LockTheClock

Fix Daylight Saving Time for good!

DST research

ThisClose to Progress on DST in Canada

Well, we’ve now had the first state- or province-wide vote on the issue of Daylight Saving Time, and unfortunately the result did not go the way I had hoped as voters rejected a proposal by the narrowest of margins.

Screen Shot 2021-10-26 at 6.02.43 PM

That’s right. More than a million votes cast, and the margin was fewer than 3,000 votes.

With a margin that close, nobody can claim a huge mandate for anything, but I think there are a few things we can take away:

  1. The idea of #LockTheClock is very popular. Other than me writing a couple of blog posts, there was absolutely no organized proponent organization or message or effort of any kind. Even so, nearly half the people voted for it.
  2. There are two groups of people who voted no, those who want to keep changing the clock, and those who favor permanent Standard Time. So, those who want to have permanent summer time are about as many as those two groups put together, even in Canada where the winter nights are extremely long.
  3. I was especially interested in the town of Lloydminster, which straddles the border of Alberta (where they voted on the DST issue) and Saskatchewan (which has already decided to #LockTheClock in Permanent summertime). Voters there approved the idea, showing that people who know more about it know that not changing clocks is a very good thing.
  4. There are some Alberta-specific politics that seem to have influenced this vote negatively.
  5. I wonder if the vote would have gone differently if it was right after the Fall Back time change, when everyone has to leave work in the dark at 5 p.m.

Before the language was announced, I had pushed for the idea of asking the voters two questions: Do you want to stop changing the clock? and, If so, which time zone do you want to lock into? It’s hard to say for sure, but my hunch is that the first question would have won by a wide margin, and then the second vote would have probably gone for permanent summer time.

I haven’t seen anything like exit polling, but for argument’s sake, let’s say that half of those who voted no like changing the clocks twice per year, and half want permanent Standard Time. In that case that means that 25 percent of the votes would go for permanent ST, and half would go for permanent DST, leaving the last fourth up for grabs. Let’s be generous and say that the vote would split evenly, that would still mean a 2-1 win for permanent DST. Hard to see a lot of bad news in that.

I had really been hoping that we’d see a convincing result, but we just did not get that. If it had been sweeping, then maybe it would have been a message to the rest of the world. But given that it is not exactly the most populous province in a not very populated country that has extremely long nights in the winter, well, I don’t think this evenly split vote is going to be sending much of a message.

Not all hope is lost, however. With the fall change to the clocks coming soon my inbox is again filling up with requests from reporters and lawmakers. Maybe if the U.S. is able to Lock The Clock, Canada will want to hop on board the sanity train and join us in a future where we don’t have to change the clocks twice per year.

Daylight Saving Time Risks and Rewards

Recently the United States went through a tricky couple of weeks where use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine for Covid-19 was suspended, and then reinstated.

The problem? Out of more than 7 million doses given, perhaps seven people got blood clots. Two of them died, although it’s not yet clear if those deaths were really because of the vaccine, or if some other factors contributed to their deaths.

Just to be clear, I am not pro blood clots.

And I don’t envy the job of the CDC. They had to figure out what to do given that the vaccine could absolutely save a lot of lives given how deadly Covid is. But then there’s the Do No Harm thing.

How does this relate to Daylight Saving Time?

The research is now crystal clear: When we set the clocks forward in the spring—robbing an hour of sleep from an entire population—people die. People die in traffic accidents. People have heart attacks and die. People have strokes and die. People die in workplace accidents. The list goes on and on.

A lot of people die in every country that has clock-changing.

And a lot more people are injured. I link on that research page to a new study showing that hospitalizations for just about everything go up in the days after the Spring Forward clock change.

So, here is the question, and the connection to the vaccine:

Let’s say that the J&J vaccine did kill those two people, and that those numbers hold up. That is, for every 3.5 million shots, one person will die.

Should they keep giving it out?

What the CDC is saying is that they should. The risk is worth it because of the chance of dying from Covid is so much higher. The risks vary, but if you spend more than 15 minutes in a room with other unvaccinated people, let’s say your chances of getting Covid and then dying are in rough numbers about 1 in 500.

So, the math works out to 1 in 500 vs. 1 in 3,500,000. In other words, you are 7,000 times more likely to die of Covid than to die from the Covid vaccine.

(And now that we know there’s a blood clot issue, especially for women aged 18-49, we can just say to that group that if you have a history of blood clots, maybe take one of the other two choices. Just doing that will likely drop the death rate by half or more.)

