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Daylight or Standard Time: Pick One, Congress
It’s time for our biannual ritual – moving the clocks forward this time – effective at 2 a.m. on Sunday, March 13th. It was just four months ago that we drove them back. And with it, of course, will come our equally ritualistic grumbling or celebrations, depending on whose side you fall on this centuries-old debate unless you live in most of Arizona, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, or American Samoa. Under the Uniform Time Act, those jurisdictions have exempted themselves from Daylight Savings Time. Our trusty US Department of Transportation regulates the process.
It isn’t much of a debate anymore. According to an Economist/YouGov poll from last November, by an almost 2:1 margin, most Americans want 1) to end the practice of clock-changing and 2) prefer to permanently “spring forward” than “fall back.” That’s a change from just two years ago, which an Associated Press poll had Americans split three ways: about 40 percent in favor of standard time; 30 percent for daylight savings; and another 30 percent who love changing their clocks twice a year (who ARE those people?).
“At least some of Americans’ stated preference to eliminate changing times may stem from the inconvenience and abruptness of the transition between times, which they could feel more strongly when asked about it near clock-changing times,” YouGov said. Many Americans say they dread the forthcoming transition from Daylight Saving Time. Asked about its end this Saturday, 34% of Americans say that they are not looking forward to it, 21% say they are looking forward to it, and 38% say they don’t really care.”
The US House Subcommittee on Consumer Protection has the umpteenth hearing at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday (EST), “Changing Times: Revisiting ‘Spring Forward’ and ‘Fall Back.’” They’re featuring a law professor, an expert in sleep neurology and pediatrics, and a lobbyist for the National Association of Convenience Stores.
All three will tell us things we already know.
The law professor will likely walk through the various times Congress has messed with our clocks, most often as war-time measures, such as World War I and enactment of the Calder Act. They instituted year-round DST in 1942, during World War II – “War Time” – and again during the 1973 energy crisis. Most recently, in 2005, Congress changed the calendar when DST is in effect (the second Sunday in March until the first Sunday in November – eight months.
And most states aren’t waiting for Congress to act, although it is Congress that ultimately must institute a national change. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures:
State legislatures continue to grapple with the vexing and multifaceted state policy questions regarding the biannual changing of the clocks. Most all of the states have considered legislation over the last several years that would place the state permanently on either standard time or daylight saving time. Since 2015, at least 350 bills and resolutions have been introduced in virtually every state, but none of significance passed until 2018, when Florida became the first state to enact legislation to permanently observe DST, pending amendment of federal law to permit such action.
In the last four years, 18 states have enacted legislation or passed resolutions to provide for year-round daylight saving time, if Congress were to allow such a change, and in some cases, if surrounding states enact the same legislation. Because federal law does not currently allow full-time DST, Congress would have to act before states could adopt changes.
The 18 states are Alabama, Georgia, Minnesota, Mississippi and Montana (2021). Idaho, Louisiana, Ohio (resolution), South Carolina, Utah and Wyoming (2020). Delaware, Maine, Oregon, Tennessee and Washington (2019). Florida (2018; California voters also authorized such a change that year, but legislative action is pending). Some states have commissioned studies on the topic including Massachusetts (2017) and Maine (2021).
Arizonans I know love not changing their clocks but are mildly annoyed at changing schedules for east coast or California phone calls, Zoom meetings, and travel.
Second, changing clocks is not good for our health. “Studies have found an increase in car accidents during the week following the change to daylight saving time and an increase in patient-safety related incidents associated with human error in the week following the transition into and out of daylight saving time,” according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Other adverse effects of the time change in the spring include increased risk of stroke and hospital admissions, and increased production of inflammatory markers, one of the body’s responses to stress.”
The AASM opposes Daylight Savings Time: “Conversely, another study found that in the fall, during the shift from daylight saving time back to standard time, there was a reduction in the rate of cardiovascular events, suggesting that the risk of heart attack may be elevated because of chronic effects of daylight saving time.”
It used to be worse in Indiana, where some counties in Chicago’s Central Time Zone orbit eschewed Daylight Savings Time while the rest of the state stuck with DST. For example, if you lived in LaPorte County – no DST at the time – one had to wake up at 4 a.m. for a one-hour drive for 7 a.m. breakfast in Elkhart, Indiana, which observed DST. Ugh. Indiana fixed that disparity by a single vote, so the entire state now observes DST.
