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Comment by zetanor | Hacker News Reader

I've seen arguments about kids going to school in the darkness being thrown around a lot, but I've never understood why that (against fresh drivers) is always taken to be worse than kids coming home in the darkness (against exhausted drivers).

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Average school start/end times in BC are 8:30 AM and 3 PM. Standard time in Vancouver puts sunrise/sunset at 8AM/415PM at winter solstice for standard time. That's 30 minutes of daylight before school and 75 minutes after school. IOW, kids are more likely to be walking in the dark in the morning, even with standard time.

Switching to daylight time will switch sunrise/sunset to 9AM/515PM, guaranteeing kids will be walking in the dark in the morning.

yeah the 4:15 PM sunset actually means it's getting dark at 3:30 PM. Pretty ridiculous. For everyone like "the kids have to walk to school in the dark!" it seems like they aren't considering that kids generally don't care at all what the morning is like because their day is about to be consumed by an obligation they never agreed to (school). When they're finally free for the day, it's effectively dark outside. The perspective among my peer group when I was a kid was that daylight savings system is totally clueless, has never made sense, and we should permanently switch to the schedule that allows more daylight after school (aka DST).

But we care about the kids. It's not about whether or not the kids are having a good time, but whether or not groggy people on their way to work can see them.

Would the better thing to do be to vary school hours by season? Add an hour in summer and remove an hour in winter?.

No school in summer.

When we start getting more sun, it’s fine in the morning even with the spring forward.

We go back to standard time in winter because otherwise it stays dark too long.

And all of this ignores the core fact that time zones are way more politically determined than geographically. And that’s a whole other problem

This is basically what Daylight Savings Time does.

P.S.

Switching to daylight time makes more sense in Eastern BC than it does in Western BC. But Eastern BC is relatively unpopulated. The population of Penticton is 40,000 vs 3,000,000 in metro Vancouver. Second largest metro (Victoria) is west of Vancouver.

Penticton experiences sunrise/sunset about 25 minutes before Vancouver, so their kids experience approximately equal amounts of sun before & after school on the winter solstice.

I know exactly what you mean with your comment, but interesting fact, Vancouver is in the East of BC! BC is huge in both directions.

Even more so when you consider that most of metro Vancouver lives east of Vancouver city.

Penticton is also in a valley so in reality the sun goes behind the mountains in the west around 3:30PM.

if it ends up being an issue, then the schools could just change start time?

But that's the whole thing.

Why change the clocks when we could change the definition of school time, business hours, liquor/gambling licensing hours, construction noise hours, etc? Just use standard time and then base our society around the physics of the sun.

The reason for daylight savings, as batshit insane as it sounds, is that it's easier to authoritatively tell people what time it is, with a one-hour jump twice a year, than to tell people to change business hours twice a year for a better experience around daylight.

It's absolutely fascinating from a psychology standpoint.

My one big hope for when countries now stop doing the stupid clock change thing, is that people become a lot more flexible around business hours and school hours, and adapt a schedule that fits people.

"…easier to authoritatively tell people what time it is, with a one-hour jump twice a year,…"

Exactly. Also, changing business hours to suit specific work conditions would ease traffic congestion. For instance, a farmer would milk cows at different times of the year. Similarly, milk tankers would be on the road at hours set by cows' routines.

And if we do that, why can't we all just use unix time and let school can just atart whenever makes sense

No, kids will just die because schools match the offices, which match expected hours

Speaking as growing up in Fort St John, BC, sunrise was after school began, and sunset was before school was out - more or less - in the middle of winter. But then, that city (in BC, and nowhere near as far north as that province gets) - is rather more arctic in every sense of the word. But then, that corner also opted out of time changes, so ... the rest of the province is catching up :)

* https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/canada/vancouver?month=12&ye...

Move the school starts later. Problem solved.

In addition to the reason already given (kids get home before the evening traffic picks up), another reason is that generally driving conditions are worse in the morning than they are in the evening so if there isn't enough light for both the morning and evening drives to be in light it is safer to give the light to the morning drive.

> another reason is that generally driving conditions are worse in the morning than they are in the evening

Wait, why? Where? I've never heard this. Which driving conditions are you talking about? Rain? Snow?

