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Countless studies have shown that driving at night holds dangers which are not present during the day. Monsters they may not be, but there is certainly something that results in a disproportionate number of people being killed and injured in road accidents in the night-time hours. The car accident casualty figures increase as the hours go back in November and drop when the evenings return to light in the spring.
There is a clear effect here, and with 40% of the UK's fatally and seriously injured motorists being hurt in the dark, it seems silly if we do not do anything to combat it. After all, there are plenty of campaigns warning against the dangers of drink driving and drug driving, as well as all the other common circumstances which have unnaturally high road accident death rates associated with them.
Although the insurance industry issues its annual plea to motorists to be careful driving in the darker evenings of the autumn and winter, this appears to have very little effect upon driver crash rates. It could be that the rather bland warnings which come from insurance bodies aren't reaching many of the motorists out there on the roads, let alone persuading them to drive more safely.
This could be because a large number of those involved in serious road accidents at night are young and aren't particularly inclined to take advice from the insurance industry. However, a lot of young ears certainly pricked up when companies started offering "pay as you drive" car insurance which comes at a much cheaper price, but also with a night-time curfew. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that many of the motorists who took out this kind of policy considered more about the dangers of driving at night than the cost of their car insurance premium.
However, it isn't just young drivers that are more likely to be seriously hurt or killed on the roads at night; this can be seen across the population. So what exactly is it that leads motorists to risk their own lives, as well as the lives of other road users, more at night than in the day? It is a question to which there is no clear cut answer, but instead a complex combination of interplaying factors.
These factors include things which are both in and out of our control. We may be influenced to drive faster by the presence of friends in the car or simply tempted to take more risks than usual by the empty roads. These are within our control, and we can simply choose to heed the warnings about driving safely and keeping to speed limits. In contrast, we can neither control what the chemicals busily buzzing about our bodies are up to nor how these affect the way that we drive.
One of those chemicals is a hormone named melatonin, which is hugely influential on the ball our brains are at night. The amount of melatonin rises during the dark hours, apparently in order to help us sleep and dream. Researchers from an American university recently discovered that part of the way it achieves its sleep and dream-inducing effects is by inhibiting certain other parts of our brain, such as memory.
Whilst this is an important finding, the really exciting discovery of this study was that it is possible to restore memory function by inhibiting melatonin production. This leads to all sorts of interesting possibilities, such as students taking melatonin inhibitors in order to do some more late-night cramming before an exam. However, there are also some very significant implications for cutting the number of people injured in night-time accidents, both on and off the roads.
Just as motorists are more likely to be hurt in road accidents at night, those who work during the small hours are at higher risk of being involved in a work accident, as their performance drops and errors increase. If workers or motorists could just pop a pill in order to increase their nocturnal mental agility, it is possible that we could see a real reduction in night-time casualties.
Unfortunately, it isn't as simple as that. Whilst inhibiting melatonin production might be great for the short term, the body does produce it for a reason and at some point it is likely that we will need to catch up. Also, it has been suggested that there may be some problems with long-term memory storage if melatonin is blocked too much.
Despite these drawbacks, it seems that these researchers' findings could have a real impact on our understanding of the dangers that lurk on the dark roads of the UK and what we can do to defeat them.
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