BackForwarding clocks shows us the light
Do you want lighter, safer and happier evenings? The Lighter Later campaign fights to shift the clocks forward by one hour throughout the entire year, while still moving them forward in spring and back in autumn. This means the sun would rise and set one hour later throughout the year, so more people are up and around when there is daylight.
Moving Britain’s clocks forward by one hour has many potential benefits. As well as reducing the fear of crime, it would also prevent save 100 lives each year and prevent hundreds of serious injuries by making the roads safer. It would cut at least 447,000 tonnes of CO2 pollution – equivalent to more than 50,000 cars driving all the way around the world – each year.
Living Streets, the national charity that stands up for pedestrians, is calling for a review of the annual time changes to avoid the leap in pedestrians killed or seriously injured on our streets during the winter months.
In September 2008 (before we returned to Greenwich Mean Time) there were 577 pedestrians killed or seriously injured in Great Britain. As winter set in and evenings got darker, this number shot up, with 720 pedestrians killed or seriously injured in October and 666 in November.
The most dangerous time on our roads is generally between 3pm and 6pm, when drivers are heading home for the day and children are making their way home from school. In the mornings, pupils tend to head straight for school, yet once the bell rings at the end of the day it’s only natural that they want to play out on the way home. The current situation actively makes this time period darker, lowering visibility and making streets more hazardous.
To date more than 60,000 individuals, businesses, schools and other organisations have signed up to reduce their emissions as part of 10:10. You can sign-up by visiting 1010uk.org.
The Lighter Later campaign is being coordinated by 10:10, an ambitious project to unite every sector of British society behind one simple idea: that by working together we can achieve a 10% cut in the UK’s carbon emissions in 2010.
Published on: 29/06/2010