Generally the coldest part of the day is just after sunrise. The warmest part of the day is typically in the early afternoon, around 1-4 pm.

This makes a few driving hazards more likely or more intense in mornings, including fog, sleet, and ice. Also tires have less traction when they are colder. In the morning it is less likely for snowplows or earlier traffic to have cleared paths on secondary roads.

Driver assist systems tend to have more trouble with sensor fogging, frosting, or icing in the morning.

That's not to say evening is a piece of cake. Evening tends to have denser traffic which increases the risk of accidents. Places that are in shadow for much of the day might maintain ice while most of the morning ice melts, or might start developing new evening ice earlier than places the heated up more in the day which could be particularly bad--if most of the road is ice free in the evening people might let down their guard.

It's coldest at night, so morning ice would be worse than evening, when daily highs are reaches and roads have been driven on more.

> kids get home before the evening traffic picks up

When we change the general time, this applies to school days as well as office hours, so the kids go home to evening traffic relation will stay constant.

> (against fresh drivers)

How many people roll out of bed, rush out the door and jump in the car before they're actually awake? In my circles, that would be a larger percentage that of those that get up with plenty of time to wake up. I'm not sure any time of the day is safer regarding attentive drivers. Especially if we're going to consider idiots on their phones while driving.

There is still a typical morning routine of an hour. How long do people need to wake up? If they are chronically tired is this going to get better through out the day?

Personally, I need multiple hours. I'm not the type to open my eyes, jump out of bed, and hit the floor running. I'm more the type of "fuck, why am I awake?" but then at the end of the day if there's stuff to do, I can be up for a while. So I'm much better at night than in the morning. Even if I'm my keyboard at 10am, I'm still not up to speed. My best comes later in the day. I think part of that is I've worked for places for so long that I was in meetings all day, and never got to do my actual job until late in the day when everyone else was winding down.

You could just have a different chronotype but are forced to conform to societal expectations around when you should do work.

I agree with you. I also need to shout at the clouds on this because the experts who make the argument for time changes drive me crazy.

I live in Calgary. At a previous grade school my daughter went to, school started early enough that she left in pitch black conditions in winter, regardless of "experts" and their precious daylight savings time.

'You need sunshine when you wake up' is really a ridiculous argument, there is no sunshine even with DST.

Get rid of it. Maybe egg the houses of the "experts" too.

(As for my kids, thankfully, they did remote school during Covid (hence late mornings) and then I moved to a place where the school starting time was later than 8.)

Yes, a lot of griping about "standard time" is really griping about winter. There are fewer hours of daylight in the winter. That's just the way it is. You can't fool time.

You can also just change the hours when things start without changing the clock for the entire country.

Anyone in the north has seen “winter hours” and “summer hours”.

> kids coming home in the darkness (against exhausted drivers).

If you’re exhausted you shouldn’t be driving. Period. You’re the danger to kids, not light or darkness. (Your headlights are in working order, right?)

Nice sentiment, sadly we live in the real world

Correct. Alas, we've designed our society around the expectation of everyone always getting everywhere via driving. And once you've driven to work, you probably don't have any other real option than to drive back.

Im so glad I don’t live in the same society as you.

I grew up in an area outside the US, and quite a bit more to the north. I still remember how for several weeks each year I had to walk to school in the dark, sometimes having issues with seeing where I was walking.

The DST changes abruptly made everything visible again. Around that time we were also getting a permanent snow cover. And the whiteness of the snow significantly improved visibility for the rest of the winter.

So I don't think that the concerns are completely unfounded, but they are probably not as dire either.

Am I missing something? DST will make walking to school in the darkness more likely, not less.

DST means a later sunrise.

I mean, the change from the DST ("summer") time to the standard ("winter") time.

One difference between morning and evening: in the mornings, some or even many students must wait outdoors for their bus to arrive, because they live too far away from the bus stop to run out when the bus pulls up. That means they are standing around in the darkness and the cold. In the evenings, they can go straight home from the bus.

> I've seen arguments about kids going to school in the darkness being thrown around a lot

I’m sure there’s some correlation with the time zone, but it feels like a “think of the children!” argument that ignores much more significant factors (e.g. traffic speed and volume).

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