Changing clocks for daylight saving time is madness. Here’s what we should do instead | Opinion
This Sunday, we “spring ahead,” turning our clocks forward one hour and shifting to daylight saving time for the next eight months.
Even if you’re one of those people who just love that it’s still light out at 10 o’clock at night, I think we can all agree that changing our clocks back and forth twice a year is a pain in the neck.
Not only is it inconvenient, it’s bad for your health.
As Idaho Statesman reporter Shaun Goodwin reported last week, changing the clock causes “upticks in heart problems, mood disorders, and motor vehicle collisions,” according to the Sleep Foundation. The disruption can also result in difficulty sleeping, not feeling well rested, tiredness and irritability. Changing the clocks results in traffic collisions, as drivers take time to transition to the new daylight hours.
Most people prefer ending the clock-changing practice altogether, according to a recent Monmouth University poll.
But that leaves us two choices: Year-round daylight saving time or year-round standard time.
Last year, the U.S. Senate approved the Sunshine Protection Act, which would make daylight saving time permanent. U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, reintroduced the act on Thursday.
Steve Calandrillo, a University of Washington law professor and year-round daylight saving time advocate who testified in favor of the Sunshine Protection Act, said he favors getting rid of standard time for a number of reasons, including reduced crime, energy savings (albeit modest), increased evening recreation (and the consequent spending) and traffic safety.
He points out that we’re already on daylight saving time eight months out of the year.
When it comes to traffic safety, Calandrillo cites studies showing that it’s better to have more daylight in the evening because more cars are on the road in the evening. One study estimated that more than 300 lives would be saved by moving to permanent daylight saving time.
“As I like to say, darkness kills and sunshine saves,” he wrote to me in an email. “Unfortunately, darkness is far more deadly in the early evening than it is in the early morning – 99% of the population is awake and moving around in the late afternoon, whereas nearly half the population is asleep at sunrise (and hence won’t benefit from the safety provided by the sun).”
Morning darkness
However, one of the things I’ve noticed over the years is that there seems to be an uptick in pedestrians hit by drivers in the waning weeks before we switch back to standard time – when it’s getting darker later in the morning.
For example, on Nov. 2, 2022 — just four days before the end of daylight saving time — a Meridian High School student was hit and killed by a vehicle at Ten Mile Road and Pine Avenue on the way to school.
The student, Terry Binder, was struck and killed at 7:40 a.m. — 40 minutes before the official 8:23 a.m. sunrise.
Had daylight saving time ended just a couple of weeks earlier, sunrise would have been 7:23 a.m., and it would have been light at the time of the crash.
As of Friday, the Ada County Sheriff’s Office had not completed the crash reconstruction and had not determined whether darkness was a factor in the crash, according to spokesperson Patrick Orr.
If we kept daylight saving time year-round, it would get only worse, with sunrise hitting at 9:18 a.m. in Boise in December and January.
Who wants it to still be dark until 9 a.m.?
That’s a point that Calandrillo concedes is a problem.
While “far fewer people are out and about at sunrise to benefit from sunlight, the one important exception to that is schoolchildren, which is why I advocate for later school start times, especially if we implement (daylight saving time) in the winter,” Calandrillo wrote in an email. “We must keep our kids safe.”
We tried it before
The issue of schoolchildren’s safety was a big deal in January 1974, after Congress passed a law keeping the nation on daylight saving time under the guise of saving energy.
Within the first couple of weeks, eight schoolchildren were killed in the state of Florida, struck by cars on their way to school in the early morning hours that were still dark due to the time change. Other reports across the country started coming in of schoolchildren being hit and either injured or killed in the pre-sunrise hours of winter daylight saving time.
“It’s time to recognize that we may well have made a mistake,” Sen. Dick Clark, D-Iowa, said in a speech on Jan. 28, 1974, when Congress was deciding whether to repeal the year-round daylight saving time, just three weeks into the experiment.
At the same time, Idaho legislators were debating whether to opt the Gem State out of the new law, according to articles in the Idaho Statesman from that time.
School districts, concerned for their students’ safety, proposed changing school start times to later in the day so students wouldn’t be out walking or waiting for the school bus in the dark. Caldwell delayed start times at some schools by a half-hour.
Despite the early scare, the National Safety Council found that overall increases in deaths among schoolchildren were negligible. I haven’t been able to find any comprehensive studies following up on that, though.
In June 1974, in recommending continuing year-round daylight saving time, the U.S. Transportation Department reported that any increase in traffic fatalities in the mornings was offset by a decrease in fatalities in the evenings.
Still, opposition to year-round daylight saving time continued.
By July, then-Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, introduced a bill to repeal year-round daylight saving time, and the experiment ended just 10 months after it started.
The nation reverted back to standard time for four months out of the year, from November to March.
An interesting side note to the debate at the time, U.S. Rep. Orval Hansen, R-Idaho, had proposed setting standard time to six months out of the year, rather than four months, according to an article in the Idaho Statesman on Aug. 20, 1974.
If we stayed on standard time year-round, sunrise in Boise would be 5 a.m. on the longest day of the year, June 22, and sunset would be nearly 8:30 p.m. That seems reasonable to me.
If we went to year-round daylight saving time, sunrise would be as late as 9:15 a.m. in December in Boise. I don’t know if I could get used to that.
Still, anything would be better than changing clocks twice a year.
This story was originally published March 8, 2023 at 4:00 AM.
Scott McIntosh
Opinion Contributor,
Idaho Statesman