The clocks go back on Sunday: the evening rush hour moves into the dark

This Friday you drive home from work in daylight: the sun sets over Riga at around six. On Monday, at the same hour, it will already be dark: sunset moves to roughly five. Between those two drives lie a weekend and one adjusted night. Nothing on the road will have changed: the same junctions, the same crossings, the same people. Only the light changes.

What happens on the night of 25 October

The switch to winter time is set by the Cabinet regulation "On the transition to summer time" — Cabinet Regulation Nr. 1010, adopted on 26 October 2010: on the last Sunday of October, at four in the morning, the clocks go back an hour. In 2026 summer time runs from 29 March to 25 October.

The dates are the same across the whole European Union — Directive 2000/84/EC requires it. Scrapping the seasonal change has been argued over for years: Latvia supports abolition, but the member states have no shared position, and Latvia does not plan to put the question back on the European agenda — that is how the Ministry of Economics explained it in spring 2026. So the thing to prepare for is the consequences, not an abolition.

The rush hour crosses into darkness over a single weekend

Autumn normally takes the light away slowly: sunset moves two or three minutes earlier each day, and the eye barely registers it. The clock change breaks that gradualness — in one night the evening becomes a full hour darker.

The worst part is where the shift lands: squarely in the evening rush hour. The drive home, children leaving school and nursery, evening driving lessons — everything that has happened in daylight all autumn happens in darkness for the first time on Monday.

And it will stay that way until spring. That is why an abrupt shift is harder to absorb than a gradual one: the habits are still summer habits while the conditions are suddenly November ones.

The risk does not grow — it moves into the evening

A clock change is a convenient natural experiment: the same hours suddenly turn dark. A University of Colorado Boulder study published in Current Biology in 2020 examined more than 700,000 fatal crashes in the United States and found that the autumn change back does not increase the total number of crashes across the week. Within that week, though, the picture shifts — morning crashes fall, evening crashes rise, and the two balance each other out. The risk moves a few hours later, to where it has become dark.

Who it hits hardest was shown by Sullivan and Flannagan in Accident Analysis & Prevention (2002), also built on comparing the same hours before and after a transition. For pedestrians the difference between light and dark turned out to be several-fold: the authors' estimates range from three to almost seven times, depending on the scenario. Single-vehicle run-off-road crashes on curves showed little sensitivity to light.

Both studies are American, and transplanting their percentages to Riga would be a stretch. But the mechanism is universal: darkness arrives earlier, and the first to feel it is the pedestrian.

Neither side has adjusted: driver and pedestrian alike

The pedestrian has crossed this street in daylight all autumn and arrived home in one piece — so "you can see fine here". On Monday he walks the same route, in the same dark jacket, with the same confidence, only now in the dark.

The driver commits his own version of the same error: the summer scanning pattern — a quick glance at the pavement, where in daylight peripheral vision catches a person too — does not work in the dark at all. And the speed stays the same: the route is familiar, and habit knows nothing about darkness.

Both sides are making the same mistake at once. Reflectors, what the law requires of pedestrians and how to work your headlights in autumn have their own guide — what matters here is something else: this week, nobody has adjusted.

The first week: what to change deliberately

• Switch the lights on earlier than feels necessary. The road traffic rules (CSN) require lights in any case, but daytime running lights are not dipped beam.
• Increase your following distance compared with Friday. In the dark all you see ahead is brake lights, not the whole picture.
• Take your eyes further ahead. What you spot at the edge of your own light can still be dealt with; what appears from under the bumper cannot.
• Build slack into your timing. Fifteen extra minutes is the cheapest way to avoid making hurried decisions in the dark.

None of these points is new. What is new is that on Monday you apply them an hour earlier than you did all autumn.

Your body also needs a few days

The autumn change is usually called the easy one: you get an extra hour of sleep. But an hour of sleep is not a rebuilt routine.

Doctors at the National Mental Health Centre explain it this way: the internal biological clock runs on a daily rhythm synchronised by light — morning light switches on alertness, evening darkness prepares the body for sleep. When the routine is shifted abruptly, the clock needs time: one or two days for some people, up to a week for others, and during that period a person tends to be more distracted than usual. Behind the wheel that costs more than at a desk. On top of that, the body now receives its "time to wind down" signal at exactly the moment you are leaving work: the clock says six, and your body says nine.

What helps is morning light, and important drives kept out of the late evening.

Evening lessons run differently this week

For me this week shows up in the timetable. A five o'clock lesson, bright and calm all autumn, runs at dusk from Monday and in the dark by the end of the week. For a student that is not "the same thing, only darker": crossings read less clearly, distances are harder to judge, and your own speed feels lower than it is.

I do not move those slots to the daytime: they are the ones that reveal what a person genuinely knows and what they have been doing on autopilot in good light. Driving at night is a separate skill altogether — main beam, glare, fatigue; I have covered it in detail. And if your CSDD (Road Traffic Safety Directorate) exam falls in late October or November, the evening slot now shows you honestly the conditions you will be examined in: the autumn exam is covered separately, and you can book a lesson online.

The clock-change procedure was checked against Ministry of Economics information in October 2026; for the current position see em.gov.lv.

The hour handed back on Sunday has not disappeared from the road — it has simply been moved from the morning to the evening. All you have to do on Monday is move your own habits along with it.