All very sensible.

Now let’s look at the Spring clock change.

The numbers of people who die because of heart attacks, etc., is not clear. The research shows an increase in death rates, but I haven’t seen a study that puts a number on it. With traffic deaths, however, one researcher did the math and figured out that on average there are 28 people that die in traffic accidents in the days after the spring clock change. So let’s use that number.

If we are going to take the CDC approach, we would need to weigh those 28 deaths against the benefits that come from changing the clock.

Here is where the argument for DST clock changing completely falls apart.

What is it that we get from changing the clock that makes it worth killing those 28 people? Really, name one thing.

With J&J, the math is, essentially, should we kill one person to save 7,000?

Using that math, changing the clock for daylight saving time would have to save 28X7,000, or nearly 200,000 people.

If we add in the deaths from heart attacks, etc., we are probably looking at DST needing to save a million lives every year to justify the human toll of the clock changing.

Does it? Does switching the clocks twice a year save a million lives?

I think you would be hard pressed to say it saves even one life. I mean really, why do we keep changing the clocks? Is there any reason other than the regular inertia of doing things the way they have always been done?

I will answer that question for you. There is none. There is no good reason to change the clocks.

Think of it like this: If we didn’t change the clocks, and someone went to the government and suggested that we should change the clocks twice per year, knowing what we know now there is absolutely positively no way it would get approved. I mean, just imagine someone arguing: Hey, I know this will kill a lot of people, and injure even more people, but think of the benefits! What are the benefits? Well, you know… The farmers!

TrollyPhoto by Amogh Manjunath on Unsplash

You may have heard of the Trolley Problem. In short, you are running a trolley, and if you do nothing, the trolly will kill five workers. If you flip a switch, you will go on a different track and kill only one person. Do you do it? You still have to take an action that will kill a person?

For the J&J question, the trolly conductor essentially decided to flip the switch to take that one life in order to save about 7,000 lives.

For the Daylight Saving Time question, the trolly conductor (all of us) are essentially deciding not to flip the switch to move to the track that won’t kill anyone, and instead stay on the track that will kill dozens, perhaps hundreds of people every single year.

It’s time to flip the switch. It’s time to #LockTheClock

 

New Daylight Saving Time Polling Shows Change is Coming

Sometimes on this blog I back into the news at a leisurely pace. For this one, well… here’s the story I would have written back when I was a reporter:

Supermajority now favors year round Daylight Saving Time

WASHINGTON — A new poll shows that preference for permanent Daylight Saving Time has grown to new highs with 68 percent of respondents saying that they support the move and 14 percent opposing.

The poll conducted by Morning Consult and Politico asked nearly 2,000 registered voters if they supported bipartisan legislation to make Daylight Saving Time permanent. Fully 45 percent said that they “strongly support” the legislation, and another 23 percent said that they “somewhat support” it. Seven percent each said they either strongly or somewhat oppose the bill, and another 18 percent said they didn’t know or did not have an opinion.

DST polling

While previous polling has shown a plurality of support for Permanent DST, this is the first national poll from a professional polling company that has shown such a strong majority. 

The Politico/Morning Consult poll surveyed 1,993 registered voters and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. A breakdown of the data showed nearly identical results for men and women, as well as Democrats, Republicans and independents. There was also no significant difference based on education, religion, employment, area of the country or if the respondents live in an urban, suburban or rural area.

…

 

If I was still a reporter, this would be the point in the story that I would insert a quote from someone, well, probably someone like the current version of me, saying something like: The momentum was clearly on the side of fixing Daylight Saving Time when you looked at all the action in the state legislatures and in D.C., so it’s no surprise that this poll shows that the legislatures really are doing what the people want them to do, and that’s to lock the clock into what we now call Daylight Saving Time, but will soon become known as just ‘time.’

Then I would probably do what all the news stories do these days, and insert a paragraph about all the negative health consequences of changing the clocks, especially in the spring when we are robbed of an hour of sleep.

 

Since I got this news, I have been grappling with a question that I don’t really have an answer to, and that is: Why?

The polls have never been really clear because they often ask the wrong questions, but in general all the polling breaks down something like about 50 percent want Permanent DST, 25 percent want Permanent ST, and about 25 percent don’t care or are fine leaving things as they are.

What would cause about half of the Permanent ST and half of the “don’t care” people to move to the side of Permanent Daylight Saving Time?

I really don’t know, but here are a couple of guesses:

 

Guess one: They asked the question right around the Spring Forward change.

