Danger Train (Life)Savings Time
Here's an interesting theory from the Japan Times:
Annual traffic accidents can be reduced by about 1.1 percent if Japan adopts daylight-saving time, according to projections released Monday by the Japan Productivity Center for Socioeconomic Development.If changing the clock by an hour will do all those wonderful things for Japan, I say we get serious here in Houston about our Danger Train problem.The center said the economic effect of turning the hands of the clock ahead an hour between April and October would be worth some 46 billion yen a year.
In recent years, the annual number of traffic accidents has hovered around 940,000, and police say statistics show they usually occur around dusk.
Center officials said calculations based on the percentage of accidents vis-a-vis traffic volume by time and season of occurrence show that about 10,000 accidents can be avoided by shifting to daylight-saving time.
It also said that under a daylight-saving regime, 10 percent fewer women would have their purses snatched on their way home from work and 4 percent fewer would be similarly victimized while shopping in the early evening.
That's right -- let's move the damn clocks forward 12 hours or so. Think of the crashes we'll avoid!
We'll charge METRO police chief Tom "Supercop" Lambert with issuing citations to all Houstonians who are not in compliance with Danger Train (Life)Savings Time. He seems well suited to the task.
(found the link at Brothers Judd)
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 04/19/04 22:06 | Other | Technorati
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Comments
Sounds a lot like the line of reasoning for lowering the speed limit on the freeways that we endured two years ago. My tongue-in-cheek reply to the emission gurus at the time was to simply lower speed limits EVERYWHERE by 15mph. Using their formulas, those proportions would lower emissions totally out of existence.
Besides, isn't 46 billion yen the dollar equivalent of A-Rod's yearly salary? Hardly seems worth it on a national scale just for those awful internal clock transitions.
Posted by Chris @ 02:23 on 04/20/04
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