Time to Move on from the Daylight Saving Time Obsession

With the apparent support of President Donald Trump, Congress may soon pass legislation allowing states to adopt misleadingly named daylight saving time year-round.

In fact, DST—now in effect from early March until early November—doesn’t save anything. Clocks merely advance an hour, shifting sunlight from the morning to the evening. The length of the day doesn’t change a single nanosecond.

The prospective policy change would incorporate language from the so-called Sunshine Protection Act, co-sponsored annually by Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) and Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL), into the Motor Vehicle Modernization Act, a massive multiyear, trillion-dollar transportation spending bill now under consideration.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee reported the bill out of committee by a vote of 48-1. It now heads to a vote in the full chamber.

Under the proposal, details of which await the bill’s final version, individual states would have an opportunity to opt out of permanent DST, as do Arizona (except for land occupied by the Navajo Nation), Hawaii, and the U.S. territories of Guam, the Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico, which have maintained year-round standard time since 1966. If they do, however, it apparently would be irrevocable, as a provision of the bill would prevent any future changes by the states’ legislatures.

One definition of insanity is repeating the same action and expecting a different result. We’ve been here before. During one of the oil shocks of the 1970s, Richard Nixon convinced Congress to begin, in January 1974, a two-year experiment with permanent DST, which he sold as an energy-saving strategy. Things went well throughout the spring and summer, but as the days grew shorter in late fall, parents began complaining about sending their children off to school in the dark. Several youngsters were subsequently killed in predawn accidents around the country, including two Floridians. Public backlash led to the abrupt cancellation of the experiment in November.

Many rationales for DST mania have been advanced since Ben Franklin jokingly (it is thought) proposed shifting clocks forward in the spring as a way to save candles at day’s end. Of course, relying on sunlight to illuminate homes in the evening means burning more candles in the morning while getting ready for school, work, or, in Franklin’s case, nation-building.

There are no solutions to recurrent seasonal changes in the timing of sunrises and sunsets, as Thomas Sowell might say, but only policy trade-offs between darker mornings and darker evenings.

Few, if any, general benefits of DST have been identified. But physiologists, sleep medicine specialists, and other experts have emphasized the human costs of springing time forward by an hour in March, only to set it back again eight months later. Misaligning body clocks (circadian rhythms) with sunlight has been associated with brain fog, strokes, heart attacks, and more workplace and road accidents. The adverse effects are especially troublesome for older people, who take longer than their younger compatriots to adjust to the time shocks.

The public is right to express frustration with the current system. There’s no good reason to “spring forward and fall back” each year.

Permanent daylight saving time holds a false promise of energy savings, bustling stores, and enhanced social welfare. The idea backfired in 1974 and will fail again if the Sunshine Protection Act is included in the Motor Vehicle Modernization Act.

The proper policy response is not permanent DST, which may benefit the owners of golf courses, tennis courts, and possibly retailers, who think they see more customers when sunlight is shifted to the end of the workday.

Permanent standard time would be a much better choice.