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What would you think of a rule that said you could only continue driving if you have slept for at least 6 of the past 24 hours? (I'm not sure what the exact num

What would you think of a rule that said you could only continue driving if you have slept for at least 6 of the past 24 hours? (I'm not sure what the exact numbers should be, but you get the idea.)

BurningFrog 11y ago
Sounds like a sensible rule that is impossible to enforce.
- Aloha 11y ago
  Agreed.
- MrBuddyCasino 11y ago
  In Germany, trucks are required to have trip recorders. The police can (and will) check them to see if the minimum resting times were observed. Don't american trucks have something similar?
  - nickff 11y ago
    Logs are kept, but the posts above are making the point that drivers should be required to sleep a certain number of hours of the past 24 hours. Logs do not help you with this, unless you are using a sleep tracking device.
    - michaelt 11y ago
      If your legal standard is "no more than 10 hours driving in any continuous 24 hour period, and at least 9 hours of continuous rest period" you don't know for /sure/ that the driver will sleep in the 14 hours they're not driving, but why wouldn't he/she?
      - MichaelGG 11y ago
        I guess it's because they might be shifting to a new schedule and it wasn't feasible to change sleep patterns? So if you get in at 00:00 one day, sleep until 08:00. Then you don't get a new assignment until 02:00 the next day day, you will have the necessary gap, but not have had any real way to have slept the right time. You would have needed to force yourself to sleep in the afternoon/evening, and, even with drugs, that is a hard thing to pull off.
      - mcguire 11y ago
        I believe the industry successfully fought off a simple hours-of-service schedule like that several years ago. Instead, you have: http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/hours-service/summary-hours-service-regulations http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/hours-service/summary-h....
      - BurningFrog 11y ago
        Not everyone is blessed with the capacity to sleep at will.
  - kw71 11y ago
    Nope, logs are all manual entries on sheets of paper.
    - lsc 11y ago
      https://www.speedgauge.net/ https://www.speedgauge.net/ I only know about this 'cause I know some of their sysadmins. but there's a whole industry of automated truck-tracking and truck-activity logging out there. Most of it, I think, is focused on reducing liability/reducing insurance costs, I think; I don't think most of it is legally mandated. Note, I've also heard from other people who's pagers go off when certain devices can't resolve GPS signals that a common cause of their pager going off is a trucker driving by with a GPS jammer that was being used to defeat one of these automatic truck logging deals. So... yeah, it's not legally mandated or anything, but automatic logging of truck activity and speed is pretty common.
      - L_Rahman 11y ago
        It is legally mandated now, and the fleets have till 2018 to implement automated truck-tracking. I work at an enterprise hardware company and we get lots of inbound customer inquiries from logistics companies in the trucking space.
  - ihaveajob 11y ago
    They do, in all western countries I know of. But that log can't check hours of sleep by the driver. On the other hand, this might be a whole new business segment for Fitbit and the like.
- ivanca 11y ago
  Easy enough, with the help of a GPS you can check that the driver can't be on the move for more than 16 hours straigh without an 8-hours reccess. If he wants to do something else instead of sleep that's his problem.
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  Pilots have rules like that and they seem to work. But I suppose the massive regulation of airline safety makes it rather much easier to implement. But how are they enforcing the anti drug stuff? A relative is a trucker and I recall him telling me it wasn't worth screwing around with alertness meds (speed, modafinil, etc) due to risks of getting caught. (And some similar stuff for taking on passengers/hitchhikers?) Seems like if that kind of oversight is in place then adding sleep restrictions is not hard. Or do you mean that they'd technically have had enough time to sleep, but in reality they weren't actually sleeping, but short of invasive biomonitoring it's impossible to tell? (One could be in bed, reading, for example.)
  - BurningFrog 11y ago
    Yeah, you can monitor the vehicle, but to ensure people sleep you'd need to enforce video evidence at least. Maybe people with no experience of insomnia just don't consider the possibility.
Aloha 11y ago
It would be resoundingly ignored, and its utterly unenforceable. Right now, if you're a driver and you decline a load, it may be days to get another one at times, especially if you're stuck in a city with a ton of inbound freight, but not too much outbound freight - so you take what you can, push your endurance, and hope you can get far enough out of town that they wont try to swap it on you.
- op00to 11y ago
  ... So obviously the solution is to keep killing motorists so you can get a paycheck. Gotcha.
  - URSpider94 11y ago
    Drivers are fallible human beings. With families. And car payments. And mortgages. Many of them own their own trucks, and have to make payments on those as well. I'm pretty damned sure that nobody goes out on the road thinking that they're going to kill someone, while destroying their livelihood and injuring themselves in the process. If you knew that the difference between working today and not being able to work for another several days was to put in a few extra hours, are you telling me you'd never make that same decision yourself?
  - Aloha 11y ago
    The article is weasel worded, frankly. In 2013 there were 32,719 vehicle related deaths in the US, 3,964 of them involved a 'large truck' in other words about 12.5% of total deaths. According to the IIHS - the number of fatalities per 100 million miles traveled is significantly lower (.88 for passenger vehicles in a large truck involved crash and .21 for occupants of large trucks) than the average for all vehicle (1.10) - and in just 15 (1998) years the numbers have declined significantly (from 1.67 and .37, and 1.8 respectively). I'd be happy to hear what your solution to the problem is, I realize any death at all is a shame, but nothing can be made 100% safe - statistically, you're at a greater risk of dying of stomach cancer, suicide or malaria - than you are to die in a vehicle accident of any kind (11.6 deaths per 100,000 in the US), or for that matter you're more likely to die of Melanoma, Hepatitis B or an Upper Respiratory Infection then you are to die in an accident with a large truck (.9 deaths per 100,000 in the US are involving a large truck). The solutions are neither clear, nor easy, but if you have one, I'd be open to ideas.
tetraodonpuffer 11y ago
even if you enforce that it's still not gonna help with the fact that as much as people would like it circadian rhythms don't adjust instantly. Ever changing shifts are the bane of a good existence, working nights all the time is fine, working nights a week every 2-3 or worse, 2-3 days a week, is going to cause a lot of problems for everybody. From my perspective I would totally gamify cars/trucks for everybody, every time you want to go somewhere you get your reflexes tested, if your reaction time is higher than a certain amount the car won't start. This will catch anybody who is too tired just as well as anybody who has been drinking I would think, which in the end works about the same when it comes to road safety.
- hyperpape 11y ago
  Sounds foolproof. The first time someone can't start their car when they need it because of a glitch in your software/inaccuracies in the testing method, you are in serious trouble.
  - tetraodonpuffer 11y ago
    isn't there already plenty of software involved in starting your car that could have bugs and prevent it from starting? I don't think an embedded reaction time test is that hard to get right compared to the software that has to deal with the engine internals and so on.
    - hyperpape 11y ago
      As a rule, things involving human action are unreliable and suffer from false positives.

