Sleep Deprived Drivers as Dangerous as Drunks

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 12, 5:02PM EST · Published Dec 7, 8:45AM EST

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Sleep Deprived Drivers as Dangerous as Drunks — © Thinkstock

Lack of sleep is dangerous, at least for drivers. A new AAA survey compares the risk to drunk driving. According to the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety:

Experts recommend that healthy adults should sleep for at least 7 hours daily. The results of this study indicate that drivers who usually sleep for less than 5 hours daily, drivers who have slept for less than 7 hours in the past 24 hours, and drivers who have slept for 1 or more hours less than their usual amount of sleep in the past 24 hours have significantly elevated crash rates. The estimated rate ratio for crash involvement associated with driving after only 4-5 hours of sleep compared with 7 hours or more is similar to the U.S. government’s estimates of the risk associated with driving with a blood alcohol concentration equal to or slightly above the legal limit for alcohol in the U.S., and the increase in crash rate associated with driving after less than 4 hours of sleep is much greater.

More specifically, the effects are variable based on sleep levels:

Drivers who had slept for less than 4 hours, 4-5 hours, 5-6 hours, and 6-7 hours in the past 24 hours had an estimated 11.5, 4.3, 1.9, and 1.3 times the crash rate, respectively, of drivers who had slept for 7 hours or more in the past 24 hours. In an alternative analysis of drivers’ usual daily hours of sleep and sleep in the past 24 hours relative to their own usual amount of sleep, drivers who reported that they usually slept for 4-5 hours daily had 5.4 times the crash rate of drivers who reported that they usually slept for 7 hours or more; drivers who reported that in the past 24 hours they had slept for 1-2 hours less than usual, 2-3 hours less than usual, 3-4 less than usual, and 4 or more hours less than usual had 1.3, 3.0, 2.1, and 10.2 times the crash rate, respectively, of drivers who reported that they had slept for at least their usual amount. This study may underestimate the risk of driving while sleep-deprived, because data on crashes that occurred between midnight and 6 AM were not available, and other studies have shown that the effects of sleep deprivation on attention and performance are greatest during the early morning hours

Oddly, the foundation had no suggested solution to the problem.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.