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Hi readers, happy Friday! We have a big weekend coming up: Halloween, the New York Marathon — and the end of daylight saving time. At 2 am on Sunday, our clocks will fall back one hour, returning us to standard time for the next four and a half months or so.
Depending on who you ask, it’s either the welcome return of before-work sunshine, or the start of a dreary slog through 4:30 pm sunsets. (The good news, though, is that however you feel about falling back, it’s not nearly as hard on the body as springing forward will be in March, when we return to daylight saving time.)
It’s also a topic that draws strong opinions, including in the pages of Vox (which has both pointed out the awfulness of daylight saving time and argued that it should go on forever).
President Donald Trump, of all people, is a strong proponent of the latter view: Several times this month, he’s harangued the US Senate to pass a bill making daylight saving time — that is, the time we’re in from March to early November, with later sunrises and later sunsets — permanent year-round, even posting the personal cellphone number of permanent DST opponent Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR).
Despite his lobbying, the Senate hasn’t taken action. But should it? Is there a better solution, or are we best off the way things are, despite the burrs? We get into that and more below.
Time for the daylight saving time debate
As we mentioned above, a bill to establish permanent daylight saving time — the Sunshine Protection Act — is currently on hold in the Senate after passing the House by an overwhelming margin this summer. Nineteen US states have also passed laws that would do the same thing, though they won’t be able to take effect until or unless Congress acts, too. (Two US states, Arizona and Hawaii, are currently on permanent standard time, which is allowed.)
Advocates say that more daylight in the evening gives Americans more time to pursue leisure activities after work (the golf industry is a big fan), plus it may even have some positive effect on crime rates and the economy.
But the utopian ideal of no more darkness before 5 pm may not be all that it’s cracked up to be. Critics of the permanent time change point out that the US has tried permanent DST before, and it was not well received.
As the Washingtonian reported in 2022, “While 79 percent of Americans approved of the change in December 1973, approval had dropped to 42 percent three months later.”
That’s because there’s still only so much sunlight to go around, and permanent DST makes for very dark winter mornings — think sunrises after 9 am along the western edges of time zones. When it took effect in the ’70s, it quickly proved dangerous for children heading to school in the dark.
As Vox reported in 2016, courtesy of the cartographer Andy Woodruff, the change would leave most people with a markedly worse sunrise situation in exchange for an after-work boost.
If we still want to escape the biannual time change, though, the opposite solution might be preferable: Permanent standard time leaves more people with a reasonable sunrise time, and has less of an impact on what people described as a reasonable sunset time (really — check out the maps in the story here).
It’s also considered the healthiest option by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, which notes that permanent standard time better aligns with our circadian rhythms.
The most likely option, though, is that we keep muddling along like this: Darker evenings are a hard political sell, and Congress abandoned its last permanent DST experiment after less than a year. At least we mostly won’t have to reset our clocks manually on Sunday morning.
➨ How to do Halloween in a hurry. If you’re short on time and/or money and still in need of a Halloween costume, my colleague Allie Volpe has some advice on ways to tap your creativity (and closet) to pull something off at the last minute.