What would you think of a rule that said you could only continue driving if you have slept for at least 6 of the past 24 hours? (I'm not sure what the exact numbers should be, but you get the idea.)

BurningFrog 11y ago

Sounds like a sensible rule that is impossible to enforce.

Aloha 11y ago
Agreed.
MrBuddyCasino 11y ago
In Germany, trucks are required to have trip recorders. The police can (and will) check them to see if the minimum resting times were observed. Don't american trucks have something similar?
- nickff 11y ago
  Logs are kept, but the posts above are making the point that drivers should be required to sleep a certain number of hours of the past 24 hours. Logs do not help you with this, unless you are using a sleep tracking device.
  - michaelt 11y ago
    If your legal standard is "no more than 10 hours driving in any continuous 24 hour period, and at least 9 hours of continuous rest period" you don't know for /sure/ that the driver will sleep in the 14 hours they're not driving, but why wouldn't he/she?
    - MichaelGG 11y ago
      I guess it's because they might be shifting to a new schedule and it wasn't feasible to change sleep patterns? So if you get in at 00:00 one day, sleep until 08:00. Then you don't get a new assignment until 02:00 the next day day, you will have the necessary gap, but not have had any real way to have slept the right time. You would have needed to force yourself to sleep in the afternoon/evening, and, even with drugs, that is a hard thing to pull off.
    - mcguire 11y ago
      I believe the industry successfully fought off a simple hours-of-service schedule like that several years ago. Instead, you have: http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/hours-service/summary-hours-service-regulations http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/hours-service/summary-h....
    - BurningFrog 11y ago
      Not everyone is blessed with the capacity to sleep at will.
- kw71 11y ago
  Nope, logs are all manual entries on sheets of paper.
  - lsc 11y ago
    https://www.speedgauge.net/ https://www.speedgauge.net/ I only know about this 'cause I know some of their sysadmins. but there's a whole industry of automated truck-tracking and truck-activity logging out there. Most of it, I think, is focused on reducing liability/reducing insurance costs, I think; I don't think most of it is legally mandated. Note, I've also heard from other people who's pagers go off when certain devices can't resolve GPS signals that a common cause of their pager going off is a trucker driving by with a GPS jammer that was being used to defeat one of these automatic truck logging deals. So... yeah, it's not legally mandated or anything, but automatic logging of truck activity and speed is pretty common.
    - L_Rahman 11y ago
      It is legally mandated now, and the fleets have till 2018 to implement automated truck-tracking. I work at an enterprise hardware company and we get lots of inbound customer inquiries from logistics companies in the trucking space.
- ihaveajob 11y ago
  They do, in all western countries I know of. But that log can't check hours of sleep by the driver. On the other hand, this might be a whole new business segment for Fitbit and the like.
ivanca 11y ago
Easy enough, with the help of a GPS you can check that the driver can't be on the move for more than 16 hours straigh without an 8-hours reccess. If he wants to do something else instead of sleep that's his problem.
MichaelGG 11y ago
Pilots have rules like that and they seem to work. But I suppose the massive regulation of airline safety makes it rather much easier to implement. But how are they enforcing the anti drug stuff? A relative is a trucker and I recall him telling me it wasn't worth screwing around with alertness meds (speed, modafinil, etc) due to risks of getting caught. (And some similar stuff for taking on passengers/hitchhikers?) Seems like if that kind of oversight is in place then adding sleep restrictions is not hard. Or do you mean that they'd technically have had enough time to sleep, but in reality they weren't actually sleeping, but short of invasive biomonitoring it's impossible to tell? (One could be in bed, reading, for example.)
- BurningFrog 11y ago
  Yeah, you can monitor the vehicle, but to ensure people sleep you'd need to enforce video evidence at least. Maybe people with no experience of insomnia just don't consider the possibility.