But my least favorite day of the year when I was employed full time was the first workday after turning the clocks back in November. It was a depressing reminder of winter months ahead, and I hated driving home in the dark.
Third, changing clocks disrupt our economy in a variety of ways. Dairy farmers will be quick to tell you that cows don’t change their clocks. Some parents of young school-age children who catch buses to school will lament waiting in the early morning darkness. Others will cite energy savings, but various studies have produced mixed results.
But in his testimony on Wednesday, Lyle Beckwith of the National Association of Convenience Stores will testify in support of permanent DST. From his written testimony that is already public:
Our industry has consistently found that commerce increases when the nation moves to daylight saving time. When the clocks change in the spring, people feel as though they have more time after work to engage in a range of activities that increase commerce from eating out to shopping to participating, in or taking kids to, a variety of outdoor activities. The increases in economic activity that result can be dramatic. They consistently show increased spending when daylight hours are shifted later in the day through daylight saving. One study compared spending changes when daylight saving started and stopped in Los Angeles with spending in Phoenix, which does not observe daylight saving time. The result was clear increases in spending in Los Angeles when daylight saving started and losses of spending when it ended.2
The golf industry is one specific example. That industry estimated as early as the 1980s that an additional month of daylight saving time would mean hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue to the industry.3 For the convenience industry specifically, 76.5% of sales come during the part of the year when we are on daylight saving time. That is a significantly higher percentage than the 65% of the year we spend using daylight saving time. Overall, this means about $5 billion of incremental sales for the industry attributable to the change to daylight saving time. Those are big numbers – particularly in an industry dominated by small businesses that operate with tight profit margins.
Lastly, and sadly, Congress will probably do nothing in the short term. It’s an election year, and there are bigger fish to fry.
But we’d all benefit if Congress would pick one – either Daylight or Standard Time – and make it uniform across the nation. As for me, I’m on Team Daylight Savings Time. I might even take up golf again.
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Looks like people prefer Daylight Savings to standard. If they made Savings time permanent, Would Arizona stay on Standard time just to keep messing with the rest of us?
Oh geez, here we go again.
The twice-a-year time change is fine. Leave it as is. A week from now you won’t care anymore. Just like you have been fine since November. The anti-time-switchers are my mortal enemies. They live farther south where the swing is less dramatic, or they live in cities where everything is light all the time anyway. Notice your map. It’s the coasts messing with flyover country again. They want the rest of us to live like them. No thanks. Not interested in sunrise before 4:00 am in the summer, or 9:00 am in the winter. So tired of having to hear these gripes every six months. If it was so awful, the griping would last longer than a few days.
Aside from all that, it’s good for you.
I fully understand why Maine would prefer permanent DST. The sun sets in December in much of Maine before 4PM on standard time. (Actually, the real problem is that Maine would have been better off to be in the Atlantic time zone. But that creates its own problems with neighboring states; there was a proposal for New England states to move to Atlantic time, but that seems improbable.)
Time zones are very large, and the effects of permanent standard or daylight time are quite different from the eastern to the western edge of any of the time zones.
I spent a year in Indiana when they were on year round standard time. I found the extremely early summer sunrises disconcerting.
I prefer permanent daylight time; evening light is much more valuable than early morning light to me.
I live in Arizona. We do not participate in Daylight Savings Time. If you ever visit Phoenix in the summer, you will realize why we don’t want to “save” one second of daylight in the summer.
This is fundamentally a federalism issue. Let each state decide.
I am those people. I speak for those people.
There’s so much anti-clock-swtching propaganda out there, and it’s led by coasties and city-dwellers who live all their lives under electric lights anyway.
We need more people on my side, working to keep things as they are!
Why did it take until 2015? DST has been around for decades. Why is this a sudden, recent issue? Why have we been happily changing our clocks for decades with little complaint, until just the last decade where this has suddenly become a national issue of great importance? (For a couple days every year, after which everyone goes back to living their lives without concern.)
I’m very much afraid you’re tilting at windmills.
All polls suck.
And preach it, Drew.
Can confirm. There were times when I was on the 11PM-7AM shift where I was lucky to see the sun at all. Maybe just the sunrise and a 1/2 hour or so, then if I couldn’t sleep I’d get up at 3Pm and catch the last 30-45 minutes of daylight.
