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Comment by joker3 | Hacker News Reader

If you drive while sleep-deprived, you're at a significantly higher risk of being involved in a fatal accident. And it might not be you that gets killed.

https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/best-cars-blog/2016/12/d...

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I remember reading somewhere that if you're driving after being awake for over 24 hours it's the equivalent of driving with a 0.08 BAC (the legal limit in many countries).

I've done long haul driving while sleep deprived before, and I can believe it (not that I've driven while drunk to compare). I've done 9 hours of driving on 1 hour of sleep, fuelling myself with energy drinks and blasting the air conditioning on cold to keep me awake. In retrospect, not the best judgement, but I had my reasons at the time.

Yes. One of my worst and most shameful memories is nearly falling asleep at the wheel.

That was the first and last time. It's way too easy to think it can't happen to you. You just have to take it seriously.

Self-driving tech can't arrive fast enough.

Yep. We need to treat driving while sleep-deprived like driving while drunk. This has some societally untenable implications: new parents, people whose jobs/commutes/responsibilities do not leave time for enough sleep, people with on-call jobs, etc. need to have their driver licenses revoked. But I can at least set this standard for myself: if I haven't slept enough, I don't drive.

I don't think that will work. For example, I just admitted that this happened to me in a sibling comment, and immediately my reflex was to delete it.

Then I thought better of it. We are all human, and we're all pressed for time. We're not out partying. No one drinks to do their jobs.

My brother and I make mobile apps. We had an office downtown in a large city. We would often work 20-24 hours and then drive home exhausted. A year ago, one block from our office while stopped at a red light, we saw a vehicle turn left hard on a yellow right as a bicyclist was crossing and hit the woman and she flew at least 6 feet vertically in the air. We called emergency services and someone else was right over helping her. When we drove past her she was out cold on the cement. I don't know what happened, but I assume she lived or I would have been called back by the police for my testimony. That was the day we decided we would no longer go to the office even though we had 4 more months on the lease. It just wasn't worth risking killing someone. I'm glad to have had that experience to shock me into realizing how stupid it was to be driving tired.

This is not practically doable.

- There is no objective test the police can administer to determine that you're legally over the sleep deprivation limit.

- Unlike drinking, bad sleep is not (always) a choice people make. Many people don't even know they don't sleep well, and people's estimate of how many hours they sleep per night are often astonishingly wrong.

The psychomotor vigilance task (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychomotor_vigilance_task) is the gold standard for alertness testing. It's practical for the police to administer it during a traffic stop.

Right. Driving while drunk slows your reaction time. Falling asleep negates it. So sleep-related accidents are actually more dangerous.

Have you got any articles that show that? I would be interested to read more.

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