For years, I have believed that one of the most overlooked safety issues in the trucking industry is the psychological and cognitive effect of keeping long-haul truck drivers on the road for extended periods of time.
Many over-the-road drivers spend weeks away from home, return for only a short period, and then leave again. During those weeks, they deal with congested highways, unpredictable motorists, appointment pressures, detention, irregular schedules, isolation, interrupted sleep, and nights spent in sleeper berths at truck stops, distribution centers, and other locations that are not always conducive to quality rest.
The trucking industry talks constantly about fatigue. I believe we need to broaden that discussion.
The Research Supports the Concern
The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), part of the CDC, recognizes that long-haul trucking presents a combination of conditions that can affect drivers’ mental well-being. According to NIOSH, long-haul drivers can experience depression associated with stress, isolation and job demands.
Among the factors identified by NIOSH are extended periods away from family and friends, long working hours, irregular work-and-rest schedules, being alone on the road, monotony and fatigue.
Those conditions sound familiar to almost anyone who has spent significant time in an over-the-road truck.
They also demonstrate why driver mental health should not be treated as something separate from highway safety.
Sleep Is More Than Hours in the Sleeper Berth
One of the biggest issues is sleep.
Being legally parked in a sleeper berth for ten hours does not necessarily mean a driver receives ten hours of restorative sleep.
A driver may be parked beside a refrigerated trailer cycling throughout the night. Another truck may be idling nearby. Backup alarms may sound at a distribution center. Trucks continually enter and leave parking spaces. There may be bright lights, temperature changes and other interruptions.
Research has documented significant sleep concerns among long-haul drivers.
In one landmark study involving long-haul truck drivers carrying actual revenue-producing loads, researchers objectively measured drivers’ sleep. Drivers averaged approximately 4.8 hours of verified sleep per day, despite reporting that they ideally needed approximately seven hours. More than half of the drivers studied demonstrated at least one period of observable drowsiness while driving.
The researchers concluded that these long-haul drivers were obtaining less sleep than necessary to maintain alertness on the job.
Other research involving 260 long-haul drivers has examined both sleep duration and sleep quality because inadequate or poor-quality sleep can degrade safety-related performance.
That distinction matters.
A driver’s logbook can tell us when the driver was technically off duty. It cannot necessarily tell us whether that driver slept well.
Fatigue Changes How a Driver Performs
FMCSA defines fatigue as the result of physical or mental exertion that impairs performance. The agency notes that fatigue can result from inadequate sleep, extended working hours and other factors.
FMCSA has also identified several effects of fatigue that are particularly important when operating an 80,000-pound commercial vehicle: reduced attentiveness, slower reaction time, impaired judgment and an increased likelihood of falling asleep.
Those are not simply health concerns.
They are highway-safety concerns.
FMCSA reports that in the Large Truck Crash Causation Study, approximately 13 percent of commercial motor vehicle drivers involved in the crashes studied were considered fatigued at the time of the crash.
Research into commercial-driver schedules has also found that safety-critical events increased as driving hours increased, while breaks reduced risk during the period immediately following the break.
This demonstrates that human performance changes with workload, rest and fatigue.
The Psychological Side of Long-Haul Trucking
But physical tiredness is only part of the issue.
Consider what happens psychologically when someone spends two or three weeks living almost entirely inside a truck.
The truck becomes the driver’s workplace, bedroom, dining area and living space.
The driver wakes up in the truck, works in the truck, eats around the truck, waits at customers in the truck and then sleeps in the same truck before repeating the process the next day.
At the same time, normal social contact may become limited.
Family dinners are missed. Birthdays are missed. Weekends disappear. A driver may speak with a spouse or children by telephone, but that is not the same as being home.
NIOSH specifically identifies extended time away from family and friends, isolation, long hours, irregular schedules, monotony and fatigue as factors that can contribute to depression among long-haul drivers.
Stress can also accumulate gradually.
A driver may not recognize that his or her patience is becoming shorter. Irritability may increase. Concentration may become more difficult. Motivation can decline. Small problems can begin producing disproportionately large emotional responses.
This is why psychological fatigue deserves as much attention as physical fatigue.
Cognitive Fatigue Behind the Wheel
Driving a commercial vehicle requires continuous cognitive processing.
A professional driver is constantly monitoring mirrors, traffic speed, following distance, lane position, road conditions, construction zones, merging traffic, weather, navigation and the behavior of surrounding motorists.
Do that for one day and it requires concentration.
Do it day after day, while sleeping irregularly and living away from home, and the accumulated workload deserves serious consideration.
FMCSA’s research recognizes that fatigue can impair attention, reaction time and judgment. Its naturalistic-driving research has specifically investigated the relationship between drowsiness, time-on-task and safety-critical events.
The question therefore should not simply be:
“Is this driver legally within his hours of service?”
We should also be asking:
“Is this driver psychologically and cognitively recovered enough to safely perform the job?”
Those are not necessarily the same question.
What We Still Need to Know
There is another question I believe deserves serious research.
Does crash risk increase according to the number of consecutive days or weeks a long-haul driver has been away from home?
I have suspected for years that there could be a relationship. But that hypothesis should be tested rather than presented as established fact.
Crash investigations routinely examine hours of service, drug and alcohol testing, vehicle condition, weather, driving history and what happened immediately before the collision.
Researchers should also examine longer-term factors:
How many consecutive days had the driver been on the road?
How many nights had the driver slept in the truck?
How much actual sleep had the driver received?
How frequently had that sleep been interrupted?
How many days had passed since the driver had meaningful time away from the truck?
How much home time did the driver receive between extended trips?