It could be that people just so dislike being robbed of an hour of sleep that they essentially said: Please, just make it stop! That could be. I hope the pollsters ask that question again, but at the rate things are moving they may not get another chance because it may be fixed soon.

But that guess doesn’t really hold up because the poll asked about a specific bit of bipartisan legislation, so I don’t think that’s it.

 

Guess two: The people arguing for permanent Standard Time are doing it so badly that opinion is turning against them. 

This is something I’ve seen firsthand a couple of times now. Permanent Standard Time proponents will show up at a state legislature, and basically pontificate about how they have a monopoly on truth and science, and make statements that amount to: If you don’t do what we tell you to do then you are an idiot. Before this year I bridled a bit when one of them would show up to testify, but now I welcome it because they are so off-putting that they actually help swing votes over to the side of fixing DST. 

But the reality is that all the efforts being made to convince people that we should only lock the clocks if we do so in Standard Time are getting essentially zero traction, so I don’t think that’s it. Indeed, if circadian sleep scientists hadn’t been speaking up, the “strongly oppose” may have gone even lower than seven percent.

 

Guess three: Young people are leading the way.

For years now I’ve thought that younger people are better than people over 50 (like me) at realizing that the conventions of the past are not rooted in what’s best, but instead just rooted in doing things the way they have always been done. I give them credit for looking at older people who tell them we have to change the clocks twice a year for the farmers, and saying: Wha… Huh? And then those young people get elected and decided to do something about it.

But the one part of the crosstabs that shows some deviation from the rest of the results is that GenZ has only 22 percent who strongly support the legislation. (Then again, only four percent strongly oppose it. Maybe that generation just doesn’t have “strong” feelings just yet.) So, again, not a really clear indicator of much.

 

So, is this all good news in the fight to #LockTheClock?

Yes. It is.

Politicians do look at polls, especially on stuff like this where they are not getting direction from their party leaders. As we’ve seen, there is no partisan angle on this at all.

When you can cast a vote that has only 14 percent of the voters who might potentially be mad at you, well, that is an easy Yes vote.

But because I am in this for the long haul, I do have a little bit of a worry that it is so popular, that we won’t take the time to do it properly, and then we could have a rebound problem in the years to come.

This is why I wrote that my idea for a federal proposal would give states a bit of breathing room. 

As much as I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to never have to change the clocks again, unless Congress can act really quickly (like, before June), my personal opinion is that we should actually wait and put the change in next year, in 2022.

That will give each state enough time to really decide what time zone it wants to lock into. 

In general, and this poll confirms it, most people and most states want to lock into permanent Daylight Saving Time, the one we use in the summer.

Look at the heartland states like Kansas, which neighbors my home state of Colorado, but is on the western edge of the Central Time zone. (Well, mostly.) I spoke to the legislator working to Lock the Clock there and told him that maybe Kansas could unify the state in one time zone, and lock into Standard Time. He told me that his constituents really want to be in Daylight Time year round. The poll confirms that. Also, they already are getting up in the dark and going to school in the dark, and they just want a little sunlight at the end of the day. 

But is that really the case in, say, Indiana? Most, but not all, of that state is in the Eastern Time Zone, but in permanent DST the sun wouldn’t come up until about 9 a.m. in the winter. If they go through a whole winter and look at what that might be, then the legislature could take that up in their session that starts in January of 2022, and make a decision about what that state wants to permanently. They may want to reunite their state into one time zone, and join their neighbors in Illinois. Then when we have the last-ever Spring Forward time change in the U.S. in March of 2022, Indiana would just stay the same.

This is why I say that if the U.S. Congress wants to act this year to #LockTheClock permanently it needs to do so now. NOW! 

If they wait past about the first of June, maybe the first of July, then the state legislatures won’t practically have time to take any action before the Fall Back time change.

 

Bottom line: This is great news, and I hope Congress takes action based on this. I just hope they either do it really quickly, or that they amend the current bills to make it easier for states that are on the border of a time zone to pick which side of the line they want to end up on permanently.

But to amend the bill, the first thing we need to do is get a bill a hearing. That’s why my previous post calling everyone to exert whatever influence they have on Senator Maria Cantwell asking her, politely, to give the Sunshine Act a hearing. Now you have all the data you need to convince her that this is something the people really want!

Which Celebrities Want to Fix Daylight Saving Time?

When I started this blog I was a lone voice in the wilderness, complaining about having to change the clocks. Not even my mom read all my posts.

