Drive Awake · Perspectives · Culture
The sign that doesn't exist
There is a sign for nearly every danger on the road. Not for sleepiness. The story of an absence - and of a proposal.
Entry · proposal
The absence
There is a sign for nearly every danger on the road: falling rocks, animals crossing, side wind, icy surface. Signage has a symbol for each, and even one for "other dangers", those without a figure of their own. For sleepiness, none. Yet it is among the most common conditions behind serious crashes and, unlike the other dangers, it does not come from outside: it comes from inside the driver.
The signal that is arriving
While that symbol is missing on the road, inside the car a signal is arriving. The European vehicle safety regulation makes mandatory the systems that warn when the driver is drowsy or distracted: the drowsiness warning on new vehicles from 2024, the distraction warning from 2026 (Regulation (EU) 2019/2144). The car, in short, is learning to notice. The road around it, not yet. The signal is born in the cabin before it is on the asphalt.
Why it is missing
A sign points to an external danger, out there: a bend, a landslide, a narrowing. Sleepiness is different, because it arises within us, and admitting it is a small taboo. Sleeping little is still read as merit, pushing through as virtue, stopping as weakness. You do not put up a sign for a danger we keep denying. The absence of the sign, before it is technical, is cultural.
The limit of proof
There is also a reason that concerns the law. Sleepiness cannot be seen before and leaves no trace after: no value in the blood, no mark at the scene. Ten years ago, on the A2 near Quinto, a crash was traced to a sleep apnoea the driver did not know he had: a case around a danger no one knew how to measure. Science is looking for that trace: a study by the IRM in Zurich is looking for a signal of sleepiness in saliva (DOI 10.1021/acs.jproteome.5c01064). It is the biochemical signal arriving inside the body, as the electronic one arrives inside the car. Two signals on their way, and a road still silent.
The proposal
Not to reproduce signage. To invent the sign that is missing.
We do not claim to rewrite road signage: an official sign follows a precise path of ordinances and international conventions, and of expertise that is not ours. We propose to open a reflection, lightly but seriously. Driving culture - and perhaps one day signage itself - can recognise sleepiness as it already recognises other dangers. The empty triangle is the shape of the warning, still to be filled: a new symbol for the one danger that has none.
And, while we wait for that sign to find its place on the road, we have built a first pocket-sized prototype of it: the circadian signal tool, which shows when sleepiness tends to weigh more, before you set off. The sign does not yet exist on the road. For now, we have put it in your pocket.
A sign does not punish. It reminds. It does not look for someone to blame afterwards: it helps you stop before. That is the point - prevention, not prosecution. To give a place, in the shared language of the road, to a danger that until now has had no name.
Staying awake, at the wheel and in life.
Sources
EU drowsiness and distraction warning systems: Regulation (EU) 2019/2144 (DDAW from 2024, ADDW from 2026).
Sleepiness and crashes: Horne JA, Reyner LA, BMJ 1995 (DOI 10.1136/bmj.310.6979.565).
Salivary biomarkers of sleepiness: IRM Zürich (DOI 10.1021/acs.jproteome.5c01064).
Swiss Road Traffic Act (LCStr/SVG, RS 741.01), art. 31 - sleepiness is not named; it is covered as a general clause of unfitness to drive.
Catalogue of Swiss road signs - a sign for nearly every danger, none for sleepiness.
Quinto case: crash on the A2, undiagnosed sleep apnoea. Anniversary 26 July.