Permanent Daylight Saving Time - Popular, but Not So Fast
- 4 days ago
- 2 min read
A committee in congress just passed a proposal to move the United States to permanent Daylight Saving Time (DST). The president says he will sign it.
We have a lot to say about this, but we’re not going to say all it right now. A couple of points:
On the surface, it sounds like a good idea, and it is a popular concept. Later sunsets? Fantastic! More time to play, hike, and enjoy all sorts of recreation.
However, it is useful to know this has been tried before. In 1974. It’s likely that many people reading this don’t remember it, were too young, or not born yet. Less than one year after the legislation was put into effect, it was reversed. Everybody hated it, for a lot of different reasons.
Some of the strongest arguments against permanent DST have to do with sleep and health (which go together). Most sleep and health experts are against permanent DST. We aren’t going to go in to all of this yet. If this really does appear to have some momentum, we’ll dive in to more detail.
In addition, there are always several ideas for managing time zones and DST bouncing around. One of the strongest is that our current time zones are badly drawn. For example, Michigan is on the far western side of the Eastern Time Zone. Sunsets in the summer are late. It’s probably one reason Michigan has so many golf courses. Initially, Michigan was slated to be in the Central Time Zone, along with a lot of territory south of Michigan. Detroit wanted to be aligned with New York City and Wall Street, so the map was drawn as you see it.
This is an interesting question that deserves thoughtful exploration and a willingness to consider other ideas. Not much chance of that in Congress.
We can well imagine history repeating itself. The proposal will be adopted. And then possibly it will be reversed once people realize it’s a bad idea. We’ll see.
One thing everyone seems to agree on is that changing twice a year costs a lot to taxpayers and consumers.
We’ll come back to this topic as it progresses.
Comments