But little by little, the audience has grown. Reporters started figuring out that I wasn’t just a crackpot, but that I could be helpful to them. (OK, I may still be a crackpot, but at least I am quotable and not wrong.)

Then legislators around the country and in D.C. figured out that I could be helpful to them, so they write me all the time these days, and I’m happy to help.

The weirdest part for me is now being in the company of celebrities.

Which ones?


Jon_Lovett-DST

Jon Lovett says he is a “one issue” voter regarding Daylight Saving Time

Well, first on the list has to be Jon Lovett, who talks about Daylight Saving Time all the time on his podcast, and has the most nuanced view of any of the celebrities I’ve seen opining on the topic. He did so again just today:

He then went on with a whole thread about his idea for a solution, which is so nuanced it can’t be contained in a single tweet. (That’s a good thing, says I.) It’s such a good solution that I hate to quibble with it, but his solution would create a bit of a patchwork around the country. I will be writing about that in my next post looking at the federal legislation out there.

Update: He did it again in this podcast, starting about 1 hour in.

I remember my heart leaping just a bit when Ben Stiller tweeted about this, AND used my hashtag:

I got to meet Nate Silver once. I told him thanks because back before fivethirtyeight.com was a household name, I knew about it and used his predictions to win some money in an office betting pool about an election. Without missing a beat he asked for a share of the winnings.

So, it makes me quite happy to see that he is part of Team #LockTheClock:

This is the celebrity I know the best because he was my boss back at the legendary Spy Magazine. I’ve never talked to Kurt Andersen about this, but of course he lands on an astute analysis:

Other celebs seem to just want the barbarism of clock changing to end. You get that feeling from Jimmy Kimmel who basically pleaded with Elizabeth Warren to #LockTheClock.

Update on the Spring Forward weekend: This is HUGE! The Dept. of Transportation does actually control the clocks, but they only do so at the direction of Congress, so we still do need to fix the law, but having Pete on our side should help a lot.

Craig Shoemaker to me is proof that just about everyone really hates this thing:

Neil deGrasse Tyson has been an advocate saying we should #LockTheClock for years:

Joseph Gordon-Levitt was so sleep deprived that his tweet wasn’t even funny, and he forgot that it’s “Daylight Saving” with no S on the end.

Celebrity author David Itzkoff captures the mood of the room well in this tweet:

Chef Ted Allen would like us to stop cooking the clocks:

Mindy Kaling might not be taking a policy position, but this one hit home:

Same goes for AOC — this tweet shows she knows it’s an issue:

I’d like to close with someone not famous — but a #LockTheClock hero in my book: George Moncure from Montana.

George is a retired guy who just wanted more daylight to play tennis with his friends. He talked to his state senator, got some bills going, handed out smart flyers, and moved the ball forward more than a lot of “influencers.” (Update, he did it!)

In the final analysis, what makes change? Nate Silver’s tweet or George’s tennis matches?

Whatever your level of celebrity — go for it. Take action. Be part of the winning side of history.

Thanks for reading, and be safe this weekend — especially Monday morning.

-Scott

Daylight Saving Time/Standard Time Legislative Update 2021

Last year at this time I had just finished testifying in Atlanta, and I had high hopes that we’d get to 20 states that had passed some kind of bill to #LockTheClock in 2020.

Well, as we know, 2020 through us all for a loop. A few states that move really fast, like Wyoming and Louisiana, got a bill done before everything went to crap, but we ended up with only 15 states that have taken action.

This year is poised to blast through the progress from last year. The bills I’ve seen, testified on, and talked to sponsors about are absolutely blazing through.

Scott-Atlanta-testimony
My last trip before Covid was to Atlanta in support of Wes Cantrell

One big thing that’s different this year is that I’m able to be many more places at the same time, through the magic of zoom. One of the realities of this new world is that people are much more accustomed to meeting in virtual rooms. That means less time on an airplane, and much more time getting the word out, so that’s a net positive.

And the vibe I’m picking up everywhere is that it’s time to get this done. With all that’s going wrong in the world, let’s at least make the clocks work. That’s the general feeling I’m picking up all over the place.

What’s going on in your state?

Well, for the very latest, check out the Daylight Saving Time legislation page, which has a map and a list updated continuously. But for some of the story behind the story working roughly west to east, here are some updates:

Nevada

Around the country, there have been only a small handful of states that haven’t done anything to #LockTheClock, Nevada among them. That changed with the introduction of a bill this week.

