People do potentially deadly risk reward calculus all the time. And of all potentially deadly things that people regularly do to crack down on, this one would have a pretty huge negative ROI for society. This issue impacts a non-trivial percentage of the population. You can't tell them all to change jobs or move their houses to be within whatever travel time limit. This purist notion of 'they should never be allowed to drive a car, for everyone else's protection' crumbles at the most trivial examination when you consider that you're talking about leaving millions of people jobless or in significantly worse quality of life conditions, while also completely reshuffling the housing markets and zoning. And even then, sometimes events will come up that force them to take that chance regardless, such as family emergencies.

Rather than this purist isolated-logic bullshit that would probably crash the economy if seriously enforced because you have absolutely failed to consider the first and second order effects of what you're suggesting, we actually have a viable tech solution instead.

I'm going to guess that most people who share this viewpoint are either high income earners living in a bubble who don't know what real life is like for most of the population, or are logical purists looking at this issue in isolation and not accounting for what life is like for most of the population. Life for most of the population is working paycheck to paycheck at whatever job you can get in order to make ends meet and keep your kids fed, and living in whatever housing you can get that doesn't make it impossible to get enough sleep to physically keep living due to long commute times. Being prevented from driving would absolutely destroy most affected families. You're going to do a lot more damage to society by preventing all those affected from driving than by doing nothing and letting it contribute to a small percentage of the road toll, which in itself is an insignificant percentage of the total death toll. Which is why every country on the planet has done nothing more drastic than awareness campaigns, despite being aware of this issue.

Really, this is where this entire discussion becomes moot. Fatigue and microsleep as a cause of road fatalities are a well studied issue that every developed nation is aware of and has done the calculus on. And not a single one of them decided to ban those affected from driving, because the calculus of that policy results in a massive net COST, not gain. And that calculus shifts even further now that we have fairly cheap car technology available to mitigate the issue. When you think through all this, the only conclusion is 'ban affected people from driving' is moronic and does significantly more harm than good.

tl;dr: you'll save more lives by replacing a single coal power plant with renewable energy than by implementing your policy. And you won't destroy the lives of millions of people and potentially crash the economy in the process. And there's already a viable solution on market that mitigates it almost entirely anyway. Pick your battles.

We've designed a system, however, that is set up such that it's bound to happen sometimes. Not everyone can call in to work and tell their boss "sorry, I slept badly last night, I'm not coming in" or order a $60 Uber to get somewhere on a whim. Moralizing at people is just virtue signaling.

This, and the fact that the HN demographic, mostly being techies, seem to be a bit disconnected from what real life looks like to 80%+ of the population of the world. A few instances per year of not coming in to work due to poor sleep or having to order Uber wouldn't just inconvenicence them - it would completely destroy their lives along with their children/families. People are doing what they need to do to survive and look after their loved ones.

He slammed into a pickup truck and killed that truck's occupant.

I had to be called in as a witness of the incident by the victim and trucking company's attorneys.

I think there's a strong difference between (rightfully so) blaming the companies that force this environment and the people who are just trying to make a living safely.

I've only been in the full-time tech industry for about 3.5 years.

Before then I was working hourly jobs to make ends meet, including working half time or more while studying full-time in college, working during high school, etc. This so I could pay rent and tuition with minimal, if any, aid.

I couldn't even afford a car until after graduating from university.

I was walking or taking public transportation everywhere prior to finally getting a car.

I won't disagree that people in SV can be snobby but let's not jump to conclusions here.

>Having climbed from societal rock-bottom to a decent position in the tech industry, my mind is constantly blown by the fact that the average techie thinks their life is anything like what the vast majority of this planet are dealing with.

I'm not sure what your point is supposed to be, here? You say that I, and other like-minded people, are just "average techies" despite literally just explaining that some of us too had our own challenges.

I think it's okay to admit that nearly everybody has had their share of challenging backgrounds. Some people's privileges are the other's disadvantages and so on. That much is obvious.

But aside from that. Backgrounds aside.

