Drowsy driving

[3] In the United States, 250,000 drivers fall asleep at the wheel every day, according to the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School and in a national poll by the National Sleep Foundation, 54% of adult drivers said they had driven while drowsy during the past year with 28% saying they had actually fallen asleep while driving.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, drowsy driving is a factor in more than 100,000 crashes, resulting in 6,550 deaths and 80,000 injuries annually in the USA.

[6] Signs that tell a driver of a need to stop and rest: Numerous studies have found that sleep deprivation can affect driving as much as (and sometimes more than) alcohol.

A 2017 meta-analysis found that driving while sleepy was associated with being approximately two-and-a-half times as likely to have a motor vehicle collision, with significant heterogeneity between the risk estimates in individual studies.

The National Transportation Safety Board reported that drowsy driving was likely the cause of more than half of crashes leading to a truck driver's death.

[13] In the fall of 2013 a new law was passed in the USA requiring the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to propose guidelines related to screening for sleep apnea among commercial drivers.

[16] Another twenty-five US states permit physicians to violate doctor-patient confidentiality to report sleep-deprived drivers or those with sleeping disorders likely to impair driving, if they so choose.

[16] An authority on professional confidentiality, Jacob Appel of New York University, has written that physician reporting is a double-edged sword, because it may deter some patients from seeking care.

"[16] Governments had attempted to reduce sleep-deprived driving through education messages and by ingraining roads with dents, known as rumble strips in the US, which cause noise when drivers wander out of their lane.