Drivers under 30 are more likely to get behind the wheel sleepy than drunk because they don’t perceive drowsy driving dangerous, reveals a study from Queensland University of Technology (QUT).

In the report presented at the 2015 Australasian Road Safety Conference on the Gold Coast, road safety researcher Chris Watling said driving sleepy and driving under the influence of alcohol pose comparable increase in crash risk, yet young drivers perceive the dangers of each behaviour as significantly different.

“Research shows a blood alcohol content of 0.05 per cent has the same effect as being awake for 17 hours, and a BAC of 0.1 per cent is roughly 20 hours, but drivers don’t consider the impairment to be the same,” Watling said.

Twenty percent of the Queensland’s fatal crashes were attributed to drink driving, while an estimated 15 percent is caused by fatigued driving, Watling cited. However, identifying incidence rates of sleep-related crashes is more difficult because there is no objective test for it.

The researchers examined the perceptions of 114 young drivers and 177 drivers over 30 on the two risky driving behaviours. They found that young drivers were more likely to drive sleepy than drunk and more accepting of enforcement practices for drink driving than they are for sleepy driving. This shows that drivers, particularly young ones, do not view equally the dangers of driving drunk and sleepy driving despite the crash risks being similar, Watling said.

According to him, sleepiness had been shown to significantly impair a person’s cognitive and psychomotor abilities, which affect safety-critical tasks such as driving, attention, working memory and coordination. Younger drivers were more likely to be impaired by sleepiness because of the natural developmental maturing of the body’s sleep-wake systems in early adulthood, Watling added.

While the study shows that the efforts of sustained drink-driving enforcement and community education campaigns have reduced the acceptability of this dangerous behaviour, Watling said it also highlights a greater need to increase all drivers’ perceptions of the dangers of sleepy driving.

Road crashes are a major cause of both injury and mortality for young adults in Australia. According to road safety data from The George Institute, 45 percent of all young Australian injury deaths are due to road traffic crashes. Young drivers, or individuals between the ages of 17 and 25 years old, represent one-quarter of all Australian road deaths.

The 2015 Australasian Road Safety Conference is the result of a successful merger of Australasia’s two premier road safety conferences, which are the Australasian College of Road Safety Conference and the Australasian Road Safety Research, Policing and Education Conference. Among its objectives is to align with the national and international road safety efforts across Australia, New Zealand and globally and assist in building road safety capacity across these regions.

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