The country’s century-long experiments with daylight saving time keep running into same problems
By hola | Published | No Comments
As lawmakers in Washington consider making daylight saving time permanent, some of the same concerns that helped derail the idea in the past are arising again — like walking to school in the dark.
Andrea, a 14-year-old from East Boston, doesn’t like the idea of having to leave for school before the sun rises. “I feel like that would definitely affect my mood, especially if I have a hard subject in the morning,” she said. “I would definitely be struggling more.”
Parents and students raised such concerns in the 1970s, the last time the country experimented with making daylight saving time permanent.
Nevertheless, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Sunshine Protection Act in July with President Trump’s backing. The Senate failed to advance the bill before going on recess earlier this month but could pick it back up in September, when it’s back in session. If it becomes a law, it will mean more sunshine later in the afternoons and evenings, more sunrises after 8 a.m. and more morning commutes in the dark.
Supporters argue that the extra sunlight will be good for mental well-being and will have economic benefits. Trump has argued that keeping the clocks on daylight saving time will unite people across the political spectrum by saving them time and money. But critics of the idea have responded with scientific evidence, suggesting it’s a bad idea for our bodies, sleep health and public safety.
Technically speaking, daylight saving time is the period between spring and fall where clocks are set one hour ahead of standard time. Every state in the country, except Arizona and Hawaii, resets the clocks twice a year, but daylight saving time has a long history of stirring controversy.
First started in Germany as an energy-saving initiative during World War I, it was then introduced in the United States in 1918, only to be repealed a year later. Daylight saving time was revived by Congress in 1942, when the U.S. entered World War II. At the time, it was billed as a way to conserve fuel and “promote national security and defense.”
Unlike the previous clock-changing experiment, this time states could choose whether they wanted to participate. This resulted in chaos with some states signing on and others refusing to make the change. Decades later, Congress enacted the Uniform Time Act of 1966, which enforced daylight saving time in most of the country and set start and end dates.
Making daylight saving time year-round has been attempted before too. In 1973, with the support of the Nixon administration, Congress passed a similar bill that made daylight saving time permanent. The driving force, again, was to conserve energy during the energy crisis of 1973.
That law, which was popular when proposed, saw its support nosedive after daylight saving time became permanent; it was repealed soon after. According to a study conducted by the Department of Transportation in June 1974, permanent daylight saving time had not saved much energy.
Supporters say making daylight saving time permanent would reduce confusion and that they generally like the idea of later sunsets. In an op-ed published in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune a few days after the House passed the bill in July, Rep. Vern Buchanan of Florida urged the Senate to pass it too. Buchanan argued that making daylight saving time permanent would bring “consistency to families, opportunities to businesses and health benefits to communities across the country.”
But sleep experts warn that keeping the clocks set an hour ahead permanently will affect our body’s circadian rhythm, our natural 24-hour internal clock that relies on natural daylight and darkness, not human-made timekeeping.
Neurologist Karin Johnson says keeping the country on daylight saving time would permanently misalign our body’s internal clocks, while moving to standard time year-round could help us get more and better quality sleep.
“What daylight saving time is doing is artificially moving the clock time to be misaligned from where the sun is overhead at noon,” Johnson said. Since our body’s clock is set to the sun, she added, “essentially, you’re causing the alarm clock to go off an hour earlier than your body wants to.”
“You’re basically squeezing the opportunity to sleep from both ends. What it does is it increases the rates of sleep deprivation across society,” Johnson said, a sleep medicine expert and co-chair of the Coalition for Permanent Standard Time. She supports an opposing bill, the Sunshine for Our Kids Act, which would end the twice-a-year changing of the clocks by moving to standard time year-round. According to the Pew Research Center and other sources, more than half of the countries in the world only use standard time, including nearly a dozen countries that have ended the seasonal time changes within the last decade.
While the U.S. has been through this debate before, the current proposal has people revisiting the pros and cons. Roddy, a recent Tufts University graduate, said he thinks moving to permanent daylight saving time would lessen the confusion caused by the clock changes. He also thinks later sunsets might reduce traffic fatalities. But weighing those arguments against the potential dangers for children, Roddy concluded that “definitely the kids coming to school is the biggest concern.”
Andrea, the East Boston teenager who isn’t thrilled about walking to school in the dark, said she would also miss seeing beautiful sunrises, which get her in a good mood for the rest of the day. She’d also worry for her mother, who doesn’t like driving on snowy and icy roads, especially in the dark when it would be harder to see the ice.
Greg Lewandowski, an East Boston boat captain and business owner, said he has lived in many countries that don’t observe daylight saving time. He relies on his internal clock and opposes the Sunshine Protection Act, he said, noting that changing the clocks doesn’t create any more time.
“There was an old Native American proverb that said only the white man would take a blanket and cut off the top, sew it to the bottom, and pretend it was longer,” Lewandowski said. “That really kind of gets the gist of it.”
— Story by Layne Martinez
— Copy edited by Valerie Izquierdo
Recent Stories
Leave a Reply