The bill follows a lot of the best practices I laid out in this post.

  • It calls on the Feds to fix the U.S. laws.
  • It cooperatively works with California.

There’s a saying around state capitols that it takes five years to pass a good bill. Given the speed this is moving around the rest of the country, Nevada may be the first state to introduce a bill and pass it in the first year.

And if it does, California will be surrounded by states that want clock sanity, so maybe the legislators in California will finally get with the other states, and with the 70 percent of voters who said loud and clear they want something done. (It’s going to be a bit harder since the two biggest advocates for change in California’s legislature are both now out of state office, but it could still happen.)

If California does follow Nevada, it will be clear that what happens in Vegas stays in, well, at least it stays in the Pacific Time Zone.

Montana

Going just a bit west and north is the Big Sky state, which has the distinction of being the only state that touches two other time zones besides the one that it is in.

If the new law passes there, much of the credit will go to a citizen, George Moncure, who just likes to play tennis outside, and likes the sun later in the day to be able to do that with friends.

I’ve told him that if I had 50 guys like him, this thing would have been fixed years ago. He’s marshaled resources, found people to testify, worked with a sponsor… he’s done it all and made it easy for me.

If you think you’d like to make a difference in your state, but don’t think one person can make a difference, I hold up George as proof that one person can make a huge difference.

Montana’s legislative session is short, so it may not squeak out in time, but it may.

Interestingly, there’s another bill going through the legislature that George is not in favor of, a bill that would put Montana in Standard Time year round. Longtime fans of the #LockTheClock movement know that this blog doesn’t have a position on which time zone is best to lock into.

So, this state may be an interesting glimpse into which of those two choices a state legislature will opt for. More on that idea when we get to Texas.

New Mexico

One of the earliest legislators I ever wrote about on this blog was Sen. Cliff Pirtle, who has been advocating for clock sanity for years.

His bill for this year passed 6–2 out of its first committee, which I was honored to testify in front of by zoom. I was just glad to speak because I got elbowed out of a chance to speak when I drove down there to testify a couple of years ago.

DST testimony in N.M.

I understand that this year Pirtle has more bipartisan support for the bill, which should help it sail through a bit more quickly.

Texas

There are a bunch of bills in Texas this year, seven at last count.

The ones that are the most interesting to me are the two companion bills that would ask the voters if they prefer locking the clock in permanent Standard Time, or permanent Daylight Saving Time. These come from Rep. Lyle Larson, and Sen. Jose Menendez. (Note that these two sponsors come from different parties. It would be wonderful to see a bipartisan bill emerge from Texas on this clearly bipartisan issue.)

I’ve seen a zillion polls regarding DST, and in general it seems that about 70 percent of people want to #LockTheClock. If and when people are then asked what time they want the time locked into, again about 70 percent say they want Permanent DST, the time we have in the summer.

But the polling is often muddied. The options are jumbled together, or the language isn’t clear.

This proposal would make it crystal clear for voters: Permanent ST or DST? Pick one.

Now, what goes for Texas may not go for every state, but it will be interesting to watch the results. The state is huge, but in general is toward the western side of the Central Time zone, so it would be easy to make the case that it should be in Standard Time year round. People in Texas, from what I hear, also like football and barbecue, both of which are better with more sunshine.

Texas-bbq-dst

A really interesting vote to watch will be in the little chunk of Texas surrounding El Paso, which is in the Mountain Time zone. Their vote likely won’t be enough to sway the state, but it will be interesting to see if people there opt to remain different than the rest of the state and like their neighbors in New Mexico and Mexico, or if they would want to join with Dallas and Houston.

Just for the trove of new data we would get, I’m hoping that bill passes and the voters get to have a say this November.

For one thing, it will take a lot of the arguments that are currently in the shadows, and force them into the light. Do pharmaceutical sleep aids do better with more clock changing? I don’t know, but if there’s a campaign on both sides, and the pharmaceutical companies donate to one side, we’ll finally have a clear answer.

Oklahoma

The bills there would #LockTheClock for Oklahoma into Standard Time.

This will also be a fascinating one to watch. No state has opted to lock into Standard Time since Arizona did it in 1968, two years after the Uniform Time Act of 1966 made that the only legal choice for a state.

Every other state that’s passed a law or resolution in the last four years has passed something saying that it wants to lock into permanent Daylight Time, so Oklahoma would be going the other direction.

