Daylight Saving Time and Outdoor Recreation

Daylight saving time (DST) does not change how much daylight there is; it changes when daylight falls relative to daily routines. We study how this timing shift affects outdoor recreation, using app-recorded disc golf visits from UDisc. Arizona does not observe DST, which provides a natural comparison with nearby states that do (CA, CO, NV, NM and UT). We use more than 1,000 courses and over 100,000 course-days within two weeks of the fall clock change from 2021 to 2025. With difference-in-differences Poisson fixed-effects models that control for weather and daylight duration, we find that the return to standard time reduces visits by 6.1% overall. The drop is concentrated on weekdays, when visits fall by 13.4%, while weekend visits show no statistically detectable change. The spring transition, which moves daylight into the evening, coincides with more weekday play, but differing pre-transition trends make that evidence less reliable than the fall results. Our results are intuitive: weekday rounds tend to start in the late afternoon, so earlier sunsets cut into outdoor play. Because outdoor recreation promotes physical and mental health, these findings point to a cost of clock policy that is often overlooked. As the United States debates permanent standard or daylight time, the timing of evening daylight deserves a place alongside energy, sleep and safety in that discussion.