There is yet another reason to quit the twice-yearly tradition of changing our clocks back and forth an hour. A new study found that sticking to daylight saving time would mean fewer deer being hit by cars.
Some people might say there are far too many deer, and there are certainly millions more of them now than there were when Europeans first arrived on the continent. But culling them with car crashes probably isn’t the way to go.
If daylight saving time was made permanent instead of lasting only from mid-March to early November, it would save 33 human lives, 36,550 deer, and $1.19 billion. It would, additionally, avoid 2,054 human injuries every year. This is the, er, sunny view of researchers at the University of Washington, who advocate a once-and-for-all instruction that the sun should set an hour later.
“Wildlife-vehicle collisions are a huge and growing problem,” said postdoctoral researcher Calum Cunningham, who co-led the team. “There are social costs, people killed and injured, and it’s also a conservation problem as it’s one of the largest sources of human-caused mortality of wildlife.”
The researchers analyzed 23 states’ data on cars and trucks hitting animals. These included a million deer being hit from 1994 to 2021. The team found that a majority of these smashes took place between sunset and sunrise and that they were 14 times more frequent two hours after sunset than two hours before sunset.
The team also compared the data with what would happen if standard time, which is used from early November until mid-March the following year, was adopted permanently. This would apparently lead to an additional 73,660 deer being hit and another 66 people being killed, with another 4,140 injured and an additional $2.39 billion lost. Permanent daylight saving time reduced hits by 2.3% over a full year.
“Humans today have this ‘evening bias’ in our activity: We get up later and stay active later than what the sun is telling us to do,” Cunningham said. “As long as people are living their lives ‘by the clock,’ which animals do not, people need to be aware of risks and make adjustments where we can. If people are thinking about what they can do for wildlife and for their own lives, reducing driving during dark hours is likely to help significantly. In areas with deer, the risk of harming wildlife and yourself while driving is 14 times higher when it is dark.”
An estimated 2.1 million deer are hit by cars each year, resulting in 440 human deaths, 59,000 injuries, and $10 billion in costs from damage, according to UW News.
