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By Dean Croke, DAT Solutions
Everyone who moves freight for a living could use a break right about now, but especially truck drivers. The benefits of a well-rested driver are felt up and down the supply chain and out on the highway.
Sleep is an overlooked factor in truck utilization and driver productivity. In a six-month study conducted by FleetRisk Advisors, where half the drivers at a large truckload carrier were trained in the science of sleep and half were not, sleep-educated drivers ran 10% more miles per tractor-week compared to the control group while being 100% compliant with hours-of-service regulations.
For a truck running 2,500 miles per week, adding 250 miles at today's spot van line-haul rates (averaging $2.40 a mile excluding fuel surcharge) would produce an extra $600 a week in revenue, or $30,000 a year.
Now's the time
There's no better time to educate drivers, dispatchers, and others about sleep science than now, while the days are still long. Truckload accident frequency in July and August is around 12% higher than the average in April, May, and June. Longer days mean people are spending more hours out of the house and on the road—and they're also pushing back their bedtime.
Using Omaha, Neb., as an example, the shortest day last year was December 21. The sun rose at 7:46 a.m. and set just before 5 p.m., for a little more than nine hours of daylight. In contrast, Omaha's longest day was June 20. The sun rose at 5:50 a.m. and set at 9 p.m., more than 15 hours later. That's a six-hour difference in daylight over the course of 182 days.
Daylite and sleep
The sleep-wake cycle is driven primarily by the rising and setting of the sun. As soon as the optic nerve senses that light levels are decreasing each evening, our bodies begin to produce more melatonin, a hormone associated with sleep. That may be an overly simplistic explanation of human physiology, but there's a connection between hours of daylight and the amount of sleep our bodies naturally crave.
Transit times and pickup-and-delivery schedules are rarely oriented around the driver's sleep-wake cycle or daylight hours. If a shipper wants a trailer against the dock at 5:30 a.m., the driver may have to wake up hours earlier in order to eat, commute to the truck, inspect the vehicle, and get to the shipper's location on time.
A study by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) found that driver alertness was related to "time-of-day" more so than "time-on-task." In summer, when there's more daylight, research shows that drivers who take a 10-hour break during the day only average 4.5 hours of high-quality sleep compared to 10-hour breaks at night
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where drivers get around 7.5 hours of sleep. Truckers who sleep during the day get around 2.5 hours less sleep each day compared to their dayshift colleagues who sleep at night.
And herein lies the challenge of prescriptive hours-of-service regulations and a one-size-fits-all approach to the driver's duty cycle.
What you can do
So now what?
- Remember that no matter how long a driver's on-duty period may be, or the time of day a driver starts work, sunlight affects the timing of the sleep-wake cycle.
- Lack of sleep can result in crashes any time of the day or night. If you employ drivers or manage their schedule, don't assume that a 10-hour break means that a driver has had enough sleep and is rested and alert.
- If you're responsible for training drivers or running a safety meeting, talk about how much sleep they're getting and specifically what you want drivers to do when they're feeling tired. Loop your dispatchers and managers into the conversation so everyone is on the same page.
- Dedicate time and resources to teaching sleep science. Diet, medication, naps, sleep duration, and the number of sleep cycles (90 minutes of sleep at a time) in a 24-hour period are factors that can affect a driver's ability to operate a vehicle safely.
- Over and above hours-of-service compliance, make sure every driver gets at least two periods of consecutive night sleep every seven days so that any accumulated sleep debt from the prior workweek is reset to zero.
Shippers and receivers play a role in the driver's productivity and well being. Gate congestion, a lack of safe parking, no access to bathroom facilities, ill-equipped and short-staffed locations… In today's supply chain environment, no trucker will lose sleep over rejecting a load if it means better safety, health, and productivity for the driver.
Dean Croke is the principal industry analyst at DAT Freight & Analytics, which operates in the industry's largest load board for spot truckload freight, and a data analytics program based on $126 billion in annual spot and contract freight transactions. For information, visit dat.com.
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