Uncle Sam wants you to get more sleep. He has good reason. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) estimates tired, drowsy or fatigued drivers cause somewhere between 200 and 500 highway fatalities a year.

Ensuring drivers get more rest is the prime reason for the agency's first significant revision of the commercial driver hours-of-services regulations in over 60 years. Among other things, the new hours-of-service rules, which take effect Jan. 4, 2004, would allow drivers to drive one extra hour a day, up from 10 to 11 hours.

But the rule increases the off-duty time required between driving shifts from 8 to 10 hours and decreases the on-duty time per day from 15 to 14 hours. As with the current rule, drivers cannot accumulate more than 60 hours of on-duty time in seven consecutive days or 70 hours in eight days. The new rule requires 34 consecutive hours off before restarting the duty cycle.

The rule governs drivers moving freight in interstate commerce in commercial vehicles with a GVW rating of 10,001 lb. or more or transporting hazardous materials in quantities requiring placards.

When unveiled in April, the rule was warmly greeted by the trucking industry as a "rule we can live with," as a statement from the American Trucking Assns. put it. Other groups, such as OOIDA, have said the new rule will do little to improve truck safety until the industry addresses other issues. Safety and labor groups on the other hand, decry the rule's increase in driving time from 10 to 11 hours per day and say the rule will hurt traffic safety.

A GOOD START
Fatigue researchers say the rule is an important step and should help improve highway safety and allow drivers the opportunity to get more rest. But they caution the revised rule by itself, even if followed to the letter, cannot ensure that drivers are sufficiently rested for their job.

"I'm not sure if being in compliance necessarily helps fight fatigue," says Mike Crum, a logistics and transportation professor at Iowa State University's College of Business. For one thing, lack of rest is but one of many factors that contribute to driver fatigue, Crum says. Plus, giving a driver extra time off does not do much good if the driver does not use that time wisely. "Ten hours is a better opportunity for sleep, but frankly it really boils down to how the drivers use the time," he says. "You can't legislate that."

Crum has done research on driver fatigue and other transportation issues. He co-authored a study for FMCSA on how certain driving environments affect driver alertness. He believes the new rule is an improvement over the current rule because it gives drivers an opportunity to get rest.

"One thing I do like," says Crum, "is the longer downtime, from 8 to 10 hours. I think that will afford an opportunity for drivers to get more sleep. Eight hours, which the current rule allowed, just isn't enough. It's hard to unwind and get enough sleep in only 8 hours."

CONTROVERSY AHEAD
Todd Dawson, director of grants, research and special projects at Circadian Technologies, a firm that provides fatigue management solutions to the trucking industry, agrees the rule moves in the right direction.

Anytime you see an improvement, that's a good thing," he says. "It’s definitely a step in the right direction. Is it the final solution? Probably not. I suspect that at some point in the future there will be revisions again.”

For some groups, these revisions represent a retreat on highway safety. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters says the new rule ignores safety by increasing driving time from 10 to 11 hours per day.

"These new rules from DOT will only increase driver fatigue, and we know that fatigue creates danger on the highways," Teamster president James P. Hoffa said in a press release.

Some safety groups have also slammed the revised rule. Parents Against Tired Truckers (PATT) and Citizens for Reliable and Safe Highways (CRASH) released a joint statement saying the increase in driving time and the exclusion of on-board data recorders as compliance tools will not address driver fatigue.

In the release, PATT and CRASH claim that federal regulators "placed trucking productivity ahead of safety in its decision-making process." The groups say they will continue to lobby for mandated on-board data recorders to monitor driving hours.

Other groups have complained the revised rule does not limit nighttime driving, as proposed two years ago. But nighttime driving does not increase driver fatigue as long as the driver is accustomed to night driving, according to Iowa State's Crum.

"I know people argue abut the nighttime driving, but if a driver is on a regular routine and is used to driving at night, that's fine. Once their bio-clock gets harmonized, they are fine."

The American Trucking Assns., on the other hand, thinks this represents a much better effort than the one introduced two years ago.

OTHER VARIABLES
In a statement, ATA president and CEO Bill Graves says, "This is a package that our members can work with. The rule is easy to understand, easy to comply with, and easy to enforce."

FMCSA says its new hours-of-service rule will help prevent more than 1,300 fatigue-related truck crashes and save up to 75 lives per year because of the extra rest time it allows drivers.

Lack of sleep, however, is just one of the reasons drivers get fatigued. Crum says his research looked at a number of variables that cause drivers to get fatigued. One factor, he says, is whether drivers can stay on schedule.

"What we found in our research on OTR drivers is that a major factor in fatigue was whether or not the loading and unloading occurred in the time frame the driver expected. If the driver is held up there, you are throwing everything off for him, his whole schedule, where and when he can rest and fuel. The driver is stressed and itching to get back down the road. All of those factors do come into play."

