No Snooze, You Lose

Forgive Brian Orrbine for sounding weary. The senior policy advisor with Transport Canada’s road safety programs group has been honchoing a review of hours-of-service regulations in Canada for going on the better part of three years.

“We’re rounding the corner,” Orrbine says of the revamping process, which has involved scientific analyses, consultations with men and women behind the wheel, and countless hours in conference with various government and industry committees and task forces.

“All the hard data we’ve collected is starting to be interpreted. It’s a bit of a wrestling match, because different people see data differently. But we’re starting to put the research into context.”

The facts-confirmed by several recent studies of truck driver fatigue-seem clear. There’s a correlation between vehicle mishaps and time of day, with accidents more likely to occur late at night and in the mid-afternoon, periods that coincide with natural downturns in the human body clock or circadian rhythm.

And it’s generally accepted that the best way to restore alertness is sleep. The exact amount varies from person to person, but most scientists agree that between seven and nine hours every 24 hours is sufficient.

But aside from a fine fatigue-awareness campaign waged by the Canadian Trucking Alliance (“Project Alert”; contact the CTA at 613/236-9426), precious little data gleaned from years of research has been put into a context that most fleet managers can understand, let alone apply to their own operations.

Evidence that this has started to change emerged last September with the publication of a study Transport Canada commissioned called Options for Changes to Hours of Service for Commercial Vehicle Drivers.

The report, generated by the department’s Transportation Development Centre in Montreal, presents an array of scenarios for daily and cumulative work schedules, together with the scientific basis and any ground-level operational concerns for each.

And while the report is presented as a reference document for a Canadian Council of Motor Transport Administrators task force which will ultimately develop a new hours-of-service standard, between the lines of regulatory policy rhetoric resides a wealth of clear-eyed practical wisdom.

Orrbine concedes that it’s not all feasible for every operation, “But if you’re a fleet manager, you certainly don’t have to wait for new regulations to create policies for your drivers that promote rest and alertness.” Some points worth considering:

ON THE JOB

When a driver operates at night-particularly from midnight to 6 a.m.-he’s working at a time of day when he is physically and psychologically prepared for sleep. The consequences can be dire: drowsiness during driving and significantly increased risk of a crash.

Remember, the body craves rest no matter how much sleep it has had. A day shift is really a night shift, for all intents and purposes, if your driver starts work at 6 a.m. but has to wake up at 4:45 to be there on time.

Indeed, it’s just as important for drivers to sleep regular hours as it is sufficient hours.

If a person doesn’t sleep enough he’ll develop “sleep debt,” and driving several nights in a sequence will cause that debt to accumulate with each successive night.

Combine a high sleep debt with a low point in the circadian rhythm, and a driver’s performance behind the wheel will drop. (It’d be an interesting exercise to chart trip data from your engine computers against the driving performance of operators on night runs-if you don’t do this already.)

Instead, limit driving during the evening hours as much as possible, and halt the number of consecutive night shifts for your drivers at three or four.

Avoid extending day or evening shifts into the night, and whenever possible, avoid schedules that span two circadian lows-say, a 5 a.m. to 3 p.m. shift-without allowing time for rest.

IN THE BUNK

During any given work day, a driver will have idle moments when he can catch some snooze-time. But are cat-naps enough? A two-hour sleep can bring a person back to about 75% of performance, according to Dr. Ron Heslegrave, a researcher at the University of Toronto Sleep Centre and one of the authors of the Transport Canada report, because two hours is enough for a person to fall deeply asleep and replenish that sleep debt. But that half-hour nap while parked at the loading dock? Don’t count on it to stave off fatigue.

At what point during the day a person sleeps can determine how soundly he sleeps. Due to the way the body reacts to daylight, it becomes resistant to sleep late in the morning-typically after 9 a.m.-even when a person failed to get much sleep the night before. Scheduling rest periods around mid-afternoon, when the body reaches another circadian low, is a better strategy. And don’t necessarily buy into the idea that team drivers are good to go after a stint in the sleeper berth.

Although team drivers are in a better position to take a sleep break whenever they feel the need, the constant motion and droning of the truck as well as the constraints of a team partnership-How many times to I have to ask you to turn down the %@$# radio?-don’t favor sleeps of any great duration.

Indeed, many team drivers find it hard to sleep because they lack confidence in their partner’s ability at the wheel.

The requirement for a minimum four-hour off-duty period between shifts does allow teams more freedom to set work and rest hours that suit them best. Indeed, there’s little point in requiring a minimum eight-hour rest if drivers can’t sleep that long anyway, as they jostle about on the bunk. Interestingly, to compensate for their shorter sleep period, the report recommends that team drivers not be allowed more than eight straight hours of driving, after which a four-hour off-duty period would be required.

In terms of your operation, that kind of schedule-and others that take fatigue management into account-may not make sense. But it does seem to dovetail with a guiding principle in the minds of policymakers these days, one that fleet managers must come to grips with sooner or later if they haven’t already: that equipment doesn’t move the freight, people do.