ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to highlight some of those difficulties and identify – hopefully – more productive approaches to the problem. Methodological difficulties seem to underlie our failure to minimize fatigue effects on road safety, in spite of the effort that has been put into researching it since the first World War. Driving, traffic and work experience can have mediating influences on fatigue effects. The contribution of inadequate sleep to driver fatigue can obviously not be investigated validly by retrospective studies of accident involvement, except perhaps by the use of extremely costly ‘on-the-spot’ types of transport research. Experience is a more difficult mediating factor to handle in driver fatigue research, since the evidence suggests that it is not simply vehicle handling, road and traffic experience that is important, but experience in coming to terms with particularly demanding schedules of transport operation.
