Long Island Pedestrian Crashes After Dark: State Data Before the Clocks Change

From November through January of 2021 to 2024, police in Nassau and Suffolk counties reported 520 crashes in which a vehicle struck a pedestrian between 5:00 and 7:59 p.m., and 485 of them happened in the dark; in the same evening hours from May through August, a span one month longer, they reported 228, according to the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles crash file on data.ny.gov (retrieved October 4, 2026).

The clocks fall back on Sunday, November 1, 2026, and Congress is arguing about whether they should ever fall back again. This report sets out when Long Island pedestrians are hit after dark today and what the law asks of the driver. If someone in your family was hit while walking, our Long Island pedestrian accident page covers the claim itself.

Why the clocks are in the news

The House passed the Sunshine Protection Act, which would make daylight saving time permanent, in July 2026 “with a 308-117 vote,” The Hill reported on October 2, 2026. That Friday, President Trump wrote on Truth Social, as quoted by NBC News: “Republicans in the Senate have to get moving on what I call the ‘No More Changing of Clocks Act,’ officially known as The Sunshine Protection Act.” He named Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas as the senator holding it up. Senator Cotton answered on X the next day: “No one likes changing the clock, me included, but Congress has enacted permanent Daylight Savings Time multiple times before and repealed it each time once Americans experienced absurdly late sunrises in the winter.”

Reuters reported on October 2, 2026 that the Senate “has no votes scheduled” before the November 3 election, and quoted Senator John Kennedy: “It’s dead as disco.” Senator Rick Scott, a sponsor, told Reuters he was still confident the bill could pass. Critics, Reuters wrote, say the sun would rise “an hour later on winter mornings”; supporters say changing the clocks “contributes to more road accidents.” Neither claim is tested here. Consequently, the question for a Long Island family this fall is what the next three months look like for anyone who walks after work.

When Long Island pedestrians are hit

The state’s file answers that by month and hour. The chart below counts every crash in Nassau and Suffolk that the DMV coded as a collision with a pedestrian and that happened between 5:00 and 7:59 p.m., by month, with all four years added together.

Three months of winter evenings produced more than twice the crashes of four months of summer evenings; per month, about three times as many. The lighting column says what changed: in summer those hours are daylight, and in winter they are night.

The step from October to November held in every year of the file: October evenings had 41, 30, 18 and 20 pedestrian crashes in 2021 through 2024, and November evenings had 55, 35, 54 and 45. Over the whole day, yearly totals rose from 1,081 in 2021 to 1,162, 1,249 and 1,277, and 1,798 of the 4,769 crashes were coded dark. For a reader, the exposed stretch of the year starts in November and runs through January, and it is the walk home.

The morning side of the clock

Permanent daylight saving time would not remove the dark; it would move an hour of it from the end of the winter day to the start. That is why the morning numbers belong next to the evening ones. From 6:00 to 7:59 a.m. in November through January, the file holds 116 pedestrian crashes, and only 27 were coded dark; 69 were coded daylight and 18 dawn.

What the data cannot say is what would happen if those hours traded places. The people on the road at 7 a.m. are not the people on the road at 6 p.m., in number or in kind, and the DMV file counts crashes, not people walking. This report does not estimate the net effect of permanent daylight saving time, and no number on this page should be read as one. In practice, the fact that matters this year is already fixed: from November 1, 2026, the evening walk is the exposed one.

Deaths: fifteen years of federal records

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) records every crash on a public road in which someone died within 30 days. Our sister data project, longislandtraffic.com, publishes a Long Island extract of the 2010 to 2024 files with its method and crash-level file; the 2024 records are preliminary.

From 2010 through 2024, FARS counts 1,009 pedestrians killed in Nassau and Suffolk counties, 31 percent of the 3,302 people who died on Long Island roads. Of the 996 fatal crashes that killed a pedestrian, 717 happened in the dark. The seasonal pattern in the state’s injury file repeats in the federal death file: 129 pedestrians were killed between 5:00 and 7:59 p.m. in November through January, against 18 in the same hours from May through August.

In October through December, the roads with the most pedestrian deaths over the fifteen years were Sunrise Highway (NY 27) with 23, Hempstead Turnpike (NY 24) with 16 and Route 110 with 15. These are counts, not rates; long commercial roads carry more people on foot and in cars.

The federal file does not show a spike caused by the clock change itself. In the fourteen days before each fall-back Sunday from 2010 to 2024, 19 pedestrians were killed between 4:00 and 7:59 p.m.; in the fourteen days starting on the fall-back Sunday, 21. Consequently, the reading is seasonal: the risk builds with the dark evenings of November, December and January, not with one Sunday.

What the law asks of a driver after dark

New York’s rule for drivers and pedestrians does not change with the light. The card below quotes Vehicle and Traffic Law § 1146 and § 1151 word for word.

The statute puts the duty of care on the driver and states the pedestrian’s limit just as plainly. A pedestrian who steps off a curb into the path of a car that cannot stop is the case § 1151(b) describes; a driver who never looks for the person in the crosswalk is the case § 1146 describes. The facts of the night decide which description fits.

Practitioner’s note (Jason Tenenbaum): From November on, the drive home happens in the dark. That doesn’t lower the standard of care. Vehicle and Traffic Law section 1146 still requires that every driver exercise due care to avoid a person in the road, and the fact that it’s night time is something that a careful driver has to keep in mind. The driver who says “I never saw her” hasn’t answered the question. The question is what a careful driver would have seen.

After a pedestrian crash on Long Island: the first weeks

Take an invented example. A man walks home from the Bay Shore train station at 5:40 on a December evening and is struck in a crosswalk on Main Street. His case will turn on records made in the first few weeks, and most of them are records of the light.

