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Comment by closeparen | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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