The costs associated with sleep disorders, principle among them is of course the safety factor. The fact that if you're not well rested, you're likely to be less safe over the road. Certainly productivity is another consideration, as well as retention. What we've found is that drivers with a better quality tend to be happier works and stay with their carriers. Motor carriers spend a lot of money recruiting new drivers to the extent that you can stabilize the fleet, you will reduce costs and improve productivity in the process.

Twenty-eight percent of commercial drivers are likely afflicted with some type of a sleep disorder. Our statistics would indicate that only 15% of the total population of commercial drivers who a LIKELY afflicted are actually diagnosed and are being treated, so there's a significant population in the general public and certainly among commercial drivers who go undiagnosed and untreated.

A couple of characteristics of sleep apnea are: it afflicts mostly males - roughly 92% of the people that we've tested were males. It also has an age component - drivers over the age of 40 have a higher likelihood of being afflicted with the sleep disorder. There's also a direct correlation between body mass and the drivers' susceptibility to sleep disorders - with a stocky build being a further indicator. Snoring, as well, can be an indicator that drivers may need to discuss with family members, but that is a symptom of a sleep disorder.

One of the most significant disruptions for the opportunity for quality sleep is sleep disorders. Sleep apnea is principle among those but it really is a medical condition whereby sleeping drivers will actually stop breathing. They can stop breathing for as short as 10 seconds to as long as 2 minutes - and that can happen between 5 and 500 times per hour.

Drivers that are afflicted with sleep disorder, specifically sleep apnea, need to be diagnosed and treated so they can get quality rest because absent that, constantly waking up - which is what will happen when you start to lose your breath - doesn't allow for the full sleep cycle and the full restorative value of sleep.

Quality of sleep is very important and certainly in the life of a commercial driver, they're rarely in the same location 2 consecutive nights. While they may be in the sleep berth of the truck, a lot of external noises and disruptions can disrupt the quality of sleep for a driver, so its important that companies create the best possible environment that you can to make sure that the drivers are comfortable and has enough opportunity to achieve quality rest - full restorative sleep is really the goal.

An important aspect of fatigue management is to empower your drivers to make the decision as to when they can safely drive and when they need to shut down. It's important to understand that we have no way of knowing whether the driver had any opportunity for quality rest or was able to get quality sleep. We often say that the driver is the captain of their own ship, so he or she needs to make the call as to what they can safely do and when they make a call to shut down, even if they theoretically have hours to run, we have to support that decision, even if it results in a service failure. We have to be able to explain to our customers that our driver did the prudent thing, did the safe thing by shutting down - so we have to support our driver.

What we've learned over time is that it's the hours of continuous service, continuous wakefulness that causes fatigue, and certainly the other contributing factor to that is each driver has driver has to be afforded an opportunity for quality rest.

One of the other characteristics of fatigue is predictable work-rest pattern. One of the things with the current HOS rules - it really does anchor on a 24-hour clock, and the way drivers typically now manage their hours, they're allowed to have a predictable sleep-work pattern. It's the rhythm that you get into between your work and your rest, the opportunity for quality rest, and then managing the continuous wakeful hours of a driver associate in shutting down when it's appropriate to shut down.

In my experience, safety does indeed pay! And with fatigue related crashes, often those crashes are on the higher end of severity continuum, so if you really want to focus on reducing those crashes - whether it be for moral reasons or for the financial reasons - it's a good place to start.

One thing I can tell you about the cost of major crashes is the costs associated with crashes have been going up exponentially. As you know, we live in a litigious society - lawsuits are commonplace - and with increased congestion, and with lot of the externalities that are working against professional drivers today, we have to do everything that we can to avoid those major crashes. Certainly progressive, forward-looking, safety conscience carriers will embrace those things that they can, but there's a financial component that is not insignificant.

Schneider National believes that we have a moral obligation as a company to operate the safest fleet we can possibly put out on the road. I view myself as a public safety advocate and that really is the focus of my efforts, but there's another key component to safety and that's the financial aspect.

Once we began to really dissect this whole question of fatigue, we started looking for ways we could reduce the likelihood of fatigue related crashes. It's important to understand that the management of sleep disorders is one part of an over-arching strategy to approach and address fatigue management within a fleet - but it's a very important part.

That really depends on who you ask. If you look at the national statistics in the fatality reporting system, it'll probably show somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 to 1 1/2 percent of fatality crashes have fatigue as a causal factor. In our experience, that's dramatically under reported - when we collected our own data, it was actually the single largest cause or supporting cause for major crashes, somewhere in the area of 33%.