US legal limit – considered driving drunk in every state.
If you wouldn’t drive after drinking, then it’s time to realize you can’t drive after not sleeping. The National Sleep Foundation agrees. It’s Drowsy Driving Consensus Panel 2016, stated that an individual is “unfit to drive” if he or she has slept two or fewer hours in the past 24 hours.
AAA conducted drowsy driving research using in-vehicle dashcam video from more than 700 crashes. “Using a scientific measure linking the percentage of time a person’s eyes are closed to their level of drowsiness, the researchers determined that 9.5% of all crashes and 10.8% of crashes resulting in significant property damage involved drowsiness. Federal estimates indicate drowsiness is a factor in only one to two percent of crashes.”
In other words, drowsy driving is one of the most underreported traffic safety issues in the US.
Drowsy driving is so dangerous and causing so many crashes, injuries, and fatalities that the issue reached the National Transportation Safety Board’s (NTSB) annual wishlist. In 2016, “reducing fatigue-related accidents” topped the NTSB’s Most Wanted Transportation Safety Improvements list. When drowsy driving tops what is essentially your Christmas list, you know it is a significant issue.
Drowsy Driving Can Be Tough to Identify
The problem is that not all crashes can be identified as caused by drowsy driving. The driver may be fully awake by the time police arrive and may not realize that he or she felt drowsy at the time of the accident. When the AAA Foundation studied drivers who fell asleep and crashed, they found “nearly half said they felt only “