Time Zones and Child Safety

[cabiness42]

http://www.wlky.com/news/local-news/indian...lf/-/index.html

 

About 6 miles from my house, a high school girl was sexually assaulted Tuesday morning while walking to the school bus. It happened at 7:00 am, and sunrise was at 7:21 am. Assaults and robberies of kids waiting for or walking to school buses seems to be happening more frequently in areas where it is dark in the morning.

 

This particular location is at 85.7W longitude, but is in the Eastern Time Zone, while the natural boundary between Eastern and Central sits at 82.5W, which is just east of Columbus, OH. If we were on our natural time zone (Central), sunrise would have been at 6:21 instead of 7:21, this girl would have been walking to the bus stop in the light, and there is at least a chance that this wouldn't have happened.

 

I know most of you live in Illinois and NW Indiana, which are on Central time, so you may not notice this problem. The natural boundary between Central and Mountain is 97.5W, which is roughly Wichita KS, Oklahoma City, and Fort Worth, so anybody in western TX, KS or ND might experience the same issue. Is there anybody else who lives near the western edge of a time zone?

 

I think as adults we have decided that we like having more light in the evening to golf and do other stuff outside, but we've neglected to think about the ramifications on child safety. DST makes this even worse by moving the clocks forward another hour. Sunrise here on November 1 wasn't until 8:15 a.m.

[Balta1701]

http://www.wlky.com/news/local-news/indian...lf/-/index.html

 

About 6 miles from my house, a high school girl was sexually assaulted Tuesday morning while walking to the school bus. It happened at 7:00 am, and sunrise was at 7:21 am. Assaults and robberies of kids waiting for or walking to school buses seems to be happening more frequently in areas where it is dark in the morning.

 

This particular location is at 85.7W longitude, but is in the Eastern Time Zone, while the natural boundary between Eastern and Central sits at 82.5W, which is just east of Columbus, OH. If we were on our natural time zone (Central), sunrise would have been at 6:21 instead of 7:21, this girl would have been walking to the bus stop in the light, and there is at least a chance that this wouldn't have happened.

 

I know most of you live in Illinois and NW Indiana, which are on Central time, so you may not notice this problem. The natural boundary between Central and Mountain is 97.5W, which is roughly Wichita KS, Oklahoma City, and Fort Worth, so anybody in western TX, KS or ND might experience the same issue. Is there anybody else who lives near the western edge of a time zone?

 

I think as adults we have decided that we like having more light in the evening to golf and do other stuff outside, but we've neglected to think about the ramifications on child safety. DST makes this even worse by moving the clocks forward another hour. Sunrise here on November 1 wasn't until 8:15 a.m.

If I were a social scientist you just wrote a grant proposal for me. This would be testable - over the past decade, there have been 2 major changes in DST setups due to federal energy bills - the movement of the start of "normal time" back by about 2 weeks in October and the forced change of Indiana onto DST when they didn't want to.

 

There are studies out there of the effect of these changes on energy use because the idea was that expanding DST was supposed to save energy. In both cases it didn't do so, it actually caused everyone to use more energy, but that didn't give us a reason to change it back because why not waste energy. I would bet you could compile data on child assaults and see if there's a similar correlation.

[southsider2k5]

http://www.wlky.com/news/local-news/indian...lf/-/index.html

 

About 6 miles from my house, a high school girl was sexually assaulted Tuesday morning while walking to the school bus. It happened at 7:00 am, and sunrise was at 7:21 am. Assaults and robberies of kids waiting for or walking to school buses seems to be happening more frequently in areas where it is dark in the morning.

 

This particular location is at 85.7W longitude, but is in the Eastern Time Zone, while the natural boundary between Eastern and Central sits at 82.5W, which is just east of Columbus, OH. If we were on our natural time zone (Central), sunrise would have been at 6:21 instead of 7:21, this girl would have been walking to the bus stop in the light, and there is at least a chance that this wouldn't have happened.

 

I know most of you live in Illinois and NW Indiana, which are on Central time, so you may not notice this problem. The natural boundary between Central and Mountain is 97.5W, which is roughly Wichita KS, Oklahoma City, and Fort Worth, so anybody in western TX, KS or ND might experience the same issue. Is there anybody else who lives near the western edge of a time zone?

 

I think as adults we have decided that we like having more light in the evening to golf and do other stuff outside, but we've neglected to think about the ramifications on child safety. DST makes this even worse by moving the clocks forward another hour. Sunrise here on November 1 wasn't until 8:15 a.m.

 

Indiana shouldn't be on Eastern time anyway. The meridian line that should determine Eastern vs Central goes through Columbus Ohio.

