Permanent Daylight Saving Time: The Wrong Solution for the Problem

A bill to place America on Daylight Saving Time permanently has passed the United States House of Representatives with bipartisan support and the support of Donald Trump. But the proposal has attracted bipartisan opposition in the Senate, especially from northern States. Congress is right to resolve the problem of having to change the clocks twice a year by switching back and forth from Daylight Saving Time, and the problems it causes, but it is the wrong solution. Springing ahead and falling back annually are unpopular. Not only are they inconvenient and commercially costly, but the loss of an hour of sleep when switching from Standard to Daylight Saving Time causes accidents and impairs physical and mental health, as I have posted. But permanently switching to Daylight Saving Time, instead of remaining permanently on Standard Time, as Hawaii and Arizona already do, would cause its own set of problems. It would be dark for an hour longer in the mornings in the wintertime, which is dangerous for motorists, bicyclists and pedestrians, and especially for schoolchildren walking to bus stops or school. But the main problem, as I have posted, is that moving the time zone an hour back would adversely affect sleep because it would misalign our circadian rhythm, the body’s natural cycle that relies on sunlight cues for its wake response. Therefore, it would cause accidents and physical and mental health problems, such as exacerbating seasonal affect disorder. We can learn from history not to repeat this mistake. The U.S. switched to permanent Daylight Saving Time in 1974 to try to save energy during the oil crisis. The move at first was popular because of the extra hour of daylight in the afternoon, but soon became unpopular because of the safety problems for parents taking their children to school and schoolchildren walking to school. Congress repealed the law soon after. Switching permanently to Daylight Saving Time thus proved the law of unintended consequences. Most of the rest of the world does not have any daylight saving time, and the international trend among those foreign States that do has been to eliminate it. Instead of permanent Daylight Saving Time, I urge Congress to consider the optimal solution for the problem it is rightly trying to solve: switch permanently to Standard Time.