It’s High Time for Year-Round Daylight Saving Time

Commentary

On the first Sunday in November, we gain an hour of sleep by ending daylight saving time (DST).

Then on the second Sunday in March, most Americans reverse the clocks to restart DST.

We need to end this foolish messing with clocks.

That late winter morning, many oversleep and church is less crowded.

More importantly, twice a year our body rhythms take a week or so to adjust.

A 2020 study of traffic accidents found a 6 percent increase in crashes in the first week of DST.

Tired workers are less productive, and schoolchildren are less attentive.

We are less upset about getting an extra hour of sleep on the first Sunday in November when we switch back to standard time.

DST was initiated during the two world wars to save energy.

Instead of sleeping early mornings when the sun was already up, the sleight of hand with the clock shifted daylight into the early evenings and saved electricity from less use of lightbulbs.

The energy-saving justification is dubious nowadays.

Work patterns and driving habits have changed, and the use of air conditioning increases as we return home sooner to warmer homes.

The whole exercise is unpopular.

AP-NORC and YouGov polls indicate that fewer than one-sixth of Americans support semi-annual tinkering with clocks.

About two-thirds of Americans would like the biannual time adjustment to stop, and most of those would prefer year-round DST.

Through the mid-19th century, Americans set their watches against local sundials.

New York City was minutes ahead of Washington and behind Boston.

The advent of railroads made that convention impractical. Those first published schedules according to the time at their companies’ headquarters and left it to communities along their lines to transpose those into local time.

Eventually, they adopted a more-or-less unified system of time zones of peculiar formation—the western border of the eastern time zone ran through the major stations in Detroit; Buffalo, New York; Pittsburgh; Charleston, South Carolina; and Atlanta.

Time zones were formalized by the railroads through the 1883 General Time Convention and became federal law through the 1918 Standard Time Act. The latter charged the Interstate Commerce Commission with setting geographic boundaries.

After World War I, New York City and many other metro areas continued seasonal DST. It was national policy again for World War II and continued by many states afterward.

DST became a permanent national policy in 1966 with the Uniform Time Act.

The end and start dates have been tinkered with since, endlessly studied by psychologists and physicians, and cursed the morning after DST commences by a sleep-deprived public.

Alas, most things that tamper with nature are immoral, illegal, or unhealthy.

Scientists say year-round standard time would be better for us.

Our biological cycles are attuned to the movements of the sun.

Morning light triggers alertness, modulates our stress responses, and regulates our emotions. Evening darkness releases melatonin that helps us sleep.

Year-round DST—especially in northern states where the amount of daylight varies more with the seasons—could increase emotional disorders, obesity, heart attacks, diabetes, and all manner of ailments associated with modern living.

Those problems would be especially acute on the Western edges of time zones, where sunrises are later.

More children would be traveling to school in the dark, and this caused a furor when year-round DST was briefly implemented in 1974 during an energy crisis.

The House of Representatives recently passed the Sunshine Protection Act to implement year-round DST, but it faces opposition in the Senate mostly from states that believe they would be adversely affected.

The bill would permit states to opt out by adopting standard time—effectively switching time zones.

Current law does not permit individual states to adopt year-round DST, but 19 states have laws that would implement it if federal law permitted.

Nowadays, fewer children walk or bike to school, and they carry flashlights built into their cellphones.

Americans already ignore the metabolic cues by rising in the dark to finish work earlier in the solar day to steal hours of evening sunlight.

Often, schools ignore the sun anyway.

For 25 years, when my wife taught in Fairfax County, her first classes began at 7:20 a.m. The kids with long bus rides were up before first light no matter the clock.

Many Americans already set their own time—working at home enables nocturnal personalities to thrive.

Routinely, I write this column between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. Phones don’t ring, my mind is undistracted, and my emotions aren’t rattled by markets and politicians.

The Senate should stop blocking what most people want and let state legislatures choose between DST and standard time.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.