Given that it is on the western edge of the Central Time zone, that makes some sense for people there. The sun wouldn’t come up until awfully late in the winter. How will golfers react to the idea of sunsets around 7:30 instead of 8:30 p.m. in the summer? I haven’t seen any organized opposition yet, and one bill already passed out of its first committee with a unanimous vote, so this bill might go all the way, which would mean that Oklahoma could be the first state in nearly 50 years to #LockTheClock.

Dad joke alert…

Will the Sooner state #LockTheClock sooner than the rest of the country?

North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas

These four states, like a stack of delicious pancakes in the heartland of the country, have some strong time zone similarities:

  • They all have a weird line vaguely around the 100th Meridian that splits the time zones from the eastern population centers from western farm and ranch lands.
  • They all have bills/resolutions calling to move to permanent DST.
  • All those bills are sailing through. One bill that I thought was doomed in North Dakota is now doing very well. I’m glad I didn’t kill it!

Illinois

The land of Lincoln has had a few bills each year for the last few years, but this may be the year something happens. The bill that I think may have the best shot is the one that has bipartisan sponsors. This is the ultimate in bipartisan issues, so it makes sense to have sponsors from both parties.

The only part of this bill that I disagree with is the fact that it just kind of announces that Illinois will be moving to DST permanently. That’s not actually allowed under the current federal law. I’ll try to work with the sponsors here and see if we can get the bill amended to something that has a better chance of making a difference, which may in turn help it to get voted on, approved, and signed by the governor.

The Illinois legislature meets essentially year-round, so it may be a while before we get news here.

Indiana

I’m not going to write about the states not doing anything, except I do want to mention Indiana, which has a particularly weird history with DST.

If I was in Indiana, I’d be reading the tea leaves of what’s going on around the country, especially in DC, and I’d realize that there’s a pretty good chance that Permanent DST is coming for everyone.

Perhaps more than the residents of any other state, Hoosiers may not be happy about this. The sun would come up awfully late in the winter. It’s just nuts that Indiana is in the same time zone as, say, Vermont.

Their chance to fix this before it gets done to them is now. Why is there no action? I just don’t get it.

Georgia

Wes Cantrell is another hero of the #LockTheClock movement. He’s been pushing bills for a couple of years now, and actually getting them passed.

This year Georgia has a couple of bills that seem contradictory on the surface, but as Rep. Cantrell has explained to me, they actually are not.

Right now the federal government doesn’t allow states to go to Permanent DST, only Permanent ST. One of the bills in Georgia would have that state do what’s legal now, and move to Standard Time year round. The other bill would have the state move to DST year round at the point that it becomes legal.

Sort of like with Texas, this will be a fascinating dynamic to watch play out.

If the feds move quickly, the Standard Time discussion will be moot. If not, however, Georgia could remain in Eastern Standard Time all year. Georgians may not hate that. The state is on the western edge of their time zone, but the effects aren’t as pronounced because the time zone isn’t as wide near the bottom as it is at the top. (I always thought the Eastern Time Zone looked a bit like a funnel.) Also, because the state is so far south the swing in daylight time isn’t as dramatic as it is up north.

But tourism is a big industry in Georgia. Also, the state is probably a bit more socially and economically wrapped up with Florida, so it may want to stay in the same time zone with that state.

Will that state move to Standard Time, like it, and want to stay, or will it try it for a year, and realize that it wants Permanent Daylight Time? I don’t know the answer to that, and really the people there probably don’t either, but it could be an interesting test case that we can all learn from.

New York

In some ways, this is the ballgame right here.

For one thing, a lot of states are super tightly integrated into New York City. I was testifying in Connecticut where a bill seemed likely to pass (until the TV industry killed it, but that’s another story.) Part of the reason it was going to pass is a compromise I had a small part in brokering.

A representative from the part of Connecticut that has a ton of people who live there but work in “The city” (as they call New York City) said that he just couldn’t support something that might see people have to change time zones every morning on the way to work and again on the way home.

Fair enough.

So the compromise was that instead of Connecticut being dependent on Massachusetts before it adopts Atlantic Standard Time — which is the trick that they would use to help deal with current law about only being able to go into Permanent ST — it would be dependent on Massachusetts and New York doing the same.

The same kind of thing is at play with New Jersey. It would be a bit odd for the countless people that drive through the Lincoln tunnel or over the George Washington Bridge or take the PATH train if they had to change time zones each time.

And with New Jersey, you need to bring in Pennsylvania and probably Delaware, etc.

