One in five truck drivers reports falling asleep at the wheel

When a tractor-trailer overturned on a Maryland road, it spilled lumber onto the roadway below and killed a motorist.

The same week in a nearby Virginia community, a jury awarded $17 million to the family of a 17 year-old killed in a truck crash.

Even worse was a Florida crash in which a truck hit a van, killing all seven of the van’s child passengers. When their grandfather learned of the tragedy, he suffered a fatal heart attack.

A common aspect of these crashes is truck driver fatigue. The Maryland trucker had been driving for 16 hours without rest. The one in Virginia fell asleep at the wheel. The Florida trucker had napped only briefly during the past 34 hours.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has been surveying truck drivers since 2003 to see how changes in federal work-hour rules are affecting the fatigue problem. The trend during the past two years, under the latest set of federal rules, is for truckers to drive even more hours than they were reporting in 2003 surveys, exacerbating fatigue, according to the IIHS.

Nearly one of every five truckers in 2005 reported driving more per day than before the current work-hour rules took effect in 2004.

The proportion who reported falling asleep at the wheel at least once during the past month increased from about 13 percent in 2003 to 21 percent in 2005.

More than 5,000 people died in large truck crashes in 2005, according to IIHS. Fifteen percent of these deaths were truck occupants, 71 percent were occupants of cars and other passenger vehicles, and 12 percent were pedestrians, bicyclists, or motorcyclists. Large truck crash deaths have declined 23 percent overall since 1979, when they were at an all-time high. Short-haul drivers on the other hand, which make up over half the commercial fleet, are involved in less than 7 percent of the nation’s fatigue-related fatal truck crashes, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.

Parts of this report were reprinted with permission from the Status Report newsletter, published by IIHS.