Metropolitan France will switch to winter time overnight from Saturday to Sunday

You will be able to sleep for another hour. France and Corsica will switch to winter time, on the night of Saturday October 28 to Sunday October 29. At three in the morning, it will be two o’clock. The objective of this measure, which is debated in particular because of its consequences on the body, is to enable energy savings. According to the ecological transition agency Ademe, the time change allowed a saving of 440 GWh on public lighting at the national level, in 2009, the last year in which the impacts were precisely quantified. In recent years, they have stood at around 351 GWh, or 0.07% of total electricity consumption, according to its estimates.

Before the change to winter time, Road Safety reminded the importance of making yourself visible at night on public roads. “Between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m., it will suddenly get darker when you leave school and go to work”, she recalled. Each year, the number of accidents involving a pedestrian increases by an average of 42% in November, compared to the month of October, according to data from the National Interministerial Road Safety Observatory (ONISR) collected between 2015 and 2019.

The timetable change, introduced for the first time in France in 1916, was abandoned in 1944, then reintroduced by a decree in September 1975. Since 1998, it has been harmonized in all countries of the European Union. The European Parliament voted to abolish it in 2019, but it has not been implemented to date.