anita's*thoughts

Saturday, January 08, 2005

Is driving tired the the new driving drunk?

A girl at work was telling us that her and her husband drove home from Hamilton at 5 am on the 1st of Jan and her husband nodded off a couple of times. I found myself mentally frowning upon this. About half an hour before that another guy at work told me that a friend of his was hurt in a fatal car accident when an on-coming driver fell asleep at the wheel. I suppose I was being a little judgemental but I had to question the responsibility of driving tired.

It is no longer socially acceptable to drive drunk. But is it still ok to drive tired?

6 Comments:

Thats kinda funny.
I read something similar about doctors. It's regarded as very bad to drink then operate, yet often doctors view working in a state induced by tiredness that is comparable to being drunk as OK

I suspect the lack of concern is because drinking or not is more quantifiable than getting tired, and we all do the later to varying degrees, so its very hard to draw lines.

By Nathan, at 10:37 pm, January 08, 2005

Having done 32 hour days occasionally I would say being tired is just as bad when opperating machinery like vehicles. Depth perception seems to be one thing that gets affected and in the case of cars thats the difference of hitting something or not, and stopping in time for lights and corners.

Next time you are getting off at the Manukau offramp (coming from the city) check the last light on the left. Many moons ago my father wrote off a car through that light due to falling asleep at the wheel.

Its about time the law against "not being in full control of a motor vehicle" was enforced properly.

By Anonymous, at 6:53 am, January 09, 2005

how are they going to enforce it?

By Nathan, at 9:18 pm, January 09, 2005

Please - no more stupid laws to replace responsibility and common-sense.

How do you spot-test tiredness?

By Dan, at 9:19 am, January 10, 2005

Interesting - can you legislate against stupidity....

By Anonymous, at 8:37 pm, January 10, 2005

Its not new legislation. The law already exists. The police simply do not enforce it. Not having control of a vehicle is a wide ranging offense. It covers drugged drivers, drink drivers and other instances where control is lost. It is illegal to drive while writing text messages on your phone.

Sleep deprivation causes judgment to become impaired. Just as alcohol dulls the mind of drinkers so does lack of sleep.

How to detect a tired driver is obviously not easy. There will be signs that a random stop might be able to see, but as with drunk driving most cases will be identified once the offender has already taken an illegal action such as straying between lanes randomly or scraping the side barrier.
Just because we can't prevent it doesn't mean it should go unnoticed.

And we only say we can't prevent it because no method of detection springs immediately to mind. Further study may reveal an easy detection method. Just like the Australian's random drug tests now (ignore the Aussies false positives).

By Anonymous, at 5:33 am, January 11, 2005