How Does Daylight Saving Time Affect the Safety of Britain’s Roads?

This report examines six years of collision data supplied by the Department for Transport and shows that after the clocks ‘go back’ the number of recorded injury crashes increases. The effect of DST has not been examined for a number of years and this new research highlights a number of important findings.

Crashes increase when clocks change
The overall effect of DST is an increase in crashes in both March and October, although the autumn change has a far greater impact. The increase in March occurs mainly in afternoons and evenings, but the larger October increase is more evenly spread across all hours of day.

Pedestrians beware
Road traffic crashes increase by 3.9% in the fortnight after the autumn change, and pedestrians are particularly badly affected. 41% of the additional crashes, an average of 117 each year, result in injury to pedestrians. This compares to an overall figure of 16% of crashes causing pedestrian injury.

Regional variation
The report also examines the effect of the change on different parts of the country, given that sunrise and sunset times vary across the nation. The most adversely affected area is a band of northern England around Lancashire, Yorkshire and Humberside, where crash rates increased by nearly 7% over both DST changes.

Not just poor weather
The worsening rate of road traffic crashes following the October change does not appear to be due to the weather. In fact, the percentage of crashes occurring in adverse weather conditions over the two week period following the change actually fell slightly.