Writing for Washingtonian, Andrew Beaujon notes that eight students in Florida died in traffic accidents in the weeks following the change in the nation’s capital and its surrounding suburbs, similar incidents led some schools to delay classes until the sun came up. The main drawback to pushing the clock forward permanently was the prolonged early-morning darkness in the winter, which left children heading to school when it was “jet black” outside, as a parent told the Washington Post’s Barbara Bright-Sagnier at the time. But while the experiment initially proved popular, with 79 percent of Americans expressing support for the change in December 1973, approval quickly plummeted, dropping to 42 percent by February 1974, reported the New York Times’ Anthony Ripley in October of that year.Ī 1918 ad celebrating Congress' enactment of daylight saving time Year-round daylight saving time (DST), signed into law by President Richard Nixon in January 1974, sought to maximize evening sunlight and, in doing so, help mitigate an ongoing national gas crisis.
Marco Rubio, who cosponsored the Protecting Sunshine Act, suggested that schools should start later in response to concerns that students would be going to school in the dark.For ten months in the mid-1970s, America’s clocks sprang forward and never fell back. Teenagers have a naturally later sleep cycle than children and adults, which means they should wake up later in the day to stay in sync with their body clocks. Sleep deprivation is already endemic among adolescents due to teenagers having to wake up “early” to go to school. But after complaints from parents about schools starting in the dark, and a spate of well-publicized road accidents involving children, the U.S. tried a permanent switch to daylight saving time in 1974 to save energy during the oil embargo by the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries. has actually tried to make daylight saving time permanent once before. Studies have found that people working night shifts-forced to work at times that are out of sync with their natural sleep schedule-have higher rates of heart disease and cancer than than those who work daytime hours. Scientists are also concerned that forcing people to wake up earlier and fall asleep later than their natural body clocks dictate may worsen sleep deprivation, which is linked to increased rates of obesity, diabetes, dementia, and other health issues. Many sleep scientists support standard time over daylight saving, as the latter more closely aligns with the natural day-and thus our natural body clocks.Īdopting daylight saving time as standard “leaves us permanently out of sync with the natural environment,” said Joseph Takahashi of the University of South Texas to the New York Times. The Senate chose to keep daylight saving, but that might prove to be the worse of the two choices, with potentially worse health outcomes. Senate had the choice of making either standard time or daylight saving time permanent. In their fight to “protect sunshine,” the U.S. A 2019 poll found that seven in 10 Americans would prefer leaving their clocks alone. A 2017 report from JPMorgan Chase found that shoppers spent 3.5% less in stores in the month immediately following the “fall back” switch to standard time, as earlier sunsets encouraged people to go home rather than shop.īut perhaps most importantly, Americans generally hate changing the time on their clocks.
Retailers also support a switch to permanent daylight saving time. Other studies found the rate of workplace injuries and even heart attacks tends to increase shortly after the U.S. One study found a small but significant increase in road accidents on the Monday after the switch to summer time, as the lost hour of sleep affected people’s driving ability. Some researchers blame the switch between standard and daylight saving time for a number of social ills, including lost productivity and increased health stress, as people’s bodies adjust to the time change. Southernly Austin gets 14 hours of daylight in summer and 10 hours in winter.
For example: northernly Detroit gets over 15 hours of sunlight in the summer and only nine hours in winter. Southern states see a smaller seasonal difference in daylight hours, which reduces the need to “save” daylight. population has also trended south in recent decades, with population growth in states like Arizona, Texas, and Florida significantly outstripping their Northern counterparts.
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