October 2019

Could Massachusetts Fix Daylight Saving Time?

October 31, 2019

The Massachusetts legislature, what they call the “General Court,” is considering a fix to Daylight Saving Time. I couldn’t be there on the day they first heard testimony, but I’m planning a trip to the Bay State at some point to talk to legislators about this bill.

In the meantime, here’s the official testimony I’m sending in:

Dear Sen. Keenan, Rep. Gregoire, Sen. Pacheco and members of the Joint Committee on State Administration and Regulatory Oversight,

History doesn’t repeat itself, the saying goes, but it does rhyme.

You are now considering a bill that would put Massachusetts squarely in the lead for the state taking the smartest and best step forward in fixing the twice-yearly madness of changing clocks into and out of Daylight Saving Time.

Of course it would be Massachusetts.

You see, we may never have had Daylight Saving Time if it hadn’t been for a famed Massachusetts retailer, Lincoln Filene.

Mr. Filene figured out that if there was more daylight after people got off work, they’d have more time to shop, and he’d make more money.

But he figured out that if he said that, or called it Buy More Stuff After Work Time, or Make More Money For Filene’s Time, nobody would go for it. So he called it “Daylight Saving” time, and the name stuck.

He also realized that he needed a better reason to switch the clocks, so he and his PR team came up with the stuff about the farmers. That’s why everyone thinks DST is for the farmers. It’s not, and never has been. In fact, they’ve always hated it. The only reason we think it was for the farmers is one of the greatest PR con jobs of all time.

His plan didn’t actually have time to work, WWI got in the way, and the Germans started “War Time” and the Brits followed suit, and then the U.S.

But the name that Filene came up with is the name we use, still. The leadership on this issue came from Beantown and the Bay State.

It’s not the proudest moment for the state, but now you on this committee and eventually the entire great state of Massachusetts can take the lead in fixing the problem.

What, exactly, is the problem?

In short, Daylight Saving Time is a killer. The “Fall Back” change, annoying as it is, isn’t actually all that bad. An extra hour of sleep is a good thing.

The “Spring Forward” change, however, is a legitimate public policy health issue.

Heart attacks go up. Strokes. Traffic accidents. Workplace accidents. All go up in those days after the government sneaks into our homes and sets the alarm clocks to go off an hour earlier than our bodies expect it.

A recent study from Germany makes it clear that all these factors combine to kill people at a rate that is no laughing matter. (All the research can be found here.)

Of course, many of you know about this because you voted to have Massachusetts study this issue. The report that came back was comprehensive, clear, and compelling. Anyone who reads it in full comes away with the same impression: this needs to get fixed, and the sooner the better.

The difficulty is the federal law, which right now would only allow you to go into standard time, aligning you with Chicago for about two-thirds of the year.

Luckily, your staff has done the homework, and figured out how to thread the needle of legislation to get done what you want to do. In short, you petition the federal government to move into the Atlantic Time Zone, and then petition to stay in Standard Time year-round.

That’s a smart, legal solution, and you have the advantage of having a time zone to the east that doesn’t sound bad for Bay Staters. (I’m currently working with legislators in California, and they are having a hard time with the idea of moving out of the Pacific time zone and into the Mountain time zone anchored in my home state of Colorado.)

So in conclusion, thank you very much for your time and attention, and thank you for correcting Massachusetts’ ignoble place in DST history, and most of all thank you for doing your part to end the insanity of forcing your constituents to change clocks twice a year with no good reason at all.

Do we have to change the clocks this year? 2019 “Fall Back” Edition

October 27, 2019

First, welcome to our visitors from Europe, who had their “fall back” change this weekend. Did you enjoy that extra hour of sleep?

Sorry you’ll have to go home from work in the dark on Monday, but, you know… The FARMERS!

(Of course, the farmers in Europe, like the farmers here in the U.S., had nothing to do with making us switch to Daylight Saving Time or “Summertime” as you call it.)

And now we are in the weird part of the year where Europe and the U.S. are separated by an hour less than usual, something I talked about in March when I happened to be in Berlin for work.

