Permanent daylight saving could nearly triple dark school commutes in WA

Making daylight saving time permanent could almost triple how many days Washington kids commute to school in the dark, adding more than 35 million of those trips each year, a new University of Washington study says.

Right now, the state’s public school students have to leave home before sunrise about 19 times annually, on average, assuming they head out 20 minutes before the bell. With permanent daylight saving, they could be forced to brave the dark about 53 mornings each winter, according to the UW study.

The researchers behind the study say the added dark commutes would put kids at risk of fatal road collisions and mess with their internal clocks.

Nationwide, the change under consideration by Congress could darken an extra 2 billion trips annually, the University of Washington study says.

It’s a live issue because a bill that would make daylight saving time permanent passed the U.S. House earlier this year, and Washington is one of 19 states that has already approved the policy, pending federal action.

UW researchers Horacio de la Iglesia and Guadalupe Rodríguez Ferrante say parents should know how the change would affect them and their kids.

The new study in the journal Current Biology is “a tangible measure of how bad it’s going to be,” said de la Iglesia, a UW biology professor. In a place like Seattle, kids could be walking to school in the dark for months, he said.

Standard time is based on matching the sun’s highest position in the sky with 12 p.m. Daylight saving time pushes the sun’s apex to 1 p.m. to preserve more light on summer evenings; making it permanent would keep that going but would have the side effect of extending darkness on winter mornings.

With help from students, de la Iglesia and Rodríguez Ferrante found start times and enrollment numbers for every public school in 14 states, including Washington, that have preapproved permanent daylight saving time.

Then, using latitude and longitude measurements, the researchers calculated how many additional days the kids would be traveling to school in the dark by bus, car, bike or foot, assuming an average commute time of 20 minutes.

For Washington’s 1.05 million public school students, dark commutes could soar from about 20 million to 55 million annually.

Students on the western edge of the Pacific time zone, like in Port Angeles, would be more affected than those on the eastern edge, like in Walla Walla.

Seattle students now average about 18 dark commutes annually, although different schools have different start times and about 60% of kids never leave home before sunrise. Under permanent daylight saving time, they could average about 55 dark commutes and all students would make some commutes in the dark.

When the UW researchers extrapolated their measurements to the rest of the country, assuming an average school start time of 8 a.m. in other states, they came up with about 2 billion total additional trips in the dark each year.

The researchers knew what to expect, but still found the number surprising because its was so big, said Rodríguez Ferrante, a postdoctoral scholar.

There could be deadly consequences. Fatal car crashes are twice as likely to involve school-aged pedestrians on dark mornings than on well-lit mornings, according to traffic collision data, the UW researchers determined.

“We will have more children in that situation, exposing them to this higher risk,” Rodríguez Ferrante said.

There would also be biological consequences, because our internal clocks align better with standard time, said de la Iglesia, who helped persuade Seattle schools to push back start times for teenagers a decade ago.

Forcing kids to start school before sunrise and depriving them of morning light can hurt their academic performance and mental health, he said.

Proponents of permanent daylight saving time say the change would give children and parents more opportunities for socializing after work and could help businesses thrive. That could be true, but making sure students are safe and well educated is more important, Rodríguez Ferrante argued.

School start times could be delayed to accommodate the change, but that would require many parents to work later, negating the benefits of lighter evenings, de la Iglesia said.

The timekeeping debate is somewhat unusual in U.S. politics in that it doesn’t necessarily correspond to party lines.

Republican President Donald Trump supports the current bill that would make daylight saving time permanent, and so does Washington Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat. Democratic representatives Pramila Jayapal and Adam Smith voted against the bill, as did Republican Rep. Dan Newhouse. The bill is stalled in the U.S. Senate.

Many Americans are sick of changing their clocks twice a year, so the idea of making a permanent choice is politically popular, de la Iglesia said.

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“But very few of the politicians have done the homework” to figure out which option would be better, he said.

De la Iglesia supports making standard time permanent and said most doctors and scholars agree. That option could reduce dark commutes for Washington kids by about 5 million trips annually, per the UW study.

This coverage is partially underwritten by Microsoft Philanthropies. The Seattle Times maintains editorial control over this and all its coverage.