This week’s column isn’t prompted by a question; instead, it’s inspired by the calendar. If you’ve followed this column on a semi-regular basis you may have noticed that the topics sometimes correspond to events and seasons – rules about school buses at the start of the school year, impaired driving during the holidays – those sort of things. But what event is coming up next weekend that could possibly have a tie to traffic safety? There isn’t holiday, a change of season, or some other community-wide festival. But there is something to be aware of: Daylight saving.
I’m not going to tell you that daylight saving is the next impending traffic disaster like a TV weather forecaster tells you that the next snow flurry will be Snowmageddon 2018. The impacts of daylight savings can’t compete (and this is a competition where winning is actually losing) with impaired driving, speeding, and distractions. What we do get from daylight saving is an opportunity to see the impacts of a loss of sleep on our cognitive abilities.
The nerds who track traffic data will tell you that drivers crash more on the Monday following daylight saving. The data in the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) show a 17% increase in traffic fatalities after setting our clocks one hour forward. Essentially, daylight saving is a giant research opportunity where we can see the results of giving everyone in the country (except people in Arizona and Hawaii) one hour of jetlag.
Interestingly, daylight saving doesn’t affect all countries equally. In the US and Canada we see a significant increase in fatal crashes, but in Sweden it has no measurable effect. Likely that is because North Americans don’t get enough sleep to begin with. If you’re getting plenty of sleep, losing an hour isn’t a big deal. But if your sleep is already marginal, that one hour can have a big impact, and not just on your driving; workplace injuries and heart attacks increase in the days after we spring forward.
It makes sense that a lack of sleep would result in more car crashes and workplace injuries; the effects are similar to alcohol impairment. Drowsiness affects your reaction time, judgment, vision, awareness of surroundings, and decision-making skills. We also have a culture that doesn’t put enough value on sleep. You can probably think of people you know who believe that if you actually get the doctor-recommended seven to nine hours of sleep each night, you’re probably lazy. According to the Mayo Clinic, those people are delusional due to a lack of sleep. Even people who say they feel rested after less sleep don’t perform as well on mental tasks (which is almost entirely what driving is).
Washington doesn’t have a specific drowsy driving law. As far as I can tell, only two states in the US do have a law related to drowsy driving. That’s not for lack of trying though. Legislators in many states, including Washington, have proposed bills, but they have failed to pass. That doesn’t mean it’s okay, or even legal. We have laws about reckless and negligent driving that can apply. Reckless driving is the “you knew it was dangerous and you did it anyway” law, while negligent driving is the “you did something dangerous without realizing it was dangerous, but a reasonable person would have known better” law. When it comes to drowsy driving, if you know you’re too tired to drive and you end up causing a crash you could be guilty of reckless driving. If you don’t pay attention to how tired you are and get in a crash that could be negligent driving.
Let’s get back to daylight saving for a moment. You might think that if the “spring forward” part causes crashes because of a lack of sleep, the “fall backward” time of year might be beneficial to drivers. As it turns out, that’s not the case, but for a different reason. There is an increase in crashes in the fall time change, although much smaller. Researchers concluded that some people looked at the extra time as a bonus hour to party on a Saturday night, resulting in more impaired drivers on the roads.
Could we save lives by abolishing daylight saving? Certainly. If you start a petition, I’d sign it. But we could also save lives by getting good sleep and pulling over when we start to feel drowsy. And that’s something we can do today.