Overdrive Magazine | Trucking Business News & Owner Operator Info
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/904267
32 | Overdrive | November 2017 BEYOND HOURS simply detecting fatigue and warning the driver. Many of the fatigue-monitoring systems offer remedial material for fleets to use in helping drivers learn about sleep patterns, naps and related fatigue mitigations. Longtime owner-operator and small-fleet owner Harold Hoffman of Springfield, Missouri, believes there's more fruit to be borne in teach- ing fatigue management to new drivers than in any technological approach. He believes too many drivers are coming out of CDL schools without the basics. "Putting a camera in [a driver's] face and knowing it's on all the time – I couldn't han- dle that," Hoffman says. "Go back to letting the person stop and take a nap from time to time. New drivers have not learned early on enough that you don't drive until you're dead tired and then get some sleep. You'll never get enough. Stop when that first or second yawn hits. If you learn to recognize the fact that your body gets tired, we wouldn't need these cameras in your face." How much drowsy driving contributes to the annual toll of 37,461 highway fatalities (based on 2016 numbers) is a matter of speculation due to the difficulty of identifying fatigue as a factor. No one doubts that it's a significant factor, and most observers believe fatigued driving is strongly underre- ported in crash analyses. "Unless a driver admits to law en- forcement they fell asleep, it won't be recorded as a fatigue-related crash," says Don Osterberg. Available data "dramatically underrepresents the is- sue of fatigue" in severe truck crashes. Fatigue plays a part in 30 to 40 per- cent of high-severity truck-involved accidents, Osterberg estimates. If he's correct, nearly 1,500 of the annual truck-involved fatalities (4,317 in 2016) can be blamed at least in part on fatigued driving. In March, former National Highway Traffic Safety Administrator Mark Rosekind said fatigue is a factor in 20 percent of crashes. This was based in part on a series of transportation disasters, only some involving trucks, investigated by the National Transpor- tation Safety Board. The last best look at a represen- tative sample of trucking-specific crashes – incidents involving trucks with an associated injury or fatal- ity – was the 2007 Large Truck Crash Causation Study. It found that 13 percent of involved truckers showed fatigue as an associated factor separate from but contributing to whatever critical reason was noted for the crash. FATIGUE-RELATED FATALITIES NUMBER IN THOUSANDS