- Note - Daylight Savings Time ends and
the clock is turned back at midnight on Sunday 10-25-98.
-
-
- A new government report says 3,000 people
have died on UK roads in the last 30 years because the clocks are turned
back each winter.
-
- Author of the report and Research Fellow
at the Transport Research Laboratory, Dr Jeremy Broughton, said lives would
be saved if the practice of changing to 'daylight saving' time ceased.
-
- "The study that I have just completed
showed that the number of people killed on the roads would fall overall
by about 120 or 130 a year if the clocks were not moved back," he
said.
-
- Daylight saving time - equivalent to
Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) - was introduced to allow more daylight on winter
mornings at the expense of longer daylight in the evenings.
-
- 'Fewer casualties'
-
- Dr Broughton based his study on a three-year
period in the late 1960s when the UK did not revert to GMT during the winter
months.
-
- "This shows very clearly that in
the morning there were extra casualties, but in the evening there were
far fewer casualties because it was lighter for that extra hour and overall
we had significant improvement in road safety.
-
- "We had some losses, but many more
gains, and overall fewer people were killed than would have been if we
had kept the normal system of time-keeping."
-
- The experiment was terminated in 1971
because of adverse publicity.
-
- Different time zones
-
- Initial statistics had suggested that
more children were being killed in the mornings, although subsequent analysis
showed that the lives saved through lighter evenings far outweighed these
losses.
-
- In 1996, a bill was put before Parliament
with the intention of bringing the UK in line with Western Europe, one
hour ahead of GMT in winter and two hours ahead in summer.
-
- It failed despite support from police
and road safetly campaigners because Scottish MPs said it would leave Scotland
in darkness until mid-morning during winter.
-
- Former Deputy Leader of the Conservative
Party, Lord Archer, is currently promoting a scheme to put England and
Wales in a different time zone to Scotland.
-
- The report has arrived too late to affect
the use of daylight saving time this year. The clocks go back one hour
on Saturday.
|
