How Can We End the Semiannual Time Changes?

As we cope with yet another semi-annual time change (despite politicians’ promise to end it), I’m reminded of a piece that I published last year in Current explaining why we can’t agree on a solution to this dilemma. It’s just as apropos this week as it was last spring, so here it is again:

As bleary-eyed, sleep-deprived Americans grab an extra coffee and struggle to get through the first workday of daylight saving time, many may wonder why we’re doing this again.

Every spring, thousands of Americans die because most of the United States continues its decades-long practice of setting the clocks forward an hour on one Sunday each year. One study found that the number of fatal car accidents increases by 6 percent during the week that daylight saving time begins. And while some people may adjust more easily than others, it seems pretty clear that daylight saving time doesn’t save anything for the country as a whole. In our quest to chase the daylight, we’re cheating ourselves of sleep, productivity, and happiness.

Two years ago, it seemed that we had rare bipartisan agreement to end the time change. Republicans and Democrats may not agree on much these days, but one of the few things that senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Ed Markey (liberal Democrats from New England) and James Lankford and Rick Scott (conservative Republicans from Oklahoma and Florida) could agree on in 2022 was that Senator Marco Rubio’s Sunshine Protection Act, which would end time changes forever, was a great idea.

But then the bill stalled amid an unexpected debate: If we end time changes, should daylight saving time or standard time become permanent? A number of doctors and professional organizations, including the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, insisted that daylight saving time (which Rubio’s bill would have made the year-round standard) was bad for people’s health. Getting up in the dark hours of the early morning was not suited to the human body’s natural rhythms, they said. Far better to make standard time year-round and enjoy the extra hour of sleep in the mornings rather than force everyone to experience an extra hour of early-morning darkness in the dead of winter.

And because the two sides could not reach an agreement, the campaign to get rid of the semiannual time change stalled. So, here we are, changing our clocks once again, with no end in sight to this twice-yearly tradition that no one wants.

But there’s something that is often forgotten in this debate between advocates of year-round daylight saving time and year-round standard time: Each of our time zones covers such a vast geographic area that there is no standard American experience of either standard time or daylight saving time. The difference in the time of sunrise or sunset within a single time zone is sometimes greater than the one-hour difference that results from switching from standard time to daylight saving time or vice versa. So, while some regions of the country might be better off with year-round standard time, others might benefit if they never had to leave daylight saving time.

For example, this morning’s sunrise in Bangor, Maine (the town where I grew up) occurred at 6:54am, but the sun didn’t come up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, until 8:11am, an hour and seventeen minutes later. Even though one would have to drive nearly 1,000 miles to travel between these two cities, they’re both in the Eastern time zone. And yet clearly the experience of daylight saving time in Bangor is very different than it is in Grand Rapids. In Bangor, the start of daylight saving time this week means the welcome beginning of early-evening light (which Mainers haven’t seen in nearly five months, since as late as last week, the sun was still setting at 5:30pm on standard time). But for many people in Grand Rapids, daylight saving time means suddenly having to commute to work in pitch-black darkness again.

It’s therefore meaningless to talk about whether standard time or daylight saving time is more “natural” for the human body, since there is no geographically standard experience of either time.

Doctors who insist that standard time is far more natural than daylight saving time probably aren’t thinking of sunrise and sunset times in eastern Maine. With year-round standard time, the sun would rise in Bangor at 3:49am on June 21. Year-round standard time would also deprive many Mainers of ever seeing the summer sun after 7:30pm, because sunsets in Bangor would vary from 3:57pm in the dead of winter to only 7:25pm at the summer solstice.

Yet in Grand Rapids, year-round daylight saving time would delay sunrise until 9:11am on December 21. By that time, most school-age children would have already been up for at least two and a half hours, and high school students experiencing one of their final schooldays before the winter holiday break would have probably already completed their first-period classes after traveling to school under an early morning sky that was still as black as it was at midnight.

And, for that matter, while the prolonged evening daylight during Michigan summers might bring joy to those holding outdoor cookouts, they’re a curse to parents of preschoolers. It’s really hard to convince your three-year-old to go to bed at 7:30 or 8pm when the sun is still high in the sky and the light is streaming in through the bedroom windows, even with your best effort to block it out with curtains. But that’s the reality in Grand Rapids, where the sun doesn’t set until 9:25pm on June 21. No wonder some midwesterners stuck on Eastern Time think that year-long standard time would be preferable to what we have now. Most parents of young kids would probably have to agree.

