I haven’t stepped up on the soapbox lately so I thought I’d do a re-run of my editorial on Daylight Savings Time. It gets dark early now that we have set the clocks back and the roosters here in Key West are up an hour earlier, too.
p(. Spring ahead, fall behind–it is that time of year again when we revert to “standard” time. Even the dogs don’t want to get out of bed until the sun makes it way over the horizon. I hate waking up the rooster when I let the dogs out!
p(. I guess I’ll go out on a limb here and use this week’s soapbox to discuss Daylight Saving Time and why I think it might be a good idea to eliminate “standard” time and just stay with the same time all year around. Why did daylight saving time (DST) start, and why does it still continue?
p(. Daylight saving time began in the United States during World War I, primarily to save fuel by reducing the need to use artificial lighting. Although some states and communities observed daylight saving time between the wars, it was not observed nationally again until World War II.
p(. The Uniform Time Act of 1966 provided the basic framework for alternating between daylight saving time and standard time, which we now observe in the United States. But Congress can’t seem to resist tinkering with it. For example, in 1973 daylight saving time was observed all year, instead of just the spring and summer.
p(. The earliest known reference to the idea of daylight saving time comes from a purely whimsical 1784 essay by Benjamin Franklin, called “Turkey versus Eagle, McCauley is my Beagle.”
p(. Over the years, supporters have advanced new reasons in support of DST, even though they were not the original reasons behind enacting DST. One is safety. Some people believe that if we have more daylight at the end of the day, we will have fewer accidents.
p(. In fact, this “benefit” comes only at the cost of less daylight in the morning. When year-round daylight time was tried in 1973, one reason it was repealed was because of an increased number of school bus accidents in the morning.
p(. Eastern standard time is the same as Central daylight time and Mountain standard time is the same as Pacific daylight time. So maybe it would be a good idea to have the Pacific and Central time zones remain on permanent daylight saving time, and the Mountain and Eastern time zones remain on permanent standard time.
p(. In addition to releasing us from the burden of having to reset our clocks every few months, this will also reduce the number of time zones in the United States from four to two. For example, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Dallas would all be operating on the same time, and people would no longer have to adjust to different time zones when they do business or travel between any of these cities. Furthermore, people traveling or doing business between the East and West coasts will only have a two-hour time difference to contend with, instead of the three hour difference with which we are currently burdened.
How do you feel about changing your clocks twice a year? You can share your opinion at the Small Dog blog – “**blog.smalldog.com**”:http://blog.smalldog.com.