The police report fixes the time, the place and the lighting entry this study counts. Photographs of the crossing at the same hour show which lights worked and what the driver could see. Then comes the question of who owns the road and the vehicle: a claim against a town, a county or a village starts with a notice of claim under General Municipal Law § 50-e, served within ninety days. Our 50-h hearing guide explains the examination that follows, and the government vehicle accident page covers a crash with a town truck or a county car.

Practitioner’s note (Jason Tenenbaum): So the first thing I ask is, was there a police report and do you have the number? The second thing I ask is, did anybody take any photographs of the street or the lighting where it happened that night? And then third thing I ask is, was it a town road, county road, or was it a vehicle for a municipality? Because if it’s a town, county, or village, then a notice of claim has to be served within 90 days. The clock does not stop for you to feel better.

The medical bills are a separate track. The car’s policy owes first-party benefits, often called PIP, to a pedestrian it injures; ask the driver’s insurer for the application in the first week, before the bills arrive. If the driver left the scene, the hit-and-run page explains where benefits come from instead, and the crosswalk accident page covers right of way. The clocks for a claim against a municipality are fixed by statute and do not move for a hospital stay.

Bring these to the first call:

• the police report number, or the precinct and the date if there is no number yet;
• photographs of the crossing and the street lights, taken at the same hour if possible;
• the name of the driver’s insurer, from the exchange of information or the report;
• the hospital discharge papers and the date of the first treatment.

For the Bay Shore man, the ninety days started on the December evening he was hit. Consequently, the first call belongs in the first month.

How this report was built

The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles publishes “Motor Vehicle Crashes - Case Information: Four Year Window” on data.ny.gov (dataset e8ky-4vqe), one row per crash case, covering 2021 through 2024 at retrieval. On October 4, 2026 we pulled every row where the event field reads “Pedestrian, Collision With” and the county is Nassau or Suffolk, through the portal’s public query interface: 4,769 records, 4,697 with a police report on file with the DMV and 72 without. An earlier pull that day matched row for row. The file also carries a separate event code, “Other Pedestrian” (253 Nassau and Suffolk records, 2021 to 2024), which this report does not count; adding it would make the evening comparison 530 in winter against 252 in summer, which does not change the finding.

Each crash was placed in a clock hour from the reported time field; no record lacked a time. The evening window is 5:00 to 7:59 p.m. and the morning window 6:00 to 7:59 a.m. “Winter” means November through January and “summer” May through August. “Dark” means the lighting field reads “Dark-Road Lighted” or “Dark-Road Unlighted”; dawn and dusk are never counted as dark.

The federal data is the longislandtraffic.com extract of NHTSA FARS, one row per fatal crash, with deaths, pedestrian deaths, hour, light and road name as that project coded them. We copied it on October 4, 2026 and counted it without changes. The fall-back comparison uses the first Sunday of November each year and fourteen days on either side. One script, harness/scripts/ped-dst-analysis.py, produces every figure on this page from the two files and writes the CSVs below.

Not retrieved: the DMV’s companion files on the people, vehicles and violations in each crash; any count of people walking at a given hour; and 2025 data, which the four-year file did not include when we pulled it.

The files and the codebook are below. The CSVs are fixed as published on October 8, 2026 and never overwritten; a later edition gets a new folder.

Cite this: Law Office of Jason Tenenbaum, P.C., “Long Island Pedestrian Crashes After Dark: State Data Before the Clocks Change,” October 8, 2026, https://jtnylaw.com/2026/10/long-island-pedestrian-crashes-after-dark-daylight-saving-2026/#evening-pedestrian-crashes-by-month.

What the numbers do not say

Every count here is a police-reported crash record. The lighting field is the officer’s description of the light, not a measurement, and a crash record is not a finding that anyone was at fault.

The two seasons are different lengths, three months against four, which is why the monthly rates sit beside the totals. They also differ in who is out walking and in the weather, and the file has no count of people on foot, so these are counts and not risks per person. The federal death counts by hour and by road are small enough that a few crashes move them.

By place, the counts follow how the DMV coded the municipality. In the winter evening window, Nassau County holds 322 of the 520 crashes and Suffolk County 198. The full list is in the CSV: 130 of the 520 carry the name of an incorporated village only, and the rest carry a town or city name. The DMV file has no separate code for the Village of Hempstead, so crashes there appear under Hempstead (140 in this window), and a name shared by a town and a village, such as Babylon, East Hampton or Southampton, cannot be split in the file. Towns differ in population, road miles and the number of people who walk; no ranking of towns follows from these counts, and none is offered. Nothing here predicts the outcome of any case.

Corrections and changelog

Date	Change
2026-10-08	First edition. No corrections.

This table is never deleted. The fourteen-day read of this page is due October 22, 2026. The next edition is due when the DMV adds 2025 to the four-year file, and the federal figures are refreshed when the final 2024 FARS file replaces the preliminary one.

Sources

• New York State Department of Motor Vehicles, Motor Vehicle Crashes - Case Information: Four Year Window (data.ny.gov e8ky-4vqe), retrieved October 4, 2026
• NHTSA Fatality Analysis Reporting System 2010-2024 via longislandtraffic.com, Long Island Town Fact Book: sources and method and crash-level CSV
• Vehicle and Traffic Law § 1146 and § 1151
• General Municipal Law § 50-e and § 50-i
• Insurance Law § 5103
• NBC News, “Trump appears to post Sen. Tom Cotton’s cell number in push to make daylight saving time permanent,” October 3, 2026
• The Hill, “Trump pushes Senate Republicans on ‘No More Changing of Clocks Act’,” October 2, 2026
• Reuters, “Trump push to end US clock switching hits dead end,” October 2, 2026 (as syndicated)