I just meant to take a swipe at 60 Minutes in general, nothing to do with this thread and the sleep thing in particular. I didn’t mean any offense. Sorry.
No offence taken. I often enjoy, and learn from, 60 Minutes. Beats the hell out of a football game for me. Or whatever is in season right now.
Yeah, unless you know someone in the government, like that young guy a few months back. Nice (not really) to know that political corruption is alive and well outside the US.
Unfortunately, political corruption is quite alive and well here.
I wouldn’t feel sympathetic - and here in the UK, the law isn’t either. Driving two tonnes of metal is perceived to be a responsibility not a right, and driving while sleepy is not driving responsibly. If you kill someone by falling asleep at the wheel you will be charged with causing Death By Dangerous Driving, and can expect a prison sentence. A few years ago a sleeping driver caused the death of ten people when his car piled onto a railway line – he got five years.
Here’s a BBC link to that story.
I think I’ll still feel somewhat sympathetic, while hoping that all of us opt out of driving while sleepy.
We’re human. We vary in how prepared we are to drive safely. I figure that, whatever average preparedness is, we spend half our time being better prepared than that, and half our time less well prepared.
There are ethical judgements we make every day about this. I actually intend, these days, never to go above the speed limit at all. I think most of the time I spent driving today, about an hour, I was not speeding. But I would guess I spent 5 or 10 minutes speeding, and obviously didn’t pay enough attention to be able to quantify it any better than that. Perhaps Dopers are more conscientious than the population at large, in fact I would guess we are if I had to guess, but I still imagine several of the rest of us in this conversation spend more than 10% or so of the time speeding - do we?
Some nights I sleep better than others. Occasionally when I am driving, I notice a bee in the car. When I drive by the local University, there are often very pretty young ladies about, and in spite of the fact that noticing them compromises the attention I pay to driving, I notice them. And try to pay proper attention anyway.
Most of us want the freedom and power that being mobile gives us, and we hope to maintain that into old age in spite of the fact that even thirty-year-olds don’t have quite the good response times that twenty-year-olds have. Suppose I took a legal and prescribed narcotic medication yesterday, and I want to go to work today. I think I’m fine, but couldn’t with high confidence state that there would be no measureable effect on today’s response time.
There are all kinds of standards we could use. A useful standard might be, if I anticipate that my driving is about to be tested within the next five minutes by a small child darting out from between parked cards, and I think the way I am driving right this moment is appropriate for this challenge, then I’m good. This is a tough standard, and I might give up driving over really feeling this obligation in 100% real time. I think humans in general don’t live up to this standard, not even close. If we did, there would be no incentive to advertise on billboards, because so few people would notice them, absolutely nobody in all the single-occupant cars. And yet look at all the billboards.
We painted ourselves into a corner. We made driving a practical necessity in everyday life, and yet also let it be a matter of life and death.
So, let’s hear it - what are some good tests of whether one is driving conscientiously enough, and who among us pass these tests, and how often?
You roll down the window and sing real loud.
I’ve been in a car a few times almost falling asleep, it’s a miserable experience.
Napier, if you are aware that you should be holding yourself to a high standard, how dangerous driving is, that it’s a privilege and not a right, and are actually attempting to drive safely, I think you’re far ahead of the vast majority of the driving public.
How can one say they don’t know what it’s like to be tired or feel the need to sleep. I have that feeling every night (and sometimes during the day), I know exactly what it feels like. I’ve been known to pull over at a casino and sleep in my car on a drive as short as an hour, if I felt halfway into it I was too tired to drive.
>How can one say they don’t know what it’s like to be tired or feel the need to sleep.
Well, they hardly could, the experience is perfectly common. But that still leaves the problem that it is somewhat insidious. If you intend not to paint your front door green, you can be confident that you aren’t going to paint it green. But intending not to fall asleep isn’t enough to be absolutely sure you won’t.
