It’s less the act of changing the clocks and rather the ill effects of losing an hour of sleep and readjusting for a few days of the year.
> DST is linked to a six percent increase in car accidents. The study analyzed 20 years of data and found that DST is responsible for around 28 deaths each year.
People really shouldn't fly I guess. Because many of us deal with multi-hour time changes on a regular basis. Going to be dealing with a 5 hour one in a couple of days.
I actually find regular changes worse. When I flied across the pond, schedule was constructed around it. Switch to and from DST requires semi-permanent shift in daily routine with is much more annoying.
And that's a big problem for lots of people - I plan on the few days of a long trip to get accustomed to the local time and feel comfortable and well rested.
But just because I'm willing to put up with it when I travel doesn't mean that I want to put up with it twice a year for no apparent benefit.
If I had the option to not have to deal with time zone changes when I travel across the country (or world), I'd vote for that solution. Even if ballistic air travel means I can fly from LA to Tokyo in an hour, the 17 hour (well, 7 hour) time difference means it'll never be a seamless trip even if I can do it in an afternoon. I'm told that if you have the time, taking a cross-atlantic trip to Europe is great because there's no jet lag, you slowly adjust to the time over the course of the travel.
Jet Lag is a well known phenomenon and if you're changing time zones regularly you probably have a system to minimize it. If you did not you'd likely suffer much more from it.
Also flying is optional, but changing from XST to XDT is not.
At the scale of a country or even a city, only a few people fly on any given day. When almost everyone is a little more fatigued than normal, the effects are multiplied.
Taking individual cars, perhaps. But if you put two people in a Prius you’ll save on emissions relative the the same two flying. Based on [1], flying is roughly 75 passenger-miles per gallon. Prius is 45 MPG, perhaps ~40 under load. So if you have more than one person in your group, better off driving.
The argument could be made that if you don’t board, that plane will still fly and consume the same fuel, but of course the numbers only matter en masse anyways.
> DST is linked to a six percent increase in car accidents. The study analyzed 20 years of data and found that DST is responsible for around 28 deaths each year.
https://www.phillypilaw.com/2021/03/15/car-accidents-dayligh...