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Permanent daylight saving time could add at least two billion dark school commutes across US

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Permanent daylight saving time could add at least two billion dark school commutes across US

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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 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 with 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.


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