It’s time to wake up to the serious effects of drowsy driving.
Alex Noel remembers starting to doze off about 20 minutes after taking the wheel. The next thing he knew, his car was veering off the road. He grabbed the wheel, but overcorrected and ended up upside down in a ditch.
He was 17, and partially paralyzed for months after the accident. “I’m lucky to even be alive.”
Phil Konstantin’s wife was not so lucky. She was killed in a crash after falling asleep at the wheel in 1999.
“[People] don’t necessarily think it can happen to them,” Konstantin previously told The Huffington Post. “It can sneak up on people.”
And it has snuck up. Approximately 83.6 million sleep-deprived Americans drive a car every day, and some 5,000 people lost their lives because of drowsy-driving crashes last year, according to a new report from the Governors Highway Safety Organization.
“We never really truly understand how tired we are,” report author Pam Fischer, a transportation safety consultant and former director of the New Jersey Division of Highway Traffic Safety, told HuffPost. “That’s the scary thing about fatigue.”
The report, which was developed by a panel of sleep medicine doctors, traffic safety administrators and other public health experts, is meant to inform everything from policy to research to private businesses. But it also offers a snapshot to those of us on the road showing just how dangerous ― and how underestimated ― the problem of drowsy driving really is.
Here are eight shocking findings about drowsy driving revealed in the report:
1. Drowsy driving crashes cost Americans $109 billion a year – the first time a dollar amount has been attached to the societal costs of drowsy driving.
2. Drowsy drivers are 3.5 times more likely to crash – approximately 36,000 crashes were investigated as part of the study.
3. Each year, approximately 328,000 drowsy driving rashes happen in the U.S. – a representative sample of 14,268 crashes across the country that happened between 2009 and 2013 were investigated. Six percent of those crashes involved a drowsy driver.
4. Drowsy driving plays a role in nearly a quarter of fatal crashes – there are approximately 6,400 such fatal crashes annually.
5. After 21 hours without sleep, your driving is about as good as if your were drunk – Research has compared simulated driving behavior in people who were sleep deprived with people whose blood alcohol concentration levels were 0, 0.05 and 0.08 percent.
6. Ten to 20 percent of all fatalities in the U.S. involving large truck and bus crashes also involved a tired driver – Long hours, irregular schedules and the economic pressures are among the factors that put commercial drivers at risk.
7. Caffeine does NOT prevent drowsy driving – it can take 20 to 30 minutes for caffeine’s cognitive boost to kick in, and those benefits basically disappear if you’ve gone too many nights without sufficient sleep.
8. More than two in five drivers admit to having fallen asleep at the wheel – in a survey of 2,545 drivers, 43.2 percent reported having fallen asleep at the wheel at least once in their lifetime
Read more of the original article for charts and report statistics in The Huffington Post.
