AI Can Keep Truck Drivers Awake

'Late one night in June 2021, a tanker-truck driver on Phoenix’s Red Mountain Freeway barreled through a line of stopped cars at more than 60 miles an hour, leaving mangled metal and broken bodies in his wake. Four people were killed, 11 injured. The National Transportation Safety Board determined the driver had fallen asleep at the wheel.

Fatigue-induced roadway disasters aren’t uncommon. In the same year, a Greyhound bus driver on an overnight run crashed outside an Illinois truck stop, killing three of his passengers. A 2016 estimate by the National Academy of Sciences found as many as 1 in 5 fatal collisions involving a large truck or bus could be fatigue-related. The sum effect is grim. In 2019-21, more than 200 such fatal collisions took place across America.

Artificial-intelligence tools are emerging that can make such disasters less likely. Samsara, a firm based in San Francisco, is one of several vendors now offering AI-enabled cameras that go inside truck cabs to track driver eyelid behavior, head position, and other signs of alertness. The cameras issue warnings if risk factors show. These systems are improving rapidly. San Diego-based Lytx has upgraded its in-cab camera monitoring platform with real-time fatigue risk scoring that integrates in-cab observations with contextual roadway data collected from billions of driving miles.

Despite the promise of safer roadways, the Teamsters are against these innovations. In 2023 the union negotiated contractual bans on driver-facing cameras—the baseline tech necessary for catching signs of fatigue—with major freight companies like United Parcel Service. “Teamsters won’t move a single package after July 31 if UPS insists on driver-facing cameras in the new contract,” the union declared. Their position rests on the tangential argument that such technology is undue workplace surveillance.'