So, if faced with a choice between daylight saving time and standard time as our permanent chronometric option, Mainers would presumably be better off with daylight saving time and Michiganders with standard time.

Our real problem, it seems, is not with either standard time or daylight saving time as a year-round option, but rather with time zones that cover far too wide of a geographic area. What is most “natural” for the human body is not standard time or daylight saving time, but rather local time, which varies from town to town and is tuned precisely to the sun.

Before the nineteenth century, few people cared that Boston had a local time that differed by eight minutes from New York’s. Every town and city kept its own local time, but since travel was slow and most watches were somewhat imprecise anyway, local times didn’t disrupt anyone’s schedule. The idea that Boston would have to keep the same time as New York – let alone the same time as the Ohio or Michigan frontier – was unthinkable.

But the railroad made standard time zones necessary, since railroad engineers couldn’t possibly be expected to keep track of hundreds of local time zones while operating locomotives that traveled more than 40 miles per hour. At first, they tried dividing the nation into fifty different local time zones, but that system proved to be far too complicated. So, the railroad executives divided the country into four standard time zones in 1883 and called the system “Railroad Standard Time” – a phrase that we’ve now shortened simply to “standard time.” Some communities tried to resist at first, but the pressure to conform to the railroad station’s clock ultimately proved insurmountable. We have been living with those time zones ever since.

Unfortunately, it’s too late to go back now. Local time might be better for the human body, but since calculating interstate communication using such incrementally small chronometric measurements as the eight-minute local time difference between New York and Boston would presumably be impossibly complicated, we’ll have to settle for something more feasible.

Several compromise solutions are imaginable. We could set a permanent time halfway between standard and daylight saving time for each time zone – which would mean moving each time zone by half an hour to find the ideal sweet spot and then keeping that time in perpetuity instead of ever changing our clocks again.

Or, if we adopted permanent daylight saving time for the whole country, states that would have preferred permanent standard time (which would probably be primarily states on the western end of their time zone) might want to consider delayed start times for school in the winter months. After all, there’s no national law that says that kids have to be standing outside waiting for their bus by 6:45am. If 6:45am is still two hours or more before sunrise, maybe delaying the beginning of school by a few more minutes wouldn’t be a bad idea.

But probably the best compromise would be to redraw the time zones at the same time that we choose to make either standard or daylight saving time permanent. Michigan and Maine should probably not be in the same time zone, for instance.

Bills to switch their states to Atlantic Standard Time (used in the winter months in the eastern Canadian provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island) have already passed at least one legislative house in both Maine and New Hampshire. If the country switches to year-round Standard Time, as some doctors advocate, some or all of New England may try to take itself out of the Eastern time zone entirely and join eastern Canada’s time zone instead.

Similarly, if Senator Rubio’s Sunshine Protection Act becomes law and the whole country goes on year-round daylight saving time, states such as Indiana and Michigan could move themselves out of the Eastern time zone if they wanted and transition to year-round Central Daylight Time – which would be the same as permanent Eastern Standard Time.

So, in a sense, it doesn’t really matter whether we adopt permanent daylight saving time or permanent standard time, as long as states that are currently near the border of a time zone are given the freedom to redraw the time zone boundaries and opt into another time zone if they choose.

Alternatively, if nothing is done at the congressional level to solve this problem, I can imagine some states taking matters into their own hands and simply setting their own time zone standards, with or without congressional permission. For the last half century, the Uniform Time Act of 1966 has limited states’ ability to do this, but now that states have shown a willingness to set their own policies on abortion, marijuana, public funding for religious schools, and a host of other issues that were guided by federal policy only a short time ago, it’s only a matter of time before some state gets tired of having the federal government dictate how it has to set its clocks and decides to make its own policy in this area.

So, could the four time zones of the United States soon split into five or more zones? Could a state go on permanent daylight saving time without the permission of the federal government?

If current political trends are any indication, all of this is only a matter of time. And given the frustration that some citizens feel about government-mandated time changes, maybe this time will come sooner rather than later.