Paul Jackson, Alexandra Holmes, Cassie Hilditch, N Reed, L Smith, N Merat; February, 2011.
Keywords: driver fatigue, literature review, road safety, road safety policy, public awareness campaigns
This report, produced by a consortium consisting of Clockwork Research, University of Leeds and TRL, provides a comprehensive and critical review of the literature which synthesises the evidence relating to fatigue and road safety.
The report aims to determine the current scale of the driver fatigue problem in the UK, highlights evidence gaps that may require further research and provides guidance for the DfT Research, Policy and Think! campaign teams. The report also provides recommendations relating to each of the key research questions proposed by the DfT at the outset of the project.
The report concludes that there is a need for up-to-date UK research to gain a better understanding of drivers’ own experiences of fatigue, and their use of countermeasures to combat fatigue. The following are also identified as research gaps:
- Young male drivers are over-represented in driver fatigue crashes but reasons for this are unclear.
- The extent to which sleep disorders contribute to fatigue-related road crashes in the UK is unknown.
- Few studies have considered the contribution of fatigue to work-related collisions in the UK.
- Exclusion of commuter journeys from the definition of work-related driving means that it is not possible to gauge the true contribution of work-related fatigue to road traffic accidents in the UK.
In terms of the forthcoming Think! campaign on driver fatigue, the report suggests that:
- The lapse hypothesis, upon which most DfT publicity campaigns have been based, provides insufficient explanation of the effects of driver fatigue. It is recommended that future campaigns take more account of the state instability hypothesis, and thus focus on educating drivers that fatigue can affect performance long before microsleeps occur and that it can also affect performance between microsleeps.
- Drivers continue to drive tired even when they appreciate the risks of doing so. It is therefore recommended that public information campaigns should challenge the misconception that a journey might be important enough to risk driving in a severely fatigued state, and to provide drivers with the skills to enable them to assess their own fatigue both before and during driving.
- Training and awareness campaigns should target key risk groups, including young (male) drivers, shiftworkers and professional drivers/drivers of commercial vehicles. The Drivers’ CPC would be one route to providing education for professional drivers.
- Changing drivers’ attitudes once they are set in place may be difficult. Consequently, it is also recommended that specific education initiatives to raise awareness of the dangers of driving tired are targeted at pre-driving adolescents.
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