Driving when you know you have a constant issue of falling asleep, getting drowsy, all of the above is unsafe. Even if you have priorities that you place above your own health/well-being, the problem with having those issues and still choosing to drive is that you are now deciding how others will be affected by your decision.

The moment you begin endangering other people's lives is the same moment that backgrounds, poorly-disadvantaged or not, become meaningless.

Because I highly doubt some victim's family is going to be impressed that you or someone else knowingly chose to drive repeatedly while acknowledging they would not be fully aware of what they were doing just because of working conditions.

Humanity has a pretty substantial record of doing "unsafe" for the betterment of themselves, mankind, or just for giggles. The risks are well-known to themselves, who are you to suggest that they cannot manage those risks?

Some people manage it their entire lives, while others do not. However, I'd trust someone driving who is well aware of their boundaries over someone who is not aware, any day.

My wife fell asleep at the wheel once, I just reached over and kept the wheel straight while trying to wake her up. I hope cars can do that in the future, for those times that I'm not there. And for the record, she's one of those that has never fallen asleep before or gotten drowsy at the wheel.

> Having climbed from societal rock-bottom to a decent position in the tech industry

I've done this as well. I've gone to war, I've seen things you likely can't imagine without a bunch of CGI and special effects. Most of the tech world has no idea what "rock bottom" even means except through the view of Hollywood, and even that doesn't look all that bad from that angle.

Spoken life someone who never had to decide between rolling the 0.000001% chance dice on driving to work tired, and their kids going hungry or potentially getting taken away if they lose their job. People do what they need to do to survive and take care of their loved ones. People will absolutely risk their lives and those of others in order to protect their kids at all cost, even when facing much worse odds. That's a constant in life. No amount of moral posturing will change that. I'm not saying their actions are 'right', just saying they're an inevitable outcome of the society we have built.

Efficiently demonstrating my point - some people on HN live in a bubble of privilege and have no idea what real life is like for the vast majority of the population.

I'm just curious, with all the moral posturing - realistically, what would you suggest that people do when after a long shift at a blue collar job they realize they might be too tired to safely drive home. Do they sleep at their workplace? How does that transition into them needing to be back at work, showered, dressed, etc. by 9am the next morning? What are the actual logistics of this concept here?

And how do you reconcile all this moral posturing and the impact of banning drivers who experience this (up to 50% of the entire population of developed nations by some polling) vs. the fact that we now have a pretty cheap car technology that turns that 0.000001% dice roll into a 1e-20 one.

Or should we just treat everybody we don't know as obviously spoiled people who live in a bubble of privilege, have nothing to lose, have never missed a meal, love no one and have no one who depends on them, and only have an opinion on what you do in order to feel superior to you and to humiliate you?

The reason this defence (and a line of other similar) exist is because as society we have accepted the fact that people will act in self interest, self protection, and above all protection of their children. No amount of education or indoctrination overrides that. (Fun fact, in some countries, escaping from jail is not illegal/punishable - assuming you don't commit other crimes in the act. Because, once again, we as society recognise that it's human nature to seek freedom and it cannot be overriden, therefore punishing it achieves nothing.

Ultimately it doesn't matter if you think a parent driving to work tired is acceptable or not, because we already know that they absolutely will. The only question is how do you mitigate the damage of driving to work tired, and whether your mitigation strategy is a net benefit or net loss to society.

'Make it compulsory for cars to detect sleeping/unconscious/seizing/microsleeping driver and pull over' is an infinitely better strategy in every regard imaginable compared to 'ban up to 50% of the population from driving'. And note that only one of those 4 situations would be avoidable with a ban, the other 3 can strike at any time with no warning or history.

There has been enough indirect evidence to suggest advanced driver assist without a significant driver monitoring is dangerous (Google's report of their employees doing other things, the fatal accident of Uber's self-driving vehicle, various fatal and non-fatal accidents of Tesla autopilot due to misuse), but there's been no systematic study and we don't have enough public data to suggest it's one way or another.

