U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

The results of sleep deprivation have been linked to motor vehicle accidents, major industrial accidents such as the Exxon Valdez, and Three Mile Island, and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster (2). The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in 1999 estimated that 56,000 police-reported crashes and 4% of all traffic crash fatalities (1550 cases) involved drowsiness and fatigue as principal causes (3). Sleepiness was a probable cause in about one third of all fatal-to-driver motor vehicle accidents involving commercial truck drivers (4). 

U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (USNHTSA). (1997). Setting limits, saving lives. Ihe case for. OS BAC laws. Washington, DC U.S. 

A. Tewarson, I. A. Abu-Isa, D. R. Cummings, and D. E. LaDue, Fire Safety Science, Sixth International Symposium, 2000, pp. 991-1002. U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Docket Number NHTSA-1998-3588-71, December 13, 1999. 

For the benefit of the driving population, simpler and qualitative versions of the increasing impairment of alcohol with increasing BACs have been published by various traffic safety organizations. Table 11-3 is one such summary published by the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (2005a). 

In light of these considerations, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration initiated a new alcohol crash-risk study (Blomberg et al, 2004). The new study was conducted in Florida and Galifomia and included 4,919 crash-involved drivers and 10,066 matched control drivers. For every crash involved driver, two matched control drivers were sampled. To match the two groups as closely as possible, for each crash-involved driver the two control drivers were sampled from the traffic stream of drivers traveling on the same road at the same location at the same day of the week, at the same time, and in the same direction a week after the crash. 

If an accident cannot be anticipated or expected by anyone, then it is indeed due to chance or to forces beyond our understanding (Figure 17-1). In that case, the term accident causation is an oxymoron. Alternatively, if we accept the notion that traffic accidents are not chance events or acts of God, then they can be predicted and prevented. This rationale led the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the journal Nature to replace the term accident with the term crash . With this approach we assume that if a person with some relevant expertise has at his or her disposal all of the necessary data immediately before an accident happens, he or she can foresee the accident. From the perspective of that expert the accident can or could have been avoided. The knowledge that is available to our mythical expert is what we seek in our attempts to understand the reasons or causes of accidents. 

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