[cabiness42]

If I were a social scientist you just wrote a grant proposal for me. This would be testable - over the past decade, there have been 2 major changes in DST setups due to federal energy bills - the movement of the start of "normal time" back by about 2 weeks in October and the forced change of Indiana onto DST when they didn't want to.

 

There are studies out there of the effect of these changes on energy use because the idea was that expanding DST was supposed to save energy. In both cases it didn't do so, it actually caused everyone to use more energy, but that didn't give us a reason to change it back because why not waste energy. I would bet you could compile data on child assaults and see if there's a similar correlation.

 

This is hardly scientific, but there is a group that is tracking pre-dawn assaults on children in Indiana as evidence of the need to switch to Central time:

 

http://www.hoosiersforcentraltime.com/incidents.html

[southsider2k5]

Indiana shouldn't be on Eastern time anyway. The meridian line that should determine Eastern vs Central goes through Columbus Ohio.

 

If you hover over the eastern time zone, you'll be able to see that Indiana is in the wrong place as well as Michigan.

[Iwritecode]

Every single year when we get the bus routes for our kids, they try to make their bus stop down the street a couple of blocks where they would have to walk past the house of a registered sex offender.

 

We always make them switch it to the corner that our house is on. Literally 50 feet from our front steps. The bus goes right past this corner anyway.

[Texsox]

Having been on a bus route advisory committee there are a couple interesting factors at work in planning bus routes and they all revolve around time = money. More stops require more buses or having the first kids picked up ten, fifteen, or more minutes earlier. This costing more in drive salaries, more time (not miles) on the engines, increased fuel costs.

 

We use the same buses for three runs each morning and evening. Middle School, followed by Elementary, then High School. Even that was planned out. H.S. kids didn't usually need their parents (who may be working) to get them to school, so they went last. We had more working middle school parents than anything else. So it worked for them to drop the kids off, or get them on the bus early. We also had early day programs at the Elementary for parents who could drop them off.

 

I also wondered about safety. Isn't there also something for having more kids at one stop instead of dividing them up to the point where only two or three kids are at each stop.

 

It really was an interesting process

[cabiness42]

Having been on a bus route advisory committee there are a couple interesting factors at work in planning bus routes and they all revolve around time = money. More stops require more buses or having the first kids picked up ten, fifteen, or more minutes earlier. This costing more in drive salaries, more time (not miles) on the engines, increased fuel costs.

 

We use the same buses for three runs each morning and evening. Middle School, followed by Elementary, then High School. Even that was planned out. H.S. kids didn't usually need their parents (who may be working) to get them to school, so they went last. We had more working middle school parents than anything else. So it worked for them to drop the kids off, or get them on the bus early. We also had early day programs at the Elementary for parents who could drop them off.

 

I also wondered about safety. Isn't there also something for having more kids at one stop instead of dividing them up to the point where only two or three kids are at each stop.

 

It really was an interesting process

 

Our district does HS first, then MS, then ES. That's why the teenage girl was out before it is light. My son is in Kindergarten and he doesn't get on his bus until 8:30 so light is never an issue for him. Still, if we were on Central time like we're supposed to be, everybody would be getting on the bus in the light.

[Iwritecode]

Having been on a bus route advisory committee there are a couple interesting factors at work in planning bus routes and they all revolve around time = money. More stops require more buses or having the first kids picked up ten, fifteen, or more minutes earlier. This costing more in drive salaries, more time (not miles) on the engines, increased fuel costs.

 

We use the same buses for three runs each morning and evening. Middle School, followed by Elementary, then High School. Even that was planned out. H.S. kids didn't usually need their parents (who may be working) to get them to school, so they went last. We had more working middle school parents than anything else. So it worked for them to drop the kids off, or get them on the bus early. We also had early day programs at the Elementary for parents who could drop them off.

 

I also wondered about safety. Isn't there also something for having more kids at one stop instead of dividing them up to the point where only two or three kids are at each stop.

 

It really was an interesting process

 

They changed our school times around a few years ago so that the HS kids started later than the younger kids. The excuse we were told was that "HS students need more sleep". This goes more towards my theory that it was to save money on the bus routes.

 

It really screwed the parents that relied on the older kids being home to watch the younger ones after school as well as any students that wanted an after school job that started before 4:00.

 

[Texsox]

They changed our school times around a few years ago so that the HS kids started later than the younger kids. The excuse we were told was that "HS students need more sleep". This goes more towards my theory that it was to save money on the bus routes.

 

It really screwed the parents that relied on the older kids being home to watch the younger ones after school as well as any students that wanted an after school job that started before 4:00.

 

How would changing the time save money?

[Iwritecode]

How would changing the time save money?

 

Less buses. Before they changed them, the school times would overlap.

[cabiness42]

Update on this situation: Law enforcement has stopped hunting for a suspect and has determined that the victim made the entire story up.