Asleep at the Wheel

When I was a little girl, my father left for work at 3 am. He was a meatpacker, drove from Jersey to Brooklyn in a refrigerated van, arriving for the slaughterhouse delivery. But on Saturdays he just had to catch up on inventory, so he stayed for breakfast with the family, then took me with him to the plant. After his six-day week of work, he was utterly spent. On the way home, I'd sit on a milk crate in the meat truck where the passenger seat would have been, except there was no passenger seat, just a square of waxy floor and a little girl on a milk crate, talking on her daddy's talk CB radio. "Ten four, good buddy," I'd say. Then I'd look over at my father for approval. More often than not, he'd be dozing off. Once we even swerved off the right shoulder. This was the 1970s, before highways had rumble strips in the pavement to jolt a sleeping driver. "Daddy!" I'd scream. He'd startle, blubber his lips and open the windows wide. I thought it was hilarious. In fact, it was downright treacherous. Last year, the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety released a study showing that drowsy driving involves about one in six deadly crashes. But vehicles in which a passenger accompanied the driver were nearly 50% less likely to be involved in a drowsy-driving-related crash. So perhaps it was a lucky thing I was on that milk crate! My dad's snooze-and-veer maneuver was probably pretty typical: 57% of drowsy driving crashes involved the driver drifting into other lanes or even off the road. Here, my old man was just trying to make a living and spend time with his daughter, but he could have killed us both -- and passengers in other vehicles, too. It turns out that he was like many drowsy drivers out there. An AAA Foundation study, based on interviews with drivers after crashes, indicated that drowsy drivers were nearly twice as likely to work at more than one job, and their primary job was much more likely to involve non-standard hours. Working the night shift increased the odds of a sleep-related car accident by nearly six times. There are technological advances in the works to address drowsy driving. A Swedish eye-tracking company, Tobii, is designing an auto technology system that uses two sensors placed at different angles in a vehicle, but this platform only covers detection of drowsiness. Auto manufacturers would have to integrate Tobii into their existing safety systems to alert drivers about their drowsiness. Applications for iPhones and iPads are in development to calculate a driver's drowsiness in real time via reaction tests. I wonder: Will drivers pull over to use these apps, or will we have doubly distracted drivers -- fatigued and tapping away on their iPhones to find out if they're too tired to drive? It seemed so much simpler when it was just my daddy, the CB radio, and I, on the milk crate. Sources:rnhttp://www.drowsydriving.org/rnhttp://www.aaafoundation.org/pdf/sleep.pdfrnhttp://www.danielrrosen.com/2011/12/swedish-companys-drowsy-driving-detection-system/