Drive Safely: Traffic Safety in Short Supply the Monday After Daylight-Saving Time

Brian Resnick writes that the only thing worse than losing an hour of weekend when the clock switches to daylight-saving time are the car crashes that follow on Monday.

The problem is the loss of sleep. When the clock springs forward, “[i]t's like giving the entire nation one time zone's worth of jet lag,” writes Resnick. But that’s only the beginning of story. The rest of the story requires the research of a team from Johns Hopkins and Stanford universities, which published a study in 1999 finding the following distressing findings regarding traffic safety on this most somnambulant of days:

Analyzing 21 years of fatal car crash data from the US National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, they found a very small, but significant, increase of road deaths on the Monday after the clock shift in the spring. The number of deadly accidents jumped to an average of 83.5 on the "spring forward" Monday compared with an average of 78.2 on a typical Monday.

Another study in Canada a few years earlier found a similar increase, and the same results were found in Great Britain the decade previous. On the other side of the calendar, a study from 2007 found that drivers are more likely to strike pedestrians at the end of daylight-saving time, when it gets darker earlier.

In answer to the question of whether we should all stay home from work and avoid getting behind the wheel on the Monday after daylight-saving time starts, according to Resnick, “[the] takeaway is that even small decreases in our sleep times can stress our bodies,” and we humans have to be aware of our fragility.