Of course, reverse that in the summer, when sunrise was around 4:40am and sunset around 8:15pm.
What if people just refused to switch. Bring the chaos!
Which, because of Indian reservations, leads to an interesting drive where you’d have to change your clock something like eleven times. Because the Navajos span multiple states, they participate in Daylight Saving Time. The Hopis do not. There are Hopi enclaves in Navajo land and vice versa. Therefore, its possible to drive and bounce between Arizona, Navajo, and Hopi lands.
Well, it gives us something else to argue about, doesn’t it?
I’ve made that trip from Tuba City to Window Rock. Should have been playing the Chicago song “Does Anybody Really Know What Time it Is?” the whole way.
The sun should be roughly overhead at noon. It’s that simple. DST shifts it to 1pm. That’s wrong. The shift to dark mornings is terrible, even if only for a month or so, and we don’t need it still light closing in on 10 pm. In extreme places, like Alaska, it’s expected to have extremes of day length and I happily lived with it. In the lower 48, it’s just dumb to shift. No daylight is being saved; we have the same amount regardless of what the clock says. Unfortunately, too many of us have to live and work by the stupid clock instead of the sun.
Eastport, Maine and Terre Haute, Indiana are both in the eastern time zone. It is impossible for both of them to have the sun overhead at noon EST; they are too far apart.
Added: Solar noon in Eastport on March 8 is 11:39 EST; solar noon in Terre Haute is 1:00PM.
I want to go back to the way it was, but with one change. The April weekend change coincided with the start of Master week and baseball season. That was fine. However, I’d move up the “fall back” portion to the last full weekend of September.
I’m with Gary on this.
And I want GA in permanent DST
I find myself in agreement with DrewInWisconsin on this one. (Stop the presses! AmIRight?)
We’re becoming a country full of people who just can’t live with the hands they’re dealt. Boys want to be girls, girls want to be boys. Everyone wants everything to be safe and guaranteed. Count me among the minority that doesn’t need a trigger warning on his wall clock: I’ll change it twice a year and not whine about the different light the next morning.
I feel the same way about converting to metric: don’t. There’s nothing wrong with life being a little quirky and uneven.
Pet peeve: it’s Daylight Saving Time. As in, it’s intended for saving daylight. “Savings” refers to a bank account.
I know I’m in a very small minority here, but my vote would be for abolishing DST and staying on standard time permanently. The time change is pointless and expensive, so we certainly don’t need that. And if we’re going to standardize on a time, it seems to me that it should be the standard time.
Should we ever standardize on a time, by definition it will be the standard time.
But your comment led to my thinking of time zones, which led to a question about their origin, which led to this: https://www.thoughtco.com/what-are-time-zones-1435358
When I was stationed in northern Maine, we did get one small benefit from the time change. My flight always seemed to have the overnight (11PM-7AM) patrol shift when we changed from Standard Time to Daylight Saving Time. A different flight had the dubious luck of always having the overnight patrol when we returned to Standard Time.
If you live in a northern state, you would have to get up very early in the morning in summer to enjoy a full day of sunshine. Which is about as much trouble as changing the clocks.
Which supports my argument, with the caveat that EST goes too far west. Michigan and Indiana should be in Central. The time zones should center around overhead (aka “high”) noon +/- about 30 minutes. DST is a lie akin to claiming a man in a dress is a woman. Leave the clocks alone and leave the daylight roughly split by noon. How hard is that to understand?
By that reasoning Time Zones are a lie.
So how about we go whole hog and eliminate time zones? Why just mess around with the edges?
Time is just a bourgeois concept.
It just can’t be done with all the other constraints on drawing time zone lines.
You could equally argue, and it has been done, that Maine should be on Atlantic time. But Chicago has more or less the same problem, being at the eastern edge of Central Time; winter sunsets are very early and you have a long dark night ahead of you when the sun goes down.
You should have been around pre-railroads. Every town set its own time by the sun.
That can be dangerous for actors there in MAGA country.
I think we need to just pick a time and stick with it. Things would be so much simpler if it were always 5:17 PM on Thursday.
The stoners and the “It’s five o’clock somewhere” crowd won’t want to sign on to that. Although, if it doesn’t have to be exactly 5:00, they’d buy into your proposal. That way, it’s always five o’clock.