FATIGUE AND DRIVING

Abstract

The accumulation of recent evidence on accident rates in relation to exposure to risk makes it possible to re-evaluate the contribution of fatigue to road safety, particularly in relation to the working hours of professional drivers. While there is little evidence that the actual task of driving itself is a major contributor to fatigue, a range of temporal and other variables have shown strong associations with accident rates, including hours of work, time of day, type of shift, together with age of driver and type of transport operation. There is some evidence for cumulative effects over several days. However, fatigue should not be thought of as a simple function of these variables, because there are various ways and strategies of coping with fatigue over the short term, and over the longer term, processes of adaptation and selection are also important.