I grew up in Southern California where one time my car broke down and my 20 minute commute (mostly highway) turned into a 2hr bus ride while my car was in the shop. Once I was an hour late to work because the bus came and went before it was scheduled for that stop. I've lived in a rural town in the south where no public transportation even existed. There wasn't even a way for most people to walk into town because there weren't even sidewalks. A few people biked, but it was pretty well known that if you weren't on a $5k bike riding in the nice area of town you had a DUI and were riding your kid's bike to get to work. I would have had to walk along a highway (a 30 minute walk) just to get to the store (I saw people doing this too). I've been in the Bay and NYC where busses have to wait at stops and there is light rail. Now I live in a city where I rarely drive my car and using my bike is easier to get around. These situations are very different and frankly I don't think people understand this.

The problem is that most of the US doesn't have infrastructure to relieve people of the choice between driving and being safe because they have to maintain their job. In many places there aren't even enough population density to make this economically feasible (aka profitable or net even). Someone was mentioning that technology can't solve this problem, but frankly this seems like the exact problem autonomous vehicles solve. Light rail is great, but it isn't a practical technology for most of the country.

You contend that there are millions of people who knowingly drive while tired enough to fall asleep at the wheel and with a history of doing so?

If so, I contend that your argument is contrived and your claim is unrealistic. Most people do not and would not drive while so tired that they knew they were likely to fall asleep while doing so. For a start, such a pattern of behaviour would be suicidal. Statistically, there would be far more nasty accidents due to tiredness than actually happen.

In reality, only a tiny proportion of people drive while so tired that they might actually fall asleep at the wheel. Not only doing that but knowingly doing it when you have a history of dropping off while driving is utterly inexcusable.

From: https://www.nsc.org/road-safety/safety-topics/fatigued-drivi...

Those are enormous numbers. I wonder how big the economic hit would be if none of those people drove.

If we're being brutally objective here, road accidents are extremely expensive in purely economic terms. Obviously there could be a loss of productivity for anyone directly involved who was injured. But then you also need to expend considerable resources to clear the accident site and fully reopen the road. While you're doing that, you might be delaying many people due to congestion in the area of the accident. Then there is the cost of caring for anyone wounded, repairing any physical damage done to public infrastructure, and repairing or replacing any other vehicles that were involved and any cargo they were carrying. And of course, in the worst case, you have the profound effects of losing people entirely under such tragic circumstances, which involve not just losing anything they would have contributed for the rest of their lives, but also the consequences for their family and friends, their employers or clients, and anyone else who depended on them economically right down to the place on the corner where they stopped to buy a coffee each morning on the way into the office.

So even if we're only trying to avoid the most catastrophic cases such as someone actually falling asleep and causing a multi-vehicle pile-up on a major road, and even if we err on the side of caution and take many thousands of drivers off the road who are at significant risk of causing such an accident but in reality would not have done so, it's still not clear cut that the economic hit would be greater than the harm prevented.

For those who like hard data, I can't immediately offer you any, but as a very rough guide, here in the UK (where we already have lower per-capita road deaths than most of the world) I have seen arguments made about local road improvement schemes that suggested a seven-figure cost to save a single life would be economically justified. It's not hard to believe if you consider that a fatal accident can close a road for several hours, leaving thousands of vehicles stranded, and involving dozens of emergency responders and all of the equipment and vehicles they need, in addition to the injury, death and damage caused to anyone directly involved.

> You should never get behind the wheel if there's a chance you'll fall asleep!

I would say anyone that feels drowsy has a change of falling asleep. So 50% of the population should regularly not get behind the wheel, by GC's standard.

One of the reasons I would love to have autopilot is because I have a history of dozing off at the wheel. Never so much where I've had an accident, but bad enough where I've scared myself badly.

This was followed by arguing for the safety feature in case it happened again.

Though it's not really a thread until OC was disagreed with, so thread works too.

For most people, the other option is to stop driving to work and then be jobless and eventually homeless, make their kids go hungry, or go bankrupt. You guys seriously seem to be completely disconnected from what reality looks like for 80%+ of the population.

