Permanent Daylight Saving Time--A Good Idea?

The Senate passed a bill yesterday that would make Daylight Saving Time permanent--in other words, we would always set our clocks one hour ahead of "sun time," and not reset them twice a year in March and November. This has been touted as a good idea, reducing confusion, decreasing energy use, etc.

But I think there are some practical concerns not taken into consideration. First of all, there's the issue of early morning darkness in the winter months. On January 1, sunrise in Bangor ME (about as far east as you can get in the US) is at 7:13 standard time. That would make it 8:13 if we switched to permanent daylight saving time. That would mean lot of traffic, including school buses and kids walking to school, in the twilight of just before and just after dawn.

And it would be even worse on the western side of the Eastern Time Zone (or any time zone, as I will explain). You see, our time zones are each approximately 15 degrees of longitude, about the distance the sun "travels" in an hour. But the time for each zone is determined by a place in about the middle of that zone, so the eastern side is really about 30 minutes earlier than that and the western side about 30 minutes later. On January 1, sunrise in Indianapolis (almost as far west as you can get in the Eastern Time Zone) is at 8:06 EST, nearly an hour later than in Bangor--and thus would be at 9:06 EDT, if we went to year-round daylight saving. Businesses would be opening their doors while it was still dark out, so commuters would be traveling in pitch darkness.

Energy savings? People would be getting up before the sun heats their homes, meaning more fuel to heat their homes not less. They would be up and about before the light begins streaming through their windows, meaning more electricity being used.

Sure there would be more light in the late afternoon, but evening rush hour would still be mostly in the dark and we'd still be eating dinner under electric lights.

Is the convenience of not changing your clock twice a year worth all that? (Especially when most of us have devices that do it automatically, anyway.)

"Light Sleep?"

 I did something this morning I haven't done in months--I slept late. Now, to be fair, sleeping late in this house means rolling out of bed at 7 AM, since we're usually up between 5:30 and 6. Still, it's really rare for me to do that--and rarer still for Jill to do so as well.

What kept us in bed? We're not sure, but we think light might have something to do with it. In our part of the world right now, sunrise isn't until around 7:30, so "first light" is right around 7. The blame for that is, at least in part, on Daylight Saving Time, which doesn't end in the United States until the first weekend of November. And then we'll need another month to get used to that change.

This does not mean, however, that I am in favor of year-round DST--precisely because of what it means in terms of dark early mornings. I can remember waiting at the school bus stop in deep twilight with my kids in January--and that is with Standard Time in effect! With DST, we'd have been waiting in the pitch of night. There are those who would argue that the solution to that is to start school later...but that would just turn the twilight trip from morning to afternoon. (Sunset in mid-January is 5 PM. Move school hours 90 minutes later, and that afternoon school bus is arriving home just about then.) It would also make after-school activities nearly impossible.

If anything, I would actually shorten DST. It's currently nearly two-thirds of the year! I think late April to early October is about right.

I'll Follow the Sun?

 At 2 AM on Sunday, we move the clock ahead one hour. At one time, there were good reasons to do this--when we were an agrarian society, when more daylight working hours aided in a war effort, when streets and roads weren't lighted at night.

I even made sense (or at least more sense) when the amount of the year we spent in "standard" time was greater than or equal to the amount we spent in "daylight saving" time. But it isn't that way now. We now spend 7-1/2 months--something like 30 weeks of a 52-week year--living one hour ahead of the sun...and only 22 weeks in line with the sun.

 If this is a benefit for nearly 60 percent of the year, why not just continue it for the whole calendar and not bother setting the clocks back an hour at the end of October? Sure it will make winter mornings and late afternoons a bit darker...but the overall number of hours of daylight won't change.

Think about it.