No Breathalyser For Fatigue

Do you know that there is a kind of behaviour we call ‘hustle’ or ‘dedication’? Do you know we have learned to forgive this behaviour too easily? Do you know what that behaviour is? It is actually like a gun that is aimed at the people in a vehicle and all other road users. This behaviour is common with drivers of articulated vehicles.

These are drivers who do long distances and stay behind the wheel for ten hours or more. There are not the only culprits. Other commercial drivers do the same. So too do some private vehicle drivers. Drivers who, like I wrote last week, think they are strongmen. Drivers who dare nature.

The evidence is red eyes and a stiff neck. We don’t call it a loaded gun because we are too religious, too pious and forgiving and believe that no matter what we do, it must always happen as destined. I am talking about driver fatigue. It is similar to a tyre burst or reckless driving in that it poses a danger to the driver, the vehicle occupants, and everyone else on the road.

However, unlike those other risk-taking driving behaviours, fatigue is less of an epidemic and more of a slow, concentrated death. No one knows when it will happen. What makes it more dangerous is that it is invisible to both the driver, vehicle occupants and other road users.

Fatigue creeps. It steals concentration in fractions- a half a second of sleep here, a delayed reaction there until one of those fraction doses last more than a fraction for a fully loaded articulated truck to drift across the median on any of our corridors or for a luxury bus to barrel through the corridor at 1 am and misses a bend that on any ordinary morning, the driver would have negotiated without a second thought.

There is no breathalyser for tiredness. No roadside test that flashes red when a driver has been awake for hours. In fact, there is no prayer point to tackle sleep or tiredness except to sleep or rest as an antidote. And so, it slips past checkpoints. Slips past law enforcement. Slips past public consciousness until it announces itself, unanimously, in a fatal crash that might be attributed to loss of control or dangerous driving instead of exhaustion.

Driving at night, which the Federal Road Safety has consistently counselled against, especially on the Lagos-Ibadan, Kaduna-Abuja, and other busy corridors, is dangerous and risky. We are all aware, yet we justify it for several reasons. Some call it cheap. Others say it is the safest because the roads are less busy at night.

Daily, we lampoon the government for the poor road infrastructure despite the current government’s efforts in this direction. We talk about other dangerous driving practices, such as excessive speeding, driving under the influence, and impaired driving, among others. This occupies the blind spot of driver fatigue.

Fatigue does not announce itself as a tyre burst does in a dramatic sense before impact. That is why it is called a silent killer. Drivers mock it. Joke about it and dare it, hoping that all sorts of combinations, such as smoking, eating kolanut and even drinking, would arrest it.

A handful who dared to fatigue never lived to tell the story, and so it remains a blind spot in our daily discourse on road safety, for reasons we all know. Our transport economy runs on long-haul tankers carrying petroleum from Lagos to the north. Articulate trucks haul cement. Grains and timber across state routes that stretch for hours or more

Commercial drivers paid by the trip rather than by the hour are incentivised to push through fatigue rather than stop and rest because a parked vehicle earns nothing, and a driver who insists on sleep risks being replaced by one who won’t. This is a structural failing that has been discussed but not given the priority it deserves.

Until we fix this, fatigue- or exhaustion-driven driving will continue, while the safe-driving singsong would sound like an upcoming Afrobeat artist’s first album. Government effort is noted, but transport expert consistently points out to the glaring gap in our highway infrastructure; the need for a well-lit rest area where drivers can legitimately and safely pull over, sleep for hours and continue without fear for their safety or their cargo, irrespective of the time

In developed countries, rest stops are mandatory on highways. They are monitored, maintained, and sometimes enforced through devices such as tachographs that record how long a vehicle has been in continuous motion. Its absence in Nigeria handicaps the driver who truly wishes to sleep

Unfortunately, there are no safe places to do so. No patrolled lay-by. No functioning street lights. No assurance that his parked vehicle and its contents will be there when he wakes. In the name of hustle, he does what he thinks is rational by driving continuously, even at the risk of a possible crash, trusting and praying to God Almighty that his body won’t fail him until he arrives at his destination.

This is where the lead Agency in this business of keeping our roads safe should again dust this lifesaving project again . The Corps has shown to its credit that it has intensified public enlightenment campaigns and festive season patrol operations, and recently, data suggest that we are making progress through these efforts.

Our enlightenment campaigns tell drivers to rest after three or four hours of driving. Yet the place to rest in obedience is not available. We need to dust off the books and reopen this project, which holds the key to unlocking fatigued driving and crashes related to exhaustion. We need a kilometre-for-kilometre physical infrastructure, with secure rest areas along major high-traffic corridors.

We need to step up and enforce maximum continuous driving limits for commercial and long-distance operators. We need to give bite to the regulatory framework that holds transport companies and drivers accountable for fatigue-linked fatalities and other related fatalities.

We need to deal with other issues. Fatigue and other regulatory work where there is trust between the regulator and the regulated. A driver pressured by his employer to ignore rest periods will not self-report exhaustion to an enforcement officer he suspects is not interested in crash prevention.

To manage fatigue, we need enforcement. But we must first acknowledge that our transport economy incentivises exhaustion. This should be followed by deliberate investment in the physical infrastructure of rest, paired with regulatory mechanisms that hold the transport company financially accountable for the schedules they impose on drivers, while drivers must also be held accountable for their errors.

So, our public communication should not only warn drivers but also partner with them and their employers, as we have always done. We should acknowledge the economic pressure they face and agree on the need to abort this irresponsible, risky driving behaviour.

While we work on what is possible, please remember that every long-distance journey carries an invisible passenger: fatigue, riding silently alongside the driver who chooses not to rest until a crash occurs. When it does, remember that it may well be fatigue, not loss of control or dangerous driving.