> In reality, only a tiny proportion of people drive while so tired that they might actually fall asleep at the wheel

You have no idea how microsleep works. It does not involve 'knowingly driving while tired enough to fall asleep'. This single statement makes it clear that you're expressing some pretty strong and sure-sounding opinions on a subject that you know nothing about. You (as in specifically you) could be experiencing microsleep on a regular basis and never even know it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsleep

And even when talking about the other cause - fatigued driving, are you suggesting that people come in to work late after every night they had poor sleep? I mean that would actually be a decent policy if not for the fact that a handful of instances of that in a year would get most people fired? Are you suggesting that someone shouldn't drive home after a long shift? (do they like, sleep at their workplace? have you thought through this?). And we're back to my first point - I don't think you understand what life is like for the majority of the population who live paycheck to paycheck and work any job that they can get just to survive and keep their kids fed.

As someone enjoying the 'privilege' of working in tech and having flexible hours and being able to arbitrarily work from home and having enough savings to take a 6 month long sabbatical without any financial strain, I can see where you might be coming from. As someone who spent the first half of their life working blue collar jobs and having a panic attack over an unexpected 300 dollar expense which literally meant I spent 2 weeks eating nothing but pasta, I'm pretty sure you either never knew or have forgotten what life is like for most people out there. Yeah for you and I being banned from driving is just a mild inconvenience and 'sigh, now I have to use Uber for all travel'. For most people, it's a life and family destroying sentence.

The issue is also compounded if you work a blue collar job where it's likely that you aren't even commuting to the same place every day and need to haul tools with you.

It's really easy for people to make blanket statements that you shouldn't drive if you have a history of being tired at the wheel, but the reality is that a large portion of our population doesn't have an option.

You keep writing as if this is a normal problem that everyone faces. If it were, and if everyone or even a moderate proportion of drivers were doing what you seem to be arguing is essential, then population numbers would be falling rapidly due to all the fatal accidents. As far as I can see, however, you haven't actually provided any data to back up your repeated claims about how widespread this problem is and how much damage would be caused if the relevant drivers stopped driving when they were unsafe.

You have no idea how microsleep works.

Susceptibility to microsleep is usually a result of failing to sufficient good quality sleep normally, an underlying medical problem, or both. Common conditions like obstructive sleep apnoea can be tested for. Effective treatments like CPAP machines exist. Given that OSA can have other serious health effects as well as causing the unusual tiredness that becomes a danger if you're doing something like driving or operating heavy machinery, investigation and treatment of potential sleep disorders is definitely recommended.

Of course if you simply don't get enough hours of sleep regularly, if you don't sleep well because you do things like drinking excessive amounts of alcohol in the evening, you can go to bed earlier, cut down on the booze, etc.

You (as in specifically you) could be experiencing microsleep on a regular basis and never even know it.

Given that there are many warning signs of microsleeps, one of which is being very tired all the time, and given that the subject of this thread is people driving when they know they're so tired they might fall asleep and having a history of scares caused by falling asleep at the wheel, I don't see that your attempt to make this personal has any relevance to the debate.

You say that as if there weren't any other options. You have public transport and you can share a car (and expenses) with someone who has your same destination.

> For most people, it's a life and family destroying sentence.

Dying in a car accident is literally a death sentence and has worse implications for your family.

So, how does this work, exactly? So you set up carpooling with a coworker. And then one day you don't sleep well. Luckily enough, they're there to pick you up so you don't have to drive! ...but what happens when it's your turn to drive? You tell them, whoops, I'm tired today, so you're going to have to drive and get your spouse to change their plans so that you have access to a car? Or maybe they're always the one driving... what happens on days that they're tired? They cancel and you both have to find your own way via public transit?

Like what are the specific logistics here, accounting for failure modes? Does it amount to "spend $100 on Uber on days after a mediocre night's sleep"?

I think if you fall asleep while driving regularly there is a serious and systematic problem.

How do all these hopelessly trapped families ever take their kids to things like medical appointments?

