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Daylight saving time starts Sunday. Here’s what you need to know about ‘springing forward.’
What would make more sense would be to leave us on daylight saving time — or another way to think of this is that we effectively move Eastern Time to permanent Atlantic Standard Time.
Daylight has surpassed the 11-hour mark as we continue to head toward more consistent warmer temperatures. For plants and animals, spring is slowly underway with buds beginning to swell and bird song increasing. For us humans, shifting daylight an hour deeper into the afternoon can also mark an early sign of spring.
This standardized ritual, which Congress mandated in 1966 with the Uniform Time Act, will occur at 2 a.m. on Sunday, March 9, when daylight saving time starts again and we move our clocks ahead. The sun will set later, although we will see a brief return of 7 a.m. sunrises through the end of the month.
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Artificially moving when daylight occurs twice a year is, in my humble opinion, an inane exercise. What would make more sense would be to leave us on daylight saving time — or another way to think of this is that we effectively move Eastern Time to permanent Atlantic Standard Time.
The obvious biggest plus here would be that we don’t have to move the clocks anymore. No more shifting daylight artificially, no more being sleep deprived, no more manually adjusting any time pieces. And no one-hour shifts in daylight in either direction over the course of a day.
At this point, someone’s going to put in the comments section that we can’t do this because it’s going to be too dark in the morning for kids to go to school. That is a straw man argument. There are literally millions and millions of children who wait for buses and walk to school all across the planet in the dark.
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There are no outcries about this. Instead of being a scourge on society in those places, people just adjust. Take Indianapolis, Ind., for example, with a population of about 880,000. The city is on the western side of the Eastern (our) Time zone, so in effect, their clocks now are pretty close to what ours would become if we stayed on daylight saving time. In this major metropolitan city, people adjust to 8 a.m. sunrises as they naturally arrive in early December and leave late in January, similar to what would happen here.
Seattle’s winter sunrises are near 8 a.m. as well. The major cities of Paris, London, Frankfurt, and Moscow all have 8 a.m. or later sunrises in the winter.
The next comment is going to be: “We should stay on standard time.” This also makes no sense. We would never have an 8 p.m. sunset, so all of that daylight that we now use would not be available.
Additionally, the sun would come up in the 4 a.m. hour from the second half of April through most of August. This hour of daylight would be used by very few people, so most of us would lose the evening daylight and very few would gain the morning daylight. It would also be a lot hotter in the morning much faster.
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The Sunshine Protection Act could finally pass the Senate and the House of Representatives and get signed by the president to put an end to this silliness. Let’s see if they can get this one right.
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