Drowsy driving has become one of the most underestimated causes of truck accidents on American roads. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) sets clear limits on how many consecutive hours a commercial driver can be behind the wheel, but those rules only count the time a driver spends working. They don’t account for everything that happens before the work shift even begins. A trucker who lives two hours from the terminal already has four hours of driving wrapped around a full shift, and federal rules treat that as personal time.
At Shapiro, Washburn & Sharp, our Virginia Beach truck accident attorneys see the fallout from fatigue-related crashes more often than most people realize. The driver may have stayed within hours-of-service limits and still been dangerously tired. A truck accident attorney who understands these cases knows to look beyond the official log and at the bigger picture, including how the driver actually got to work that morning.
Excessive Commuting and the FAST Act Study
Section 5515 of the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act, passed in 2015, required the FMCSA to study the safety effects of commercial driver commutes longer than 150 minutes and report back to Congress. The agency defined “excessive commuting” as any commute exceeding two and a half hours one way. The study was triggered in part by the 2014 New Jersey Turnpike crash involving comedian Tracy Morgan, where a Walmart driver who had reportedly slept only a few hours in the previous day and a half struck a limo van and killed comedian James McNair.
The FMCSA submitted its Report to Congress in May 2020. The result surprised some safety advocates. The agency stated that the study was unable to find sufficient data to identify the specific safety effects of commutes exceeding 150 minutes. The conclusion didn’t mean excessive commuting is safe. It meant the data needed to draw a firm regulatory line wasn’t available, leaving the rules governing personal commute time largely untouched.
That gap matters because driver fatigue continues to drive serious crashes year after year.
What Recent Research Says About Drowsy Driving and Commercial Trucks
The numbers around fatigue-related crashes have only gotten more sobering as researchers improve their methods. A 2024 study from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety estimated that drowsy drivers were involved in 17.6 percent of all fatal crashes between 2017 and 2021, which works out to roughly 30,000 deaths over that five-year stretch. That figure is roughly ten times higher than what police reports alone capture, because fatigue is notoriously hard to identify after a crash.
For commercial trucks specifically, the Governors Highway Safety Association estimates that between 10 and 20 percent of large truck and bus crashes involve a tired driver. The National Sleep Foundation has found that about 14 percent of truck drivers have reported a near-crash they attribute directly to drowsiness.
Some of the factors that contribute to driver fatigue include:
- Long personal commutes before and after a shift
- Untreated sleep disorders like obstructive sleep apnea
- Tight delivery deadlines that pressure drivers to push past safe limits
- Pay-by-mile compensation structures that reward more driving
- Irregular schedules that disrupt normal sleep cycles
- Insufficient rest facilities at terminals and along key routes
Driving after being awake for 20 hours produces impairment comparable to driving with a blood alcohol level of 0.08 percent, which is the legal limit for non-commercial drivers in most states. For a tractor-trailer driver hauling 80,000 pounds, the consequences of that level of impairment can be catastrophic.
Why These Cases Need Careful Investigation
Fatigue is rarely written into a police report. It has to be reconstructed from evidence after the fact. That can include driver logs, cell phone data, dispatch records, electronic logging device downloads, surveillance footage from truck stops, and sometimes employment records showing where the driver lives in relation to where they pick up the truck. Pulling that information takes time, and trucking companies are not going to volunteer it.
Liability in a fatigue-related crash often extends beyond the driver. The trucking company may have set unrealistic schedules or ignored warning signs. A medical examiner may have cleared the driver despite an untreated sleep disorder. Dispatchers may have pushed deliveries that effectively required driving while fatigued. Each of these parties can carry separate insurance coverage, and identifying all of them is part of what makes commercial trucking cases so different from typical car wrecks.
A Local Firm With Decades of Trucking Experience
Shapiro, Washburn & Sharp has represented injured clients since 1985. Our firm’s attorneys have written books, published articles, and lectured to other lawyers around the country on personal injury law, and several members of the team have been recognized by peer-reviewed legal organizations for their work on behalf of crash victims.
If you have been injured in a truck accident, contact an experienced Virginia Beach truck accident attorney to find out what legal recourse you may have against the party or parties responsible for the crash. Truck accident claims can be more complex than other types of vehicle accidents because there are often multiple at-fault parties that are responsible for the financial damages victims may be entitled to.
If you or someone you love was hurt in a Virginia Beach truck accident, the team at Shapiro, Washburn & Sharp is ready to listen. Contact us at 833-997-1774 for a free consultation to learn about the options available to you. Our firm has offices in Virginia Beach, Portsmouth, Suffolk, Hampton, Norfolk, and Chesapeake, and we’re proud to serve injured people throughout the region.