Aloha 11y ago

It would be resoundingly ignored, and its utterly unenforceable. Right now, if you're a driver and you decline a load, it may be days to get another one at times, especially if you're stuck in a city with a ton of inbound freight, but not too much outbound freight - so you take what you can, push your endurance, and hope you can get far enough out of town that they wont try to swap it on you.

op00to 11y ago
... So obviously the solution is to keep killing motorists so you can get a paycheck. Gotcha.
- URSpider94 11y ago
  Drivers are fallible human beings. With families. And car payments. And mortgages. Many of them own their own trucks, and have to make payments on those as well. I'm pretty damned sure that nobody goes out on the road thinking that they're going to kill someone, while destroying their livelihood and injuring themselves in the process. If you knew that the difference between working today and not being able to work for another several days was to put in a few extra hours, are you telling me you'd never make that same decision yourself?
- Aloha 11y ago
  The article is weasel worded, frankly. In 2013 there were 32,719 vehicle related deaths in the US, 3,964 of them involved a 'large truck' in other words about 12.5% of total deaths. According to the IIHS - the number of fatalities per 100 million miles traveled is significantly lower (.88 for passenger vehicles in a large truck involved crash and .21 for occupants of large trucks) than the average for all vehicle (1.10) - and in just 15 (1998) years the numbers have declined significantly (from 1.67 and .37, and 1.8 respectively). I'd be happy to hear what your solution to the problem is, I realize any death at all is a shame, but nothing can be made 100% safe - statistically, you're at a greater risk of dying of stomach cancer, suicide or malaria - than you are to die in a vehicle accident of any kind (11.6 deaths per 100,000 in the US), or for that matter you're more likely to die of Melanoma, Hepatitis B or an Upper Respiratory Infection then you are to die in an accident with a large truck (.9 deaths per 100,000 in the US are involving a large truck). The solutions are neither clear, nor easy, but if you have one, I'd be open to ideas.

tetraodonpuffer 11y ago

even if you enforce that it's still not gonna help with the fact that as much as people would like it circadian rhythms don't adjust instantly. Ever changing shifts are the bane of a good existence, working nights all the time is fine, working nights a week every 2-3 or worse, 2-3 days a week, is going to cause a lot of problems for everybody. From my perspective I would totally gamify cars/trucks for everybody, every time you want to go somewhere you get your reflexes tested, if your reaction time is higher than a certain amount the car won't start. This will catch anybody who is too tired just as well as anybody who has been drinking I would think, which in the end works about the same when it comes to road safety.

hyperpape 11y ago
Sounds foolproof. The first time someone can't start their car when they need it because of a glitch in your software/inaccuracies in the testing method, you are in serious trouble.
- tetraodonpuffer 11y ago
  isn't there already plenty of software involved in starting your car that could have bugs and prevent it from starting? I don't think an embedded reaction time test is that hard to get right compared to the software that has to deal with the engine internals and so on.
  - hyperpape 11y ago
    As a rule, things involving human action are unreliable and suffer from false positives.