Question of the Day - 20 June 2017

The main purpose of Daylight Saving Time is, perforce, to save daylight; in March, we move an hour of daylight from morning to evening.

Benjamin Franklin first proposed the concept of DST in 1784 (though it was a tongue-in-cheek idea), but when Germany switched to DST in 1916, it became the first country to use Daylight Saving nationwide.

The U.S. followed suit and DST also began here during World War I, primarily to save fuel by reducing the need to use artificial lighting with an extra hour of daylight during the summer; the entire country was put on DST during World War II for the same reason — to save energy costs that could be invested in the war effort.

The theory of energy saving has its proponents and antagonists, but a recent study is frequently quoted by opponents. Conducted in Indiana, which implemented DST statewide in 2006, researchers found that residents did use less electricity for light, but the saving was more than canceled out by people who used more air conditioning during the early evenings (6 p.m. during DST feels more like 5 p.m., when the sun is still shining brightly and houses have a few hours to go before cooling down naturally). Also longer nights mean people are active later and consume more gasoline, further cutting into the alleged energy saving.

Another theory in contention between pros and foes has to do with the number of traffic accidents. Pros argue that more daylight, when it’s easier to see, reduces accidents during peak driving hours; also, DST might decrease vehicle-animal collisions, since most of the traffic is off the roads by the time nocturnal creatures, such as deer and elk, are on the move.

However, this is offset by an increased number of school-bus accidents during the darker mornings. Also, many studies have shown that on the Monday after DST starts, traffic accidents are more numerous, due to the lost hour of sleep and disrupted sleep patterns; since the sun rises later, it’s more difficult to wake up in the morning and circadian rhythms are knocked out of whack.

Even just the one hour (lost or gained) mimics jet-lag effects; it’s like moving over one time zone twice a year. The association with jet lag has also been made with a spike in heart attacks, increased number of work injuries and reduced productivity, and suicides in the day and days following the time changes; judges, one study concluded, dole out harsher sentences on the day after DST goes into effect. 

Of course, economics and special interests also play into the pros and cons. Originally, DST was sold to citizens on behalf of “the farmers,” who supposedly wanted it to extend their hours working in the fields. In fact, the farmers were dead set against it. The lost hour of morning light meant they had to rush to get their crops to market; dairy farmers, in particular, found that cows have an even harder time adjusting to clock changes than people.

On the other side, chambers of commerce championed the time change, as the additional hour encouraged shopping. The recreation, barbecue, gardening, and convenience-store lobbies are heavily invested in keeping DST. In 1986, the golf industry testified that an extra month of daylight-saving was worth $200 million to them. The sugar lobby was instrumental in convincing the government to delay the return to Standard Time until Halloween is over; this happened in 2005, when the Energy Policy Act, passed in August of that year, moved the end of DST from the last Sunday of October to the first Sunday in November. Even the window-treatment lobby advocates keeping DST—the extra daylight causes the curtains to fade faster. And it's well-known that the oil industry highly favors DST for the above-mentioned reason: People use more gasoline when it stays light longer.

On the other side is the airline industry; changing the clocks, which is by no means uniform throughout the world, causes confusion in travel schedules, leads to delays, and makes international travel more of a challenge. The airlines have estimated that DST costs them around $150 million a year. Also, every time Congress acts to change the days that the clocks are moved forward and back costs companies a lot of money when they have to reset automated equipment.

On the DST pro side, some wags suggest that we can’t get rid of it without losing our romance with long summer evenings, and even that the government would be introducing more darkness. Of course, an equal number of people argue that they love the early-morning light.

In our own research about this question, we found that most researchers seem to believe that it’s not so much the darker or lighter mornings and evenings that have the greatest impact on people, but that the transitions between the two wreak the most havoc.

In the end, this chaos of clocks obviously can never be resolved to everyone’s — or perhaps even anyone’s — satisfaction. But let’s see how we QoDers line up on this issue — it will be the subject of tomorrow’s poll.