Georgia would see about 71 million additional school trips in darkness under permanent daylight saving time, the largest increase among the 14 states a University of Washington team analyzed. The researchers, led by postdoctoral scholar Guadalupe Rodríguez Ferrante and biology professor Horacio de la Iglesia, estimate at least 2 billion extra pre-sunrise school trips nationwide. Their paper appeared in Current Biology on Oct. 29.
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Georgia’s 71 million dark trips and the 14-state count
The team studied 14 of the 19 states that have approved permanent daylight saving time contingent on federal action. For each, they combined school enrollment, individual school start times and geographic coordinates to work out how many days each child would commute in the dark, then summed the trips and compared the total with today’s practice of changing clocks twice a year. Georgia topped the list at about 71 million additional dark trips, ahead of Washington at nearly 35 million.
The University of Washington release, written by Sarah McQuate of UW News and republished by ScienceDaily on Nov. 4, adds that Mississippi and Alabama each go from about 2 million dark school trips under the current system to more than 20 million under permanent daylight saving time. Schools in both states start, on average, before 8 a.m. The other states in the 14 show a similar pattern, but the release publishes no numbers for them, so those totals stay unverified here.
The study’s own title, as ScienceDaily reports it, speaks of “over a billion more dark-morning school commutes” for K-12 children under the Sunshine Protection Act, while the release gives a floor of 2 billion nationwide. Neither explains the gap. News-Medical’s account from Oct. 30 flags the same mismatch, so the state-level figures are the numbers the sources agree on.
The authorship is unusually young. Besides Rodríguez Ferrante and de la Iglesia, the paper lists UW biology undergraduates Nirekh Dasika, Alicia Nam, Jessie Lu, Navneet Tumber, Elena Kully-Rivera, Viridian Klei and Micaela Romero, plus a high school student, Daniel Zhang. Their school-by-school arithmetic, which draws on each campus’s enrollment, listed start time and latitude and longitude, is what produces the 71 million figure for Georgia and the 35 million for Washington.
Fatal crashes involving school-age pedestrians: twice the odds in the dark
The safety argument rests on a second analysis. Using U.S. traffic collision records, the team found that a fatal crash involving a school-aged pedestrian was roughly twice as likely during dark mornings as after sunrise. Fox 13 Seattle’s coverage of the paper adds a caveat: the study does not establish how many extra crashes permanent daylight saving time would cause.
De la Iglesia, the senior author, summed up the motivation in plain terms: “Nobody wants their kids to go to school in the dark.” The paper is registered under DOI 10.1016/j.cub.2026.10.014, but the publisher’s page sits behind a redirect that could not be read, so the figures here come from the university release and press coverage of it.
Who gets the darkest mornings, and the circadian argument
The release singles out communities on the western edge of their time zones, with Forks, Washington, as its example, along with districts that start early and districts that rarely face dark commutes today but would face them regularly. Mississippi and Alabama, with average starts before 8 a.m., sit in the early-start group.
The authors also make a body-clock case. Morning light helps set the circadian clock, which affects mood, sleep and appetite, and they argue permanent daylight saving time would undo the benefit of the delayed high school start times adopted because teenagers’ clocks run late. De la Iglesia argues that pushing school starts later would only drag work and evening hours later too, effectively returning everyone to solar time, which he says is Standard Time.
The 8 a.m. assumption and the stalled Sunshine Protection Act
The national estimate depends on one stated assumption. Rodríguez Ferrante said the team assumed students leave home around 8 a.m. Because the researchers used each school’s listed start time, and many children leave earlier for breakfast programs or activities, they say the real figure is likely higher than their estimate.
The House passed the Sunshine Protection Act on July 14, according to Fox 13 Seattle, and the university release says the bill is stalled in the Senate; ScienceDaily lists it as H.R. 139 in the 119th Congress. Nineteen states, Washington among them, have approved measures that would take effect if Congress acts. The release does not say who funded the study, and the sources give no indication that any state is weighing school start changes in response.
Georgia, at about 71 million additional dark trips, is the state where the study finds the gap between permanent daylight saving time and twice-yearly clock changes at its widest, ahead of Washington’s nearly 35 million and of any other figure the release gives.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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