If so, there’s something of a sliding scale. Most of them take their car - their single car, that serves the whole family. When it breaks down, they lean on friends, family, and neighbors for help.

Those without a vehicle in the first place... don’t. I live in a town of <15k people today, and grew up about thirty miles outside of it. I graduated high school in the early 2000s - many of my classmates didn’t see a doctor unless they had a medical emergency.

It seems like there is a large disconnect between your perception and the reality of life for much of America.

Some of the earlier discussion here has apparently been mostly people talking at cross-purposes and didn't turn out to be very enlightening. However, it does seem that at least some people here really are trying to defend something that I think most people would consider unconscionable where I come from. The arguments have essentially been that people there have no realistic choice but to rely on theirs cars, even if driving them is obviously dangerous, or they literally can't live a normal life and support their families properly.

This raised a lot of questions for me that single-car or car-free households face all the time over here, like how you get the kids to school or anyone who isn't the driver to important appointments like medical ones. I was surprised that your response was more-or-less "you don't", but then in the context of medical appointments there is again a very different culture here to yours. It would be similarly unconscionable for most of us in the UK to bring a child into the world and not then make sure they get all of their check-ups and vaccinations at the right times, and you'd have to try very hard to find a situation where a parent without access to a car couldn't still make those provisions for their child in some realistic way. From comments by yourself and others here, I conclude that this is not necessarily the case in the US, or at least in significant parts of it.

93% of American households do - and I expect if you took away a few large dense metros like NYC and Boston, that number would jump up to about 98%

No you don't. In 95% of the US "Public transit" is maybe a bus that stops a mile away once every 2 hours. If that.

In this case, if the person isn't able to get disability b/c of their condition, I can't fault them for doing what they need to survive. I don't like that it puts others at risk, and hope they are taking steps to reduce the risk. Detection technology that alerts them seems like a step in the right direction.

I've had to do all of those things. At some times in my life, I've had the first and last for an extended period. To my knowledge, I have never as a result driven in a condition that made me unsafe behind the wheel, though.

Yours is another comment that talks about people doing what they need to do to survive, which is an ironic characterisation given we're talking about behaviour that is borderline suicidal.

We live with that risk, and some others have to live with more risk because of their circumstances. I'm more reacting to all the posts that no one should ever drive at all with even the slightest risk that they'll fall asleep, which is just an unrealistic ideal for most of us.

You know they let some people drive who have extremely bad eyesight--bad enough that that they can't read road signs? Yet they are allowed to drive, because not driving makes participation in our economy next to impossible.

Comments like this are side-tracking the discussion. The original premise wasn't that sometimes everyone is a bit more alert or tired than others. It was someone who knew very well that they had a history of falling asleep at the wheel and wanted to continue driving apparently knowing it was likely to happen again.

We're human and can't say for certain that falling asleep is impossible (or some other medical event won't happen).

Of course not. But normal people with a healthy lifestyle don't just randomly fall asleep at the wheel in the absence of a serious (but perhaps undiagnosed) medical condition. The way a lot of the comments in this thread are defending driving while tired, you'd think millions of people could all just doze off without any warning or awareness that they were at unusually high risk.

You know they let some people drive who have extremely bad eyesight--bad enough that that they can't read road signs?

In my country, such poor vision would (if not properly corrected) immediately disqualify you from holding a driving licence. This is a policy that I entirely agree with, so we apparently come from very different perspectives here.

It's really not that complicated. Stop making choices for other people that could cause them to wind up injured or killed. Because yes, that is in fact what you're saying to do here.

Yes? There are even millions of people who drive drunk every year, which is a far more conscious choice to endanger other people than someone driving home after long, late shift.

15 million people work a night shift. If 10% of them drive home drowsy one night per year, you're already at millions.

You've never lived in the States, have you? The absolute vast majority of anything in the States is inaccessible without a car. If you live in a city, sure, you might get by with public transport (almost universally very bad in the States). Anywhere outside the city center? Good luck getting anywhere without a car.