So. Yeah. New York is kind of the key.

Also New York is pretty much the center of the broadcasting world. As far as I can tell, it’s broadcasters who are the most rattled by the idea of more daylight for everyone later in the days. They don’t want to come out and say it, but they want it to be dark outside so people will come inside and sit on the couch and watch TV.

How hard will they push when actual bills start getting hearings? Or will they push so hard behind the scenes that the bills won’t get hearings at all?

New York’s legislature meets all year, so we won’t get any quick answers, but you can be sure that I’ll be paying close attention to the four bills, so far, that have been introduced there.

Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut

Another hero of the #LockTheClock movement is Tom Emswiler of Massachusetts. They are now considering a bill that would take the recommendation of the study committee that said moving to Permanent Atlantic Time would be best for the Bay State (report downloadable from this link). Tom gets a ton of the credit there.

It started when he wrote a column for his local paper. That turned into a law that ordered a comprehensive study. That study was conducted by consulting tons of experts, debating for hours, and the end result was that the best thing the state could do is move to Permanent Atlantic Standard Time, as long as a couple of neighboring New England states came along.

Well, now those states are slowly coming along.

They are getting some resistance. It was ESPN, based in Connecticut, that has previously killed proposals there, but overwhelming bipartisan support may finally push back against that.

New Hampshire has a creative lawmaker, Josh Yokela, pushing for practical solutions there, and his bill may get signed this year.

I disagree with national broadcasters when they want to see it darker, earlier, so people will watch more TV. I do think they have a small nugget of a valid point in not wanting to see the continental United States move to five time zones from the current four. I don’t think that will happen because of the Connecticut-New York issue. But if that was solved, and we had states in the Atlantic Time Zone, it could be a bit confusing for a while.

But the reality is that solar noon is way off clock time for the New England States. If politics were out of the equation, those states probably would be in the Atlantic Time Zone, in Standard Time, all year long.

After all the dust settles with the efforts to #LockTheClock, will we have five time zones in the lower 48? Probably not, but it’s a fun thought experiment of where you might draw the line that works for solar time as well as for the natural associations of populations.

 

Summary

I hope you’ve enjoyed this walk around the country.

The one thing that seems to tie all of these conversations together is the fact that this topic is no longer a sideshow. For years it was discussed in a few states with a few lighthearted legislators who didn’t mind a bit of snickering going on when their bills were brought up, and then killed.

There’s still plenty of levity with this topic. In a recent hearing I was participating in the committee chair couldn’t find the sponsor, and he joked that she must be operating in a different time zone.

But once the jokes are done, and people realize that approximately 28 people are going to needlessly die this year because of the “spring forward” time change, and that countless more will have heart attacks, strokes, workplace accidents and more, the joking fades away and the voting starts. And this year more than any other year, legislators are voting yes.

Will state legislatures be able to fix this? Not on their own, and in an upcoming post I’ll take a look at what’s going on in DC, but there’s no question that state legislatures passing resolutions and laws is a hugely important effort that is absolutely getting noticed in Washington.

And if the U.S. can get this fixed, then maybe Europe will get out of its current rut, and it will be able to fix this, too.

Then instead of dreading the clock change every spring and every fall, we’ll just be able to live our lives and someday our grandchildren will wonder what the heck we were doing changing the clock twice a year.

Thanks again for reading, and keep in touch!

Permanent Standard Time vs. Daylight Time — The Ultimate Guide

Bottom Line at the Top:

All research and scientists agree that changing the clock twice a year is deadly, especially in the spring when we rob an hour of sleep from the entire population, other than those lucky ducks in Arizona, Hawaii and Puerto Rico.

If we decide to #LockTheClock for everyone, which time zone should we lock into? There’s legitimate science that backs either position for health reasons. It tips toward permanent Standard Time for sleep reasons, especially for those states on the western edge of their respective time zones. For other states, the health social, business, educational and other benefits are on the side of permanent Daylight Time.

Here is a guide so you can decide for yourself which time zone would be better for you and your state.

Issue

 Permanent Standard Time Permanent Daylight Time
Deaths from cancer, other causes   Deaths go down in DST, up in ST.
Mental Health SAD is treated more effectively with more morning light. Despair overall would improve with more evening light.
Exercise   More evening light means more exercise.
Sleep Studies show people get more and better sleep in permanent standard time. Other studies say the benefit is relatively small, and the question is too complex to be boiled down to a single recommendation.
Schools Students do better with more sleep, so if school start times are not adjusted, this is better. No increase in accidents, so if the start times are adjusted, this is not an issue.
Traffic   Improvement in safety.
Pedestrians   Big improvement in safety.
Environment   Smog decreased if afternoon rush hour is in the sun.
Crime   Goes down in DST.
Business   Retail sales improve.
Wildlife   More daytime driving saves wildlife and reduces fatal deer-auto crashes.