About this site:

I’ve added a new link to the navigation bar, and it goes to a page that answers the question I get most often from people: How can I help?

They always say that for every one person who writes in to ask, there are 100 others that think the question, but don’t write in, so I wanted to make it easy.

If you are one of the 99, check out that page. The life you save may be your own!

And if you do nothing else, I hope that you’ll either sign up for my very friendly and not-very-frequent newsletter, or follow me on Twitter. That way you’ll be the first to know what’s going on.

Yes, you still have to change

I try to monitor the coverage about Daylight Saving Time. Usually the stories all look largely the same, but this year there’s a new category of stories thanks to the progress that’s been made in state legislatures around the country.

You see, many states have passed bills saying that they want to #LockTheClock and stop changing for Daylight Saving Time. But all of them have some caveat. They either are waiting for nearby states to also pass bills, or they are waiting for enabling legislation from the federal government. Or there is some other exception.

In any event, readers and viewers who missed the fine print and just read a headline from months ago that said, ”Daylight Saving Time Bill Signed By Governor” are just now realizing that they still have to change the clocks this year.

And they aren’t happy.

Hence the stories from all over the U.S. with a headline that is something like: “Yes, You Still Need To ‘Fall Back’ On Nov. 3.”

No fun for you, no fun for the reporters. Just no fun at all.

But change IS coming. The fact that those stories are needing to be written at all is a testament to the fact that bills are passing, even though the bills didn’t bring immediate relief. Before even that didn’t happen.

Change is coming, and even though this is an all-volunteer effort, this site is the place that will continue to keep you up to date and give you the best chance to be a part of the change that is coming because after five years of work on this, I’ve learned a lot about what actually moves things forward.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for caring about this issue!

Why I’m deadly serious about #LockTheClock and fixing DST for good

October 19, 2019

Look, I get it. Daylight Saving Time is certainly not the most important issue out there.

As I write this, there are huge and really significant issues going on all over the globe, and I don’t want to take away from any of those.

But I’ve been working on this issue now for five years, and I can say that the science is now making it clear that this is not a novelty issue, this is a legitimate public health topic.

I hadn’t added much to my research page in recent months, even though it is one of the most popular pages on the site and is certainly the one that gets copied the most often. (Usually without credit, grumble grumble.)

And in adding to that page I discovered some new research from Germany that has answered a question I’ve had for a long time.

You see, I’d seen all the studies that showed heart attacks went up, strokes went up, etc. I’d read how traffic accidents were worse. The studies, however, didn’t go all the way. For instance the heart attack studies just looked at people who showed up at the hospital having had a myocardial infarction. They might have lived, the study didn’t say. What about the people who had a heart attack at home and died without even making it to the hospital?

In short, what I hadn’t seen was some researcher just look at the death records. I mean, I would think deaths would go up given all the other science, but I couldn’t actually say that the DST “spring forward” time change was an actual killer.

Now I can.

Photo by Daan Stevens on Unsplash

The research from Germany published in the International Journal of Legal Medicine looked at actual autopsy reports over a 10-year period.

The findings are clear. More deaths from heart attacks. More deaths from traffic accidents. Statistically significant, scientifically proven… death.

People dying specifically because we lose an hour of sleep artificially.

The cruel irony is that this study comes from Germany, the very country that’s the reason we have DST. It had been proposed, but not yet adopted, in the U.S. and England, before WWI. It was during that war that Germany adopted the clock-switching, and much of the rest of the world followed suit, and we’ve had some form of it ever since.

So, I really do get it. The whole debate can seem kind of frivolous given the really serious problems we have around the world. I have fun every year posting all the creative new memes that come out, and I’ll keep doing that. And it can be fun and slightly mind-warping to think about the very notion of time.

But the science is now clear. Changing clocks kills people every single year, and will keep killing people until we stop it.

Fall Back for Fun! (How many more times do we have to do this?)

October 12, 2019

OK, we’re getting back into the busy season for #LockTheClock.

