And like I said, I really don't care..but I will respond to innuendo.
Nuff said. Let's move on to helping those who choose to operate legally. Uh, you do remember the law, don't you?
It has nothing to do with HOS regs.
It has everything to do with the officer determining if you are fit to drive.
The provision falls under Reckless Operation:
(2) No person may endanger the safety of any person or property by the negligent operation of a vehicle.
I was hoping the driver who was cited would post regarding his experience.
But if you have any doubts just ask a DOT officer, or any police officer for that matter, what they would do if they pulled you for weaving, or left-of-center, or erratically speeding up then slowing down(common during fatigue) and they looked at the QC and determined that you had been driving for 16 hours.
Here is memo posted to a Police Officer's web site.
When tired, a driver will have a hard time concentrating on your driving. This should be no great revelation. When we are tired, we have a hard time concentrating on anything we do. Moving in a 4500 pound object going 60 feet a second (40 MPH) is not a time to have a lapse in concentration.
When fatigued, we tend to take more risks. Drivers may do things while fatigued they would never think of doing when well-rested. Simply put - fatigue dulls the mind.
When tired, drivers have a tough time keeping their cars in the proper lane. They may weave and appear drunk, but they're not. They're just very tired. The results are the same though; it's a dangerous, accident-producing situation. A fatigued driver often speeds up and slows down erratically.
If a fatigued driver ignores these early warning signals and continues to drive, vision deteriorates and it gradually becomes very difficult to see. Attention focuses forward. The driver will begin to miss signals of signs in the peripheral vision area. In other words, the driver develops "tunnel vision." If a driver does not have peripheral vision they will have a difficult time seeing cars coming from an intersection. This accounts, in part, for many of the accidents that occur near the end of a long shift.
Many of the time honored cures for fatigue simply won't work, like drinking coffee to stay awake is only a stopgap, temporary measure. The caffeine can bring you up fast, but as the kidneys eliminate it from the body, it will also bring a person down-fast. The solution to fatigue is rest. (Gee, there's a novel idea)
REACTION TIME
Without a doubt the biggest problem fatigue can create is it's the affect on reaction time. Due to fatigue, there can be as much as a half second added to the time it takes to react to an emergency. That may not sound like much but at 60 MPH a half second delay in reacting to an incident is 45 feet, and at 40 mph a half a second is 30 feet. That could be the difference between the scenario being an emergency and not being an emergency.
"So often our safety message focuses on drunk driving or the importance of wearing seat belts. Both of these are extremely important," Illinois State Police Director Sam W. Nolen said, "but motorists should also obey other traffic laws. Think of how many lives could be saved if everyone obeyed traffic laws."
And to that I'll add, "Or just used common sense."