Crum says the final research model uses some 18 different factors that contribute to driver fatigue. "Some of them are pretty subtle," he says. "It can come back to the pressure the dispatcher is under which gets transferred to the driver. Drivers feel pressures from a whole lot of places: From shippers, from dispatchers. There are all sorts of economic pressures coming at the driver." All of these pressures can add to fatigue.

Dawson says a driver's schedule can have the most impact on his or her fatigue levels. "When you look at what causes fatigue, there are a lot of factors, but one of the big impacts is how a guy works and what his schedule looks like. If there is not a schedule and a guy works more of an on-call basis, then it's very difficult for him to predict when he is going to go to work and then when to go to sleep.

"When you can put drivers on as regular a schedule as possible, that allows the drivers to plan for their sleep, plan for their social time and always be ready for work," he adds. It's more difficult for people who work a split shift schedule where they jump back and forth from days to nights to get the proper amount of rest, Dawson says.

For those who are on a fixed schedule, it makes little difference if you work days or nights, once your body gets used to the schedule. "Some people are morning people, some people are night people. When you go on a schedule and alter your life around that schedule, your body will change with it. A person can ultimately get used to working at night."

24-HOUR CLOCK
But moving back and forth from working days to working nights makes it very difficult to get the rest one needs.

"One of the good things about the rule is that it makes it easier to maintain a 24-hr. clock," Dawson says. "Previously, it was a much shorter clock, which meant that even if you followed the hours-of-service rule to the letter, you were automatically rotating and jumping back and forth between day and night sleep. You can still do that with the new one, but it's still easier to stay with the hours of service and maintain a regular 24-hour clock."

A regular schedule is something many truckers would probably like. According to Crum's research, almost 40% of drivers studied said they rarely or never were able to start and stop driving the same time every day, thereby making it hard to keep a stable schedule. Crum says a regular schedule is directly related to fatigue management.

According to Dawson, drivers generally know when they are getting tired, but sometimes they try to work through the tiredness and that's when they can get into trouble.

SIGNS OF TROUBLE
"They have a general sense that they are tired," he observes. "They get grumpy; they get irritable. While they are driving, they may notice that they are staring straight ahead, their eyes are a little glassy, and they begin to yawn a lot. These are indicators that let a person know 'Hey, I'm getting tired, maybe it's time to stop and take a break.'

"The difficulty is that sometimes we try to fight through those periods of fatigue," he says. "Then we suffer from what they call micro-sleeps, very short periods of sleep where a person might literally fall asleep for anywhere from two to 10 seconds."

Falling asleep for 10 seconds while driving a big rig could have major consequences, especially since there is no way of knowing when a micro-sleep might occur.

"Once you become fatigued, it's difficult to predict when you might slip into a micro-sleep," Dawson says. "If appropriate steps aren't taken as soon as you notice those signs of fatigue, it's difficult to know exactly when you might fall asleep."

One of the best "counter-measures" against fatigue is napping, Dawson says. "Napping is one of the things that's been proven to help improve a person's alertness, not just for drivers, but anybody on the street as well."

Dawson says studies show that a 15-minute nap can boost alertness for four or five more hours. "That doesn't mean a guy is going to be at peak alertness, but it is certainly going to delay his drop in alertness so he won't fall into as great a fatigue."

"I think a lot of drivers know that if they need the 15 minutes, they will pull over and rest. They may not even get in the sleeper. It could just be putting your head back on the rest for 10 or 15 minutes."

Other steps to fighting fatigue require a concerted effort from the driver, shippers, the operations people and even the driver's family.

"Obviously there's education, training and things like that for managing fatigue," Dawson says. "But there's also things within the company like the rules about dispatching and how drivers are called that make up a fatigue management plan."

Crum says getting a driver's family involved is also crucial. If a driver can’t catch up on his rest while home on his days off, he’ll likely start his next work shift tired.

"We found that if drivers were unable to recover their sleep deficit on their couple of days off after they have driven six or seven days, they start their next driving period tired," says Crum. "They are not going to recover that sleep on the road and they are at greater risk for having an accident."

Everyone is different when it comes to how much rest he or she requires. Crum says his studies show that five to five and a half hours was the median sleep time per day for drivers, in other words, half their survey slept more than that and half slept less than that. The key is to make sure you get the amount of sleep that rights for you.

A future research project involves looking more closely at owner-operators, Crum says, especially since some data indicates that group seems to be less tired on the road than company drivers.

LEARNING FROM O/O’S
"One of the things we are looking at now are owner-operators," he says. "Our initial results show that owner operators put themselves in a fatigue situation less often than company drivers."

Crum says his new research will try to determine the reason behind that result. Some reasons owner-operators appear to get more rest could be scheduling or that they are more concerned with their investment.

The fact that they have control over their schedule could help owner-operators be less fatigued than other drivers, Crum suggests. "Or maybe there is something about the asset ownership," Crum continues. "Maybe if you own the asset maybe there is additional incentive to protect yourself and the equipment by not putting yourself in a fatigue situation." Crum hopes to find answers to these questions with his next research project. Rules and research are all well and good, but in the final analysis it is up to you to keep yourself rested and safe on the road.