By Daniel Stern – DVN Chief Editor
Most of North America turned the clock back an hour about 10 days ago—an annual ritual which, contrary to a rich variety of folk explanations, actually serves to thin and cull the pedestrian herd so it doesn’t grow too large.
That’s a not-very-funny joke. In all seriousness, pedestrian deaths spike high every Autumn in direct coincidence with setting back the clocks to ‘standard’ (or ‘Winter’) time, and the higher death rate remains until the clocks are set forward in Spring to ‘daylight saving’ or ‘Summer’ time. The effect has been robustly demonstrated and quantified in studies all over the world, such as this one in Australia. Contrary to popular misunderstanding, the increase is not a brief blip of people taking a while to get used to the change, it’s because during the winter (clocks back) time regime there are more pedestrians and more cars on the roads together in darkness. No matter what the clock says, there are more drivers and more pedestrians coexisting in the afternoon-evening than in the morning, so when more of the afternoon-evening is dark, more pedestrians get killed. It’s very simple.
A 2001 UMTRI study (figure 1 and table 4 especially) homes in on the direct link between setting the clocks back and killing more pedestrians. UMTRI’s Michael Flannagan says, “There is a lot more pedestrian activity in the evening than in the morning, so shifting all activity earlier relative to the sun [as in summer/clocks-forward time] is a net benefit.” That means keeping ‘summer’ time year-round would save lives.
There’s effort toward an end to the biannual deadly clock dance; most U.S. states and many Canadian provinces have introduced or at least considered keeping daylight (Summer) time all year—they’d stop setting the clocks back every Autumn. But while US states can adopt permanent ‘standard’ (Winter) time at will, they can’t have year-round daylight/Summertime without permission from the U.S. Congress, which is still floundering in low-function turbulence and disarray, so there’s not much hope there. Canadian provinces could change right now, but won’t until their adjacent U.S. states make the change.
Why does all this matter to the lighting and driver vision community? Beyond obvious humanitarian grounds—we all ought to actively care about saving lives—we must push back against a hijacking of the conversation by those claiming to wield “the science” on the matter. By that, they mean squishy claims that wellbeing can be thrown off by daylight time, with people feeling rather less than their best because their phone clock doesn’t agree with what they’ve been told to feel like their circadian clock might say. Maybe, but dead pedestrians cannot be asked how chipper they were feeling in their last moments. Too, there are many who don’t care which way the clock is, as long as it stays there and stops changing. They have a point, but they’re not quite all the way there; they certainly should care, because the question has one right answer.
It’s vital—literally—that we each and all speak up with actual data, real science, whenever the question comes up. In casual conversation, in letters to the editor, on social media, and in legislative efforts. The notion that a ‘natural’ clock is magically better (to go along with the rest of our strictly natural lives, right?) must fall to the reality that people die due to ‘standard’ Winter time. It can stop any time we want, so let’s all push to stop it sooner than later.