What was the driver’s workload during the previous two or three weeks?
FMCSA itself has recognized the importance of longer-term sleep and driving schedules when studying fatigue and crash risk, and the agency continues to examine relationships between driver schedules, fatigue and crashes.
Until we collect and analyze that information on a large scale, we cannot responsibly say that drivers who have been out two or three weeks cause most crashes.
But we should absolutely be asking whether extended periods on the road contribute to risk.
We Monitor the Truck—But What About the Driver?
The modern commercial truck can contain an extraordinary amount of safety technology.
There are collision-mitigation systems, automatic emergency braking, lane-departure warnings, electronic logging devices, outward-facing cameras, inward-facing cameras, speed governors and systems capable of monitoring driver behavior.
These technologies can serve legitimate safety purposes.
But none addresses the entire human side of trucking.
A camera cannot reduce loneliness.
A speed governor cannot restore lost sleep.
A collision-mitigation system cannot give someone meaningful time with a spouse, children or grandchildren.
A lane-departure warning cannot eliminate weeks of accumulated occupational stress.
An inward-facing camera can document what a driver was doing seconds before a collision. It cannot necessarily address the weeks of fatigue, poor sleep or psychological strain that may have preceded those seconds.
We have become extremely good at monitoring the machine and the person sitting inside it.
Perhaps we need to become equally serious about protecting that person’s ability to function.
We Monitor the Truck—But What About the Driver?
The modern commercial truck can contain an extraordinary amount of safety technology.
There are collision-mitigation systems, automatic emergency braking, lane-departure warnings, electronic logging devices, outward-facing cameras, inward-facing cameras, speed governors and systems capable of monitoring driver behavior.
These technologies can serve legitimate safety purposes.
But none addresses the entire human side of trucking.
A camera cannot reduce loneliness.
A speed governor cannot restore lost sleep.
A collision-mitigation system cannot give someone meaningful time with a spouse, children or grandchildren.
A lane-departure warning cannot eliminate weeks of accumulated occupational stress.
An inward-facing camera can document what a driver was doing seconds before a collision. It cannot necessarily address the weeks of fatigue, poor sleep or psychological strain that may have preceded those seconds.
We have become extremely good at monitoring the machine and the person sitting inside it.
Perhaps we need to become equally serious about protecting that person’s ability to function.
Home Time Should Be Considered a Safety Issue
This is where I believe trucking companies, insurance carriers and transportation researchers should change the conversation.
Instead of looking at home time strictly as an employee benefit or operational inconvenience, we should study it as a potential safety intervention.
Could shorter rotations reduce accumulated fatigue?
Could more frequent home time improve sleep and psychological recovery?
Could meaningful recovery periods improve concentration and patience?
Could they reduce turnover?
And, most importantly, could they prevent crashes?
Those questions deserve the same scientific attention we give cameras, collision-mitigation systems and other safety technologies.
I am not arguing that safety technology should disappear. I am arguing that technology cannot replace a rested, mentally healthy and psychologically prepared professional driver.
After decades in this industry, I believe one principle deserves much more attention:
The safest truck on the highway still depends on the condition of the human being sitting behind the wheel.
If the trucking industry truly wants to reduce crashes, it cannot focus exclusively on equipment, electronic monitoring and regulatory compliance.
It must also examine what weeks of isolation, disrupted sleep, occupational stress and continuous life on the road are doing to the driver.
Meaningful home time should not simply be viewed as time when the truck is not producing revenue.
It may be one of the most overlooked components of driver safety.
What the Industry Should Do
If the trucking industry is serious about reducing crashes, driver psychological health and recovery should become part of the safety conversation.
Trucking companies, insurance carriers, FMCSA, and independent researchers should study whether consecutive days away from home correlate with fatigue, cognitive performance, psychological stress, and crash or safety-critical-event risk. Research should compare drivers who are home frequently with drivers who routinely remain on the road for 10, 14, 21 days or longer.
The industry should also examine whether extended periods on the road should be followed by meaningful recovery time at home, rather than simply enough time to complete a 34-hour restart before returning to work.
A 34-hour restart may satisfy an hours-of-service requirement, but regulatory compliance and psychological recovery are not necessarily the same thing.
The industry should consider several measures:
- Track consecutive days away from home as a potential fatigue and safety indicator.
- Study whether crash and near-crash risk changes as continuous time on the road increases.
- Examine sleep quality—not simply legal sleeper-berth or off-duty time.
- Give drivers meaningful opportunities to recover at home following extended trips.
- Train dispatchers and safety managers to recognize behavioral signs of chronic fatigue, stress, and burnout.
- Include driver mental health and psychological recovery in fleet safety programs alongside cameras, collision-mitigation systems, and other technology.
Most importantly, researchers should determine whether there is a point—10 days, 14 days, 21 days, or some other period—at which continuous time away from home begins measurably affecting a driver’s cognitive or psychological performance.
We should not arbitrarily choose that number. We should conduct the research and let the evidence determine it.
If that research demonstrates that shorter rotations and meaningful home time reduce fatigue, improve cognitive performance, or lower crash risk, then home-time policies should no longer be viewed simply as recruiting and retention benefits.
They should become part of the industry’s safety strategy.
The research behind the strongest statements includes the CDC/NIOSH long-haul truck driver research, FMCSA driver-fatigue guidance, FMCSA research on driver schedules and crash risk, and the peer-reviewed long-haul driver sleep study. The FMCSA restart research is especially interesting because it actually measured sleep, stress, alertness and safety-critical events among working commercial drivers.
Brian E Vasey.
Great Article