Far Too Many Americans Are Asleep at the Wheel--Literally

The radio is blaring, the window rolled down. You blink hard and try to concentrate. But invisible strings tug your chin and eyelids downward, and you drift to off sleep as your car drifts across lanes.

If you’re lucky, you jerk awake a second later and snap back into focus.

But tens of thousands of people each year aren’t so lucky, and wind up in crashes, many of them fatal. Indeed, falling asleep at the wheel--often just a metaphor for being inattentive on the job--has in its literal sense become a deadly problem on our nation’s highways as folks work longer hours and sleep less.

The U.S. Department of Transportation estimates that at least 50,000 accidents a year are caused by sleepy drivers, with 1,436 deaths in 1992. In California alone last year, 2,355 people were injured or killed in wrecks where sleepiness was a contributing factor--and experts regard these numbers as conservative.

In Washington, a federally sponsored national campaign to warn against the dangers of driving while tired opens in December. In New York, Gov. Mario Cuomo has created a task force on the effects of fatigue on driving, which accounted for as many as half the fatal accidents last year on the New York State Thruway.

“People just don’t know how big a problem this is,” said Dr. Allan Pack, medical director of the National Sleep Foundation, which is helping to mount the nationwide “Drive Alert, Arrive Alive” effort.

What is known is that drowsy driving is fairly widespread. A recent national survey found that more than one-third of drivers reported having felt drowsy while cruising along, although the proportion of those who said they actually fell asleep was smaller.

The tendency to succumb to exhaustion behind the wheel cuts across all boundaries of sex, age and race. But drivers 25 and younger are the most prone to nodding off, because of lifestyles that embrace late-night partying, studying into the wee hours or working evening jobs, Pack said.

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Also at risk are truckers who drive their hulking tractor-trailers throughout the night, often through long, flat stretches of desert or plain. Snoozing becomes almost irresistible, given the monotonous drive, blackness all around, lulling vibrations and the mesmeric quality of watching the broken white stripe in the middle of the road rush toward you and past, toward you and past.

“A lot of drivers get hypnotized,” said Dick Jacoby, president of West East Trucking in Chatsworth, which delivers produce around the country. “A lot of guys, they try to fight it. But you can’t.”

Jacoby, who says he has logged 2 million miles on the road, tells his employees to find a rest stop or a motel if exhaustion hits. “The rule of thumb is if you blink your eyes twice or yawn once, pull off and go to sleep.”

To sleep disorder specialists, the rule of thumb is that humans weren’t designed to perform tasks like driving late at night.

Our natural biological rhythms push us to doze at certain times of the day; the strongest cravings grip us between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. and in the mid- to late afternoon.

Add to those powerful urges the fact that our society is demanding more of its work force, at all hours, and the result is a high potential for sleep deprivation and disaster.

“Society right now is pressing people to work longer hours and take longer commutes. As a whole, we have a bigger sleep debt,” said Dr. Frisca Yan-Go of the UCLA Sleep Disorders Center.

“But you have to pay some back. You cannot be chronically sleep-deprived and not give something back.”

Consider: The Exxon Valdez oil spill and the catastrophe at Three Mile Island both occurred late at night. Fatigue also has led pilots to misread their instrument panels and land not only on the wrong runway, but at the wrong airport.

Last March, a pickup truck packed with 20 people veered off the freeway into a ditch near Barstow, killing 12 and injuring eight others in one of the worst single-vehicle accidents in California history.

The cause: a driver who had fallen sleep.

“They’re like alcohol-related crashes. They’re more severe than the average crash in general,” said Ron Knipling of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

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To try to prevent such catastrophes, Knipling’s agency and private researchers are developing devices that can be installed in cars to detect drowsiness, perhaps by recording how much the car is drifting off center or how often the driver adjusts the steering wheel.

Activating an alarm can warn of drowsiness, but the trick is finding a way to stimulate the driver into steady alertness, especially in a luxury car that maximizes comfort and minimizes effort--a virtual “bed on wheels,” as Pack of the sleep foundation puts it.

One idea is for drowsiness detectors to trigger the car’s ventilation system and lower the heat inside. Another study shows that releasing an odor, like peppermint, may also induce wakefulness.

But experts stress that these are merely short-term measures, like drinking coffee. Sleep cannot be deferred too long.

“It’s like urination in a way. You can put it off, walk around a bit to relieve the pressure, but if you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go,” said Pack.