The movement to end seasonal time changes may be gaining momentum — but what would it mean for the safety of vulnerable road users?
The perennial debate over whether or not to roll back the clocks on the first Sunday in November hit a milestone this summer when the House of Representatives passed the Sunshine Protection Act, which would get rid of the fall and winter’s “standard time” hours and adopt spring and summer’s “daylight savings time” hours year-round.
That would effectively mean that Americans with nine-to-five work schedules would leave for their jobs in darker conditions on the shortest days of the year, in exchange for up to an extra hour of sunshine after work — with accompanying tradeoffs for U.S. travel patterns.
The bill has since stalled in the Senate transportation committee, but its proponents — which include nothing less than President Trump himself — claim that it still deserves serious consideration for its potential to encourage outdoor recreation in the evenings, and to narrow the likely window for nighttime crime.
Its potential to reduce traffic crashes, though, has been hotly debated for years, particularly among people who advocate for the safety of people outside cars.
Since the concept of “standard time” arrived in 1883, North America’s transportation landscape has profoundly shaped our country’s approach to setting our clocks.
That’s because prior to the proliferation of railroads, U.S. residents observed a staggering 144 different local times that needed to be at least somewhat standardized into four standard mainland “zones” once communities were linked together by trains — at least until Daylight Savings Time came along and confused matters more.
Originally intended as an effort to conserve some of the energy used for indoor lighting at night during the first and second world wars, DST stubbornly hung on in some (but not all) U.S. states after the conflicts ended. That created an inconsistent map of varying temporal rules that still persists in part today, despite efforts to bring order to the chaos with the Uniform Time Act of 1966. Hawaii, Arizona, and US territories around the world still refuse to change their clocks, despite the fact that the other 48 states all do it.
Now, most U.S. residents say they’d prefer to skip the hassle of resetting their microwaves twice a year — though they split on which of the two seasonal adjustments they’d prefer to give up.
And the research isn’t clear on which one would be better for safety, either.
A 2022 study on which this website reported, for instance, found that not rolling clocks back in the winter could save at least 33 human lives and 36,550 deer in car-on-cervidae collisions every year, since drivers would get back a little more daylight for their evening commutes before nocturnal ungulates began crossing highways as part of their evening migration patterns.
Meanwhile, a 2025 study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety suggested that change could have an even more dramatic safety benefit for drivers, since “fatal crashes among motor-vehicle occupants decreased in the 5 weeks after the fall time change (-7.1%) and increased in the 5 weeks after the springtime change (+12%).”
Disturbingly, though, the opposite was true for fatal crashes among pedestrians and bicyclists. Their death tolls surged 13 percent after clocks fell back in the fall — and dipped 24 percent after they sprang forward in the spring.
Of course, Vision Zero advocates argue that since all road deaths are preventable, it’s not enough to just pick the time change that nets out to the fewest casualties overall — and certainly not to offer people outside cars as sacrificial lambs. Rather, we must reckon with the fact that three quarters of pedestrian deaths happen in the dark no matter what number appears on the clock — and take an aggressive, systemic approach to saving those lives.
That means we have to do the obvious things, like installing streetlights, HAWK signals, and other infrastructure to make pedestrians and bicyclists more visible after sunset. Redesigning roads and cars to slow motorists to less-deadly speeds when they do crash is essential, too, as is doing more to limit the functionality of distracting cell phone features when drivers are behind the wheel — particularly when time changes coincide with major holidays that tempt motorists to text about their party plans.
But it also means thinking more expansively about how our national street safety epidemic and our national epidemic of car dependency reinforce one another — particularly after nightfall.
And that means addressing the suburbanization of poverty that has late-shift workers schelpping home along busy arterials after the bus stops running. It means dismantling an unsustainable work culture where drivers have to rush to punch a clock even when they’re too exhausted from a time change to drive, and where few have the freedom to leave their jobs to travel home at a safer daylight hour. It means taking dedicated action to stop hit-and-runs, which spike after dark and disproportionately injure people outside of automobiles.
And it certainly means providing more mobility alternatives, like increased nighttime transit service, if only to halt the cycle of unwalkability that leaves so many vulnerable road users traveling alone at night.
However we do it, it’s time to shine a light on the unique dangers of walking and biking after dark — and stop pretending that ditching seasonal time changes will make a significant difference if we don’t.
