Congress Sucks (DST/Halloween Edition)

So yes, I get it that Halloween has more children die than any other night. According to this study, most evenings one kid dies in a pedestrian accident, while on Halloween, it's 2.2 kids.

But there's gotta be a lot more than 2.2 times the number of kids out on Halloween, which means that as a percentage, the number of deaths in pedestrian accidents decreases significantly on Halloween. That's pretty awesome: it means either that pedestrian deaths don't scale linearly with the number of people, or that everyone is a lot more careful on Halloween in particular. It's probably a combination of both (probably, the more kids are out, the more careful everyone is).

That's not to say we shouldn't try to reduce that number; that is certainly a worthwhile goal. And that's why several years ago, Congress changed the switch from daylight savings time to regular time to after Halloween.

The problem is, though, that when the darkness shifted by an hour, my family, as with many others, started the evening's festivities an hour later. So there was nothing gained for us, except that it messed up the kids' sleep scheduled even more.

So, Congress, as usual: thanks for nothing.