by bryanlarsen 11 hours ago
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
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.
Penticton is also in a valley so in reality the sun goes behind the mountains in the west around 3:30PM.
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.
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.
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
Move the school starts later. Problem solved.