It is this small pleasure that many like to anticipate each year. “Hey, we’re going to sleep an extra hour this weekend”. As every year during the last weekend of October, France and other European countries switch to winter time. Sunday at 3 a.m. (summer time), it will be 2 a.m. (winter time) in France. It will therefore be necessary to think of setting back the clocks with manual adjustment by one hour.
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In France, the system has existed since 1976. Three years after the oil crisis, the idea was to achieve energy savings by making activity hours coincide with sunshine to limit the use of artificial lighting. According to the Ministry for Ecological Transition, “the time change saved 440 gigawatt hours of lighting in 2009, i.e. the [electricity] consumption of around 800,000 households. Thanks to these savings, France has avoided the emission of 44,000 tons of CO2”. These savings could increase by 2030 according to Ademe thanks to savings in heating.
The measure is coordinated at European level to facilitate communications and transport. Thus since 1998, for all EU countries, the switch to summer time occurs on the last Sunday in March at 2 a.m. and the switch to winter time is scheduled for the last Sunday. of October at 3 am.
However, the time change is regularly criticized, its detractors sometimes evoking the disruption of biological rhythms and agricultural activities, or even negative effects on road traffic. On this subject, an information and accident prevention campaign linked to the drop in light at the end of the day following the change of time has been launched for the second year by Road Safety, the National Federation of general insurers (Agéa) and France Bleu.
According to Road Safety, as night falls earlier when leaving school or commuting to work, “each year, the switch to winter time causes a peak in road accidents of 47% for pedestrians at the end of the day”, i.e. on the 5:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. slot. France will return to summer time next year on the night of March 24 to 25.
