Safe Speed Forums

Day Six dealt with stress, fatigue and anger.

Inability to relax leads to stress. Stress may arise out of an immediate situationsuch as heavy traffic making you late for an appointment. It may surface each time you gt into your car ... fear of an accident or beig tailgated (basingwerk ) You may even feel stressed when your children are in the car.

Fatigue - caused by driving long distances without a break features as a prime accident cause in all statistics. The affects are cumulative: opening a window, stopping for coffee my halp for a short while ... but the bottom k=line is that fatigue will take over until adequate rest is taken.

Anger can be carried onto the road by circumstances which occurred outside the car. How many times have you had a "domestic" or disgreement with a work colleague, got into your car and continued to fume about it whilst driving to and from work? Then you react to other drivers by rude getures, mouthing obscenities at them and all this says more about your own inadequacies than the person you direct these at. People under stress, fatigued, in a hurry because they have not allowed sufficient time for their journey, and those with an aggressive competitive attitude are more susceptible to outbursts of anger on the road.

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Evaluate your attitudes to stress, faitigue and effect of work loads and sundry disputes on your driving skills.

Guilty. I try not to but it's hard to leave the anger behind when you get in the car.

I usually only get fatigued when I drive at the speed limit on a major motorway. If I use an A or B road with lots of bends and two-way traffic I find that I can travel a lot further without fatigue.

On the motorway I usually up the pace to about 20kph over the limit and I feel the fatigue fall away as my concentration increases. One of my regular trips is about a 2 hour drive and on the way home I found myself regularly "falling asleep", ie drooping eyes, yawning, distracted etc. By upping the speed to 120kph I found that this situation no longer occurs.

I believe that boredom induced fatigue is probably the biggest killer on motorways, certainly a far bigger killer than speeding.

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Ross

Yes I'm a hoon, but only on the track!!!!

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Fatigue caused my one and only accident. Was years ago, about when i was 21 and didn't know any better, was driving from about 4am till early evening, short haul 3.5ton van, and i feel alseep at the wheel, luckily one of those short micro sleeps, woke up and stood on the brakes. Still managed to shunt the car in front though at about 5 mph.
Taught me one thing though, when ever i start to feel tired or yawn now i take a break and wake up.
Faitgue is just dangerous the way it can creep up on you, espically driving late at night on the motorways. Used to carry a thermos of Tea with me, not many places open at 3am on the M25 and A3.