You’d have to look closer at the statistics, I suspect that the clustering of fatalities would give a fairly clear picture: for instance, an altogether too frequent type of DUI fatality is young adults driving home from a night out, dancing and drinking, in the wee hours of the morning. Obviously fatigue is a factor on top of alcohol, but it’s not clear that anything would be gained by counting those as “sleep deprivation related accidents”.
I suspect that a kind of Pareto analysis is what’s really called for in limiting the costs of traffic accident; you want to target, not generic causes (e.g. speeding or drunk driving or fatigue) but specific clusters of behaviours that account for disproportionate numbers of accidents. If you can stamp out driving-home-drunk-and-tired-from-nights-out behaviours, you’re already reducing the total fatality count by a lot. (This is precisely how traffic safety campaigns have been organized lately here.)
You’d have to look closer at the statistics, I suspect that the clustering of fatalities would give a fairly clear picture: for instance, an altogether too frequent type of DUI fatality is young adults driving home from a night out, dancing and drinking, in the wee hours of the morning. Obviously fatigue is a factor on top of alcohol, but it’s not clear that anything would be gained by counting those as “sleep deprivation related accidents”.
I suspect that a kind of Pareto analysis is what’s really called for in limiting the costs of traffic accident; you want to target, not generic causes (e.g. speeding or drunk driving or fatigue) but specific clusters of behaviours that account for disproportionate numbers of accidents. If you can stamp out driving-home-drunk-and-tired-from-nights-out behaviours, you’re already reducing the total fatality count by a lot. (This is precisely how traffic safety campaigns have been organized lately here.)