And, having legitimate and compelling reasons to try to drive even though one is sleepy is also a very common experience. For example, I don’t even like business travel, I’m doing it for someone else, but spending 12 hours flying over the Atlantic leaves me renting a car and trying to remember foreign traffic rules and signs and speed limits while fighting off the mental fog and mentally preparing for upcoming meetings and presentations, because I think it’s 2:00 AM after a long day, and the rest of the world thinks it’s 8:00 AM. My co-workers all do it. There’s pressure for me to do it too, on the basis of fairness and holding up my end, and bolstered by the statistical notion that doing it is by far the standard choice and nothing bad has happened. So, in this situation, I’ve just kind of soldiered on, but worried I was making the wrong choice.
And, the fact that nothing bad did happen is hardly proof that the choice was a good one.
Similarly, if something terrible did happen to somebody else, I’m not so comfortable concluding on that basis that their choice was a bad one and that they deserve punishment. Or, more accurately, I’m not so comfortable concluding that their choice was worse than what I would have done, and that they deserve something much worse than ever happened to me.
It’s the enormous importance of the random component of all this that I most wish was not part of our reasoned approach to it all. The real events - the traffic accident, if it does occur - by its nature has a fearsome random component to it. The way we treat people who are involved in accidents does not necessarily have to have a big random component to it, too.
Your trip problem is easy to resolve, Napier. You and your company’s travel people should plan the trip carefully so that you shuttle from the airport to your hotel, have a meal, then (depending on time of day) pick your car the next day and tend to business. Nowadays there are ways of dealing with jet lag.
We need to lose the idea that going without sleep is somehow heroic, IMO.
About 10 years ago, My wife and I were returning from a long trip, and around about 2:00 AM I became seriously drowsy somewhere in the middle of New Mexico. We had not seen a freeway exit for miles, let alone a rest area, and I finally pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway to close my eyes for a while. We hadn’t been there for five minutes before a state trooper pulled up behind us. When he approached my car, I explained to him that I was feeling very sleepy and had pulled over for reasons of safety. He informed me that I was in violation of some statute or other, and that I would have to get moving, and that if I refused I’d spend the rest of the night in jail. So naturally I started the car and carried on driving. Some distance up the road, but well before we had reached another freeway exit, I caught my second wind and became sufficiently alert to continue the trip without fear of impairment.
It wasn’t until the next day, after I’d reached home safely, gotten a few hours’ sleep, and talked it over with my wife that I grasped the significance of the event. I had been forced, at threat of being arrested, to drive on a dark, deserted highway, at night – my wife and infant daughter in the car with me – after having informed the state trooper that I was fatigued. WTF?
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While he may have asked me if I’d been drinking (I hadn’t), he didn’t conduct a sobriety test or make any other effort to determine whether I was in any condition to be driving.
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The area where I had pulled over was on a straight patch of road, with fields on both sides, and I was far enough over to the side that I did not pose any reasonable risk to traffic.
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The trooper offered no suggestions as to where I might be allowed to pull over and rest for a few minutes without being in violation of whatever statute he was in the process of enforcing.
I described the whole event to my father (an attorney) and stated that, were such a thing to happen again, I would demand to know the name and badge number of the trooper who was forcing an impaired driver back onto the road. Much to my surprise, my dad insisted that driving on without confrontation had been the safer choice.
>Your trip problem is easy to resolve, Napier.
I agree that reorganizing trips the way you propose would reduce the driving while sleepy. It would have me spending an extra day to do so, however. There’s a judgement whether spending an additional day to get rid of a sleepy one hour drive is a reasonable investment, though - I don’t think I can quite wave it off as “easy”.
>Nowadays there are ways of dealing with jet lag.
There are? What are they? I find if I spend a week over there, I’m starting to feel mostly normal by the end of it, but I’m still fighting it approximately a week. And, of course, a few days after the return too (though like many I find traveling West is less bothersome).
It seems to me that traveling across more than, say, 4 time zones tends to make a person sleepy at times which, locally, people are expected to be alert and participating, and tend to do so for perhaps one day per time zone (a very rough estimate). And, near as I can tell, the accepted standard is that people try to go ahead and make the best of it.
What are we all missing?