Permanent Daylight Saving Time could lead to at least 2B more dark commutes to school for US children

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill this past summer that would make Daylight Saving Time (DST) permanent in the United States — meaning there would be no turning back the clocks each fall. Nineteen states, including Washington, have already preapproved this change. If the bill is ultimately signed into law, the change would go into effect in those states.

The bill is currently stalled in the U.S. Senate. School start times are a central issue because permanent DST would lead to darker mornings from November to March. This would mean darker commutes for everyone, but how much would it affect children going to school? University of Washington researchers did the math for 14 out of the 19 states that preapproved the change. Using school start times, enrollment data, and latitude and longitude measurements, the team calculated just how many days each child would be commuting to school in the dark and then added the trips together.

In Washington, there would be almost 35 million more trips to school in the dark under permanent DST compared to the current system of switching between DST and Standard Time twice a year. The other 13 states followed a similar trend, with Georgia having the highest deviation from the current system — 71 million more trips. When the researchers extrapolated these results for the rest of the country, it added at least 2 billion more dark commutes to school.

The team also analyzed traffic collision data from the U.S. and found that it was roughly twice as likely for a fatal crash involving a school-aged pedestrian to occur during dark mornings than after sunrise.

The researchers published these results Oct. 29 in Current Biology.

“It’s called the ‘Sunshine Protection Act’ because you get an extra hour of light at the end of the day. But you will take that hour from the morning. You could call it the Sunshine Destruction Act,” said senior author Horacio de la Iglesia, UW professor of biology. “These dark mornings will inequitably affect children who have to go to school at a certain time. It’s a very tangible metric that anybody from any state or socioeconomic background can relate to. Nobody wants their kids to go to school in the dark.”