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Study: Permanent daylight saving time would reduce deer-related crashes

The study says the time switch in the fall causes peak traffic volumes to shift to darker hours, leading to a 16% spike in deer-vehicle collisions.

AUSTIN, Texas — A new study shows permanent daylight saving time would help prevent deer-related crashes, potentially saving thousands of deer and dozens of human lives.

The study, published this week in the peer-reviewed journal "Current Biology," estimated over 36,000 deer deaths, 33 human deaths and over 2,000 human injuries could be prevented if we never made the switch back to standard time in the fall.

Researchers examined about 1 million deer-vehicle collisions occurring between 1994 and 2021 and found that 76% of them happened at nighttime. They also found that collisions are 14 times more frequent two hours after sunset than before sunset. 

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The study found that the switch from daylight saving time to standard time that we make every fall shifts the peak traffic volumes from before sunset to after sunset, leading to a 16% spike in deer-vehicle collisions.

In addition, the study states that about 2.1 million deer-vehicle collisions happen in the U.S. every year. The study says a permanent move to daylight saving time would reduce these types of crashes by about 1.7%, while a permanent move to standard time would increase the instances of these crashes by 3.5%.

To learn more, take a look at the full study.

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