The switch to daylight-saving time this morning made Las Vegas, if for only a day, a 23-hour, not a 24-hour town.
It also made our streets safer, or more dangerous, depending on which academic you believe.
Psychologist Stanley Coren of the University of British Columbia believes we can expect about a 7 percent jump in traffic accidents on the Monday following the switch to daylight-saving time, according to his 1996 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
He attributes the increase, in part, to sleep lost as we set our clocks ahead one hour.
A society burning the candle at both ends will find that the loss of even one hour of rest is enough to create a measurable increase in accidents.
But the vice president of research at the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety disputes Coren's conclusions.
"I've tried to replicate those (results) from the data and haven't been able to," the institute's Susan Ferguson said in a telephone interview Friday.
Instead, Ferguson believes the extra hour of afternoon light more than offsets any effect the loss of an hour of sleep might have. With better visibility during the busiest hours for motorists and pedestrians, the afternoon commute, the switch to daylight-saving time makes streets safer, especially for pedestrians.
"What we find is that adding an hour of light increases the visibility of pedestrians," she said. "If you get more of the daylight hours you're going to save some lives. ... It's about seeing and being seen."
Her research sparked a brief and unsuccessful attempt several years ago to extend daylight-saving time later into the fall and begin it earlier in the spring.
So who's right?
It appears the truth about the effect of daylight-saving time on traffic safety might be somewhere in between.
"I'd say it's inconclusive," said Darrel Drobnich, senior director at the National Sleep Foundation. But what Drobnich doesn't quibble about is that sleep deprivation is an often-ignored contributor to accidents, whether you're on daylight-saving or standard time.
"Obviously if you lose an hour of sleep it can affect you," he said. "But I don't want people to get too hung up on that, because sleep deprivation is a problem year-round."
Some research suggests a motorist who has been awake for 24 hours is impaired equivalent to having 0.10 percent blood alcohol content, the legal limit in Nevada.
And a lack of sleep, according to the Nevada Department of Transportation, claims the lives of about 11 Nevadans, who die each year in accidents in which driver fatigue was a factor. Officials suspect the numbers should be even higher because they are usually forced to rely on drivers, if they're still alive, to admit they fell asleep.
"There's not yet a Breathalyzer test to tell if you're a drowsy driver," said Kelly Anrig, chief safety engineer for the Transportation Department.
But is one hour less really going to throw the roads into chaos?
Dr. Paul Saskin, clinical director of the sleep center at Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center, believes any jump in the number of accidents following the switch to daylight-saving time is attributable to several factors.
"They're overlapping factors," he said. "The light plays a role, the time of day plays a role, the amount of sleep and geography plays a role."
But Las Vegas police Detective Bill Redfairn, who has investigated fatal crashes for 16 years, argues the fault is not with the amount of sunlight at the end of the day or a missed hour of sleep, but with ourselves.
"Losing an hour of sleep, an hour longer of daylight? We're having fatalities because people are failing to obey the rules of the road," he said.
If you have a question for the Road Warrior, call 387-2906 or e-mail Michael_Squires@ lvrj.com. Please include your phone number.
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal, 1997 - 2002