Death and darkness on the roads

If you've had a heart-stopping near miss on the road, cycle lane or pavement in the last few days, I can explain why you've been subjected to this danger. It's very simple. The clocks are to blame. Or to be more precise, the politicians who make us put them back by an hour every Autumn.

The fact is that when the clocks go back we give up our comparatively safe combination of darker mornings/lighter evenings and swap it for a more lethal cocktail of lighter mornings/darker evenings. As a result, more crashes, injuries and deaths occur. By fiddling with the clocks every Autumn, we volunteer to bring the darkness on one hour earlier. And that's a killer.

I know what you're thinking. The extra crashes, injuries and deaths caused by darker evenings are surely compensated for by the corresponding reduction in incidents due to lighter mornings. But safety experts are agreed that it doesn't work like that. At the start of the working or school day, adults and children on the move are on a high state of alert. They have to be at their work stations or places of education by a certain time, can’t afford to be late and are therefore on a mission and concentrating hard. In the evening, kids in particular are much less focussed, have time to fool around and play in the streets. And the darker those streets, the more accidents occurs.

Builders, farmers and Scots have been insisting that lighter mornings/darker evenings work better for them. Fair enough. But collectively, these people represent only a small proportion of the British population. Builders and farmers can get around the difficulty by altering their start/finish times. Scotland has the luxury of its own Parliament, it’s free to operate it’s own time zone and could easily put its clocks more in line with other, neighbouring countries in the extreme north, such as Sweden. England and its 50 million people do not have the luxury of their own Parliament. Therefore they don’t have the legislative power to adopt their own time zone.

Road safety experts agree that between the end of October and late February countless crashes, injuries and deaths that could be avoided are NOT avoided. If the clocks did not go back every October, there would be an overall reduction of over 600 fatalities and serious injuries, according to the Policy Studies Institute.

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) broadly agrees and says that if only for the sake of road safety - and, in particular, the safety of child pedestrians, cyclists and vehicle passengers - our clocks should be left alone and not turned back at this time of year. "Every day throughout this winter period an extra person will die unnecessarily because the Government will not hear this argument," an angry RoSPA concludes.

Darker evenings are nothing short of death sentences for many vulnerable road users. If the political parties were doing their jobs properly they’d all be promising in their imminent election manifestos that, in the interests of life-saving, the clocks will NOT go back in Autumn 2009.… or ever again.