Tiredness: Killer No.1

The Sunday Times
01/06/2003

Driving fatigued has been found to be a bigger danger than driving drunk

by James Foxall

Years of hard-hitting television campaigns have drilled it into most motorists that drink-driving is socially and morally unacceptable, yet experts are now warning that tiredness is far more of problem. The latest studies carried out on behalf of the government by Loughborough University's Sleep Research Centre (LSRC) suggests that at least a fifth of all motorway crashes are caused by tired drivers.

Research on the A1 in North Yorkshire identified 16% of crashes as being sleep related compared with 3% that were linked to alcohol.

Road safety campaigners complain that the Department for Transport still spends 25% a year less publicising the problem of driver fatigue than the £2m it puts into anti-drink-driving advertising.

The result is that with only a vague appreciation of the dangers almost all drivers have been on the road while tired and many go to alarming lengths to keep their eyes open at the wheel. A survey by LSRC's commercial arm Awake discovered one man who put drawing pins under an elastic band around his wrist to stay awake, an air stewardess who shut her hair in the sunroof so that if she nodded off she would be jerked back to consciousness, a lorry driver who stood up in his cab, a man who sucked lemons and another who recounted his sexual exploits to himself to prevent sleepiness.

But despite this inventiveness, there is overwhelming evidence to suggest that these ploys don't work. Dr Paul Jackson, a former research manager at the Department for Transport, said: "You feel sleepy because you need sleep, it's as simple as that. When your eyes are closing and your head is nodding you've gone beyond the point when you should stop driving."

Experts emphasise that fatigue induces a gradual, sliding scale of impairment, in exactly the same way as alcohol. Both ultimately result in blackout, but a driver's responses can be seriously diminished long before this stage is reached.

An increasing number of solutions aimed at preventing drivers from dozing off at the wheel are now becoming available. The Nap Zapper is a new device that clips behind the ear like a hearing aid. As soon as it detects the driver's head nodding it emits either a loud bleep or vibrates. It costs £15 and is available from www.secret-orders.com.

Former lorry driver Aaron Mason has invented the AM2000 device that plugs into a cigarette lighter. This emits a series of audible and visible warnings on a timed sequence and the driver has to switch these off within a set time. If it's not turned off an alarm is triggered to warn the driver to take a break. It costs £59.99 and is available from www.driverfatiguesystems.co.uk.

There is a variety of CDs available, too. Awake at the Wheel is an American product that gives advice on how to stay alert when driving. It costs around £13 and is available from www.awakeatthewheel.com.

But according to Awake any device that relies on waking a tired driver is flawed. The organisation emphasises that the only solution is to have a caffeine-laden drink such as Red Bull - motorway services' coffee is often too weak to have any effect, apparently - then have a 15-20 minute nap.

To help, Awake has produced a Driver Reviver CD or cassette using soothing "pink" noise - similar to the sound from an untuned radio with the high and low frequencies removed. This is designed to block out background noise as the driver parks by the roadside and has a 20-minute nap. A voice from the CD then commands "wake up", hopefully leaving the driver refreshed and ready to continue. The CD costs £11.95 (tape £8.95) and is available from the AWAKE shop.

Road safety groups are now calling for the government to include fatigue in advertising campaigns targeting drink or drugs. In the courts, growing pressure to get tough on tired drivers is already having effect.

In February the independent Sentencing Advisory Panel (SAP) advised that drivers who kill because they've fallen asleep should face at least two years in jail; the lord chief justice later decided that the minimum should be a nine-month sentence. But crucially both agreed that from now on fatigue should be regarded as an aggravating rather than mitigating factor. Tired drivers, they said, have a simple duty: to stop.