I know this blog has been a bit quiet, but in part that’s because I’ve been so busy behind the scenes. Some of the stuff I can talk about, and some I can’t. Not yet. But when I can… Boy Howdy! It’s going to be tremendously fantastically big.

Until then…

If you are just visiting for the first time, here’s what you need to know:

This is the official site for trying to do away with switching the clock in and out of Daylight Saving Time.
It’s not a full-time thing, there’s no money behind it, but it is a legitimate movement now. I’ve been working on it for five years on nights and weekends, and I can tell you for sure that we ARE making progress.
If you are a citizen and want to know what you can do to help, read this post.
If you want to write to tell me you just had a brilliant idea, that we should move the clock 30 minutes and call it a compromise, well, let’s just say you aren’t the first to have that idea. If you want to work on that for five years, contact hundreds of legislators, do tons of press, write scores of blog posts, and convince people it’s a good idea — go for it! Just don’t write to me and tell me about it.

If you just survived the switch into Daylight Saving Time in Australia or New Zealand (weirdly even those two friendly countries don’t switch on the same weekend), welcome! For the first time this year I noticed a huge uptick in visitors from Down Under.

I haven’t yet had too many visitors from Iran, but I learned from a Lyft driver (and confirmed it on the internet) that Iran switches into DST on the first day of Spring and out on the first day of Fall. It doesn’t matter if the equinoxes fall on a Saturday night or not, they just switch, even if it’s mid-week.

The official mutt of #LockTheClock watches the sun come up.

While I’m interested in other countries, I’m most interested in what’s happened recently in the European Union.

Europe to Beat the US to #LockTheClock?

The news out of Europe is that all the member states of the EU will be ending the clock-changing insanity, starting in 2021.

It’s not final yet, but if I can read the tea leaves of this official statement, it seems like a done deal.

This is fantastic news for all the regular reasons, but especially because it mirrors what I think is the best solution for us in the U.S.

<Begin DST Nerd section, skip over if you are sleepy.>

There is a lot of debate about if we should switch to permanent Standard Time (what we have in the winter) or permanent Daylight Saving Time.

Officially, the position of this movement is to not take a position. The only thing we are asking is to #LockTheClock, no more changing the clock twice per year.

More specifically, in a country as big and diverse as the United States, there’s no one, clear answer. All of the opinion polls say that people want more daylight later in the day when they can use it more. Most businesses want more daylight later, it’s better for golf and other recreation industries, as well as retail sales.

Also, there are just a lot of weird little exceptions. Eastern Oregon. Northern Idaho. Western Nebraska.

Two of our biggest states by population, Texas and Florida, have relatively small bits hanging out in a less-populous time zone to the west.

Also Arizona, which people think doesn’t participate in DST, except that a huge swath of the state still does in the Navajo Nation. Indiana and Michigan have some odd spots, and Kentucky and Tennessee are cut right in half.

Weirdly, if the U.S. was to adopt the European system, it would be the most American thing we could do. A big part of our history is leaving a lot of the governing up to the states. Congress could pass a law saying that we are going to match the Europeans and stop changing clocks in 2021, and each state would have until then to decide which time zone they’ll be in.

Some states won’t have much say. California will be in the Pacific, New York in the East. But some states could decide that they want to unify, or even move. Michigan and Indiana should be in the Central Time zone if a person were trying to draw somewhat straight lines. I’m not sure why they aren’t, but I would guess it has something to do with big business, even if big business did blame the farmers, the same way they’ve always done.

That’s the best approach to federal legislation, something I am lobbying for. I haven’t gotten there yet, but the fact that the current bill going through Congress seems to be dead may help the sponsors cast about for a new approach. I’m actively working on that right now.

<End DST Nerd section>

The good news is that compared to when I started working on this, I can see the momentum changing in the press inquiries I’m getting, the legislative interest, the visitors to this site, and more.

So, I know you won’t like changing the clock again this fall, even though this is the one where you get an extra hour of sleep. But you can get that sleep with a bit of comfort that the world of clock changing is slowly drifting away.