[Mirioron]

>According to the National Sleep Foundation, about half of U.S. adult drivers admit to consistently getting behind the wheel while feeling drowsy. About 20% admit to falling asleep behind the wheel at some point in the past year – with more than 40% admitting this has happened at least once in their driving careers.

From: https://www.nsc.org/road-safety/safety-topics/fatigued-drivi...

Those are enormous numbers. I wonder how big the economic hit would be if none of those people drove.

[thatcat]

Wow so if you maximize economic growth at the cost of setting up a system that regularly requires a high degree of easily avoidable risk, then later you can use the "you're destroying the economy" argument to prevent any reasonable response that would lower that risk. That seems like a very irresponsible way of managing a system.

[Silhouette]

This is a matter of degree. The start of this thread wasn't about someone who was driving home at the end of a long day at work and feeling a little tired. It was about someone who, by their own admission, had a history of dozing off at the wheel, and wanted to knowingly continue driving while unfit to do so.

If we're being brutally objective here, road accidents are extremely expensive in purely economic terms. Obviously there could be a loss of productivity for anyone directly involved who was injured. But then you also need to expend considerable resources to clear the accident site and fully reopen the road. While you're doing that, you might be delaying many people due to congestion in the area of the accident. Then there is the cost of caring for anyone wounded, repairing any physical damage done to public infrastructure, and repairing or replacing any other vehicles that were involved and any cargo they were carrying. And of course, in the worst case, you have the profound effects of losing people entirely under such tragic circumstances, which involve not just losing anything they would have contributed for the rest of their lives, but also the consequences for their family and friends, their employers or clients, and anyone else who depended on them economically right down to the place on the corner where they stopped to buy a coffee each morning on the way into the office.

So even if we're only trying to avoid the most catastrophic cases such as someone actually falling asleep and causing a multi-vehicle pile-up on a major road, and even if we err on the side of caution and take many thousands of drivers off the road who are at significant risk of causing such an accident but in reality would not have done so, it's still not clear cut that the economic hit would be greater than the harm prevented.

For those who like hard data, I can't immediately offer you any, but as a very rough guide, here in the UK (where we already have lower per-capita road deaths than most of the world) I have seen arguments made about local road improvement schemes that suggested a seven-figure cost to save a single life would be economically justified. It's not hard to believe if you consider that a fatal accident can close a road for several hours, leaving thousands of vehicles stranded, and involving dozens of emergency responders and all of the equipment and vehicles they need, in addition to the injury, death and damage caused to anyone directly involved.

[fastball]

The start of the thread was actually:

> You should never get behind the wheel if there's a chance you'll fall asleep!

I would say anyone that feels drowsy has a change of falling asleep. So 50% of the population should regularly not get behind the wheel, by GC's standard.

[Silhouette]

No, the start of the thread was:

One of the reasons I would love to have autopilot is because I have a history of dozing off at the wheel. Never so much where I've had an accident, but bad enough where I've scared myself badly.

This was followed by arguing for the safety feature in case it happened again.

[fastball]

Sorry, should’ve said “start of this argument”.

Though it's not really a thread until OC was disagreed with, so thread works too.