If you are a state legislator trying to figure out what is the best time zone for your state to land in, you might want to look at this guide.

Play around with the sunrise and sunset times under the different scenarios. You may be surprised.

Right now the trend in every state that has taken this up is to want to adopt permanent Daylight Time. I even testified recently in Nebraska and Kansas, supporting the sponsors there because I support any bill that makes a move toward getting rid of the clock changing and locking into one time zone year round.

That said, I think both Nebraska and Kansas would do well to look at permanent Standard Time. The sun would come up awfully late in those two states in the winter. Going to permanent Standard Time would also give them an opportunity to get rid of that line that goes through the middle of those states, cutting them into two different time zones, something that would be approved of by the Department of Transportation under the Uniform Time Act of 1966. I brought that up in one-on-one conversations with the sponsors in both those states, and they both were clear that the citizens want Permanent DST. Once I was clear on the fact that they understood the dynamics, I told them I would help them however I could.

It may just be that they have to go into Permanent DST to discover that the sun coming up after 8 a.m. in the winter is just too late, and they will want to do what Arizona does, and go to permanent Standard Time. Either way is fine, of course, as long as they end the barbarism of changing the clock twice a year.

Up in New England, there’s just no question that forcing states that have such short days in the winter that the solution that works for Arkansas or Nevada is the exact same solution that is going to work for them is just ludicrous.

And I’ve written about Indiana before, but really, there is just no sense in that state being in the Eastern Time Zone. They could also unify that state around a single time zone already in use in the northwest and southwest corners of the state.

It’s a similar story in Kentucky, where lots of residents have to change time zones daily just crossing a county line like this one:

Time-zone-signWayne’s World is Confusing!

Of course, I could be totally wrong, here. It may be that the people of, say, Michigan, are fine with a couple of months in the winter where it doesn’t get light until 8:30 a.m. because it means that no matter what they will get at least some sunshine after work/school all year long. That is a legitimate trade-off, and is certainly a legitimate choice for the people of Michigan to make.

Same goes for Texas, which may be putting this question to a very real test.

A legislator there is proposing to ask voters which time zone the Lone Star State should go to permanently. Every other poll I’ve seen muddies the question. This would be crystal clear, and would be really helpful if there is a federal law that moves all states into Permanent DST, which seems more than possible.

The people of Texas can then use a tool that looks at sunrise times, etc., and decide for themselves. Do you want more sun before work in the winter, or do you want to eat Texas barbecue with the sun still shining until later at night all year long?

(My prediction is that Permanent DST will get between 65 and 75 percent of the vote, but I’ve been wrong before about election outcomes in Texas!)

Which is the correct choice?

There is, of course, no single “right” answer here.

The very concept of time is simply an agreement among people. In our modern world we need to have time as an agreement to coordinate so much of what we do.

My view is that the time agreement has a bug, and the bug makes us change the clocks twice a year. One of those changes, the one in the spring, kills people every time, and injures lots of others.

Once we get rid of that bug, what is the best time zone for us to land in? I really don’t think there is a perfect answer for any place, and the answer is a bit different in every place.

Anyone who says there is only one correct answer has some other agenda that they are not telling you about.

Protecting Students During the Dark Days of Covid… And the Dark Days

Here’s another guest post by Jonathan Helton. His first post for this blog about childhood obesity was great, and now he’s back with a post that is very timely for me as my son returns to in-person learning for the first time since last March in the coming days. -Scott

 

Students-walking-dark-dst

This is not the usual time for “back to school” but there’s not much about this year that is “usual.”

With the return to school for many students, however, the topic comes back up about what the right time is to start school, especially relative to Daylight Saving Time.

It can be more than a little disconcerting sending your kids to a bus stop in the morning dark. This fear has reflexively pushed some people to favor permanent Standard Time if they had to pick one time zone to stick in to avoid the madness of changing time zones twice per year.

As the argument goes, an hour of sunlight shifted towards the morning will keep kids safe on their way to school. It’s certainly a noble sentiment.

Noble, but misinformed. In reality, these clock changes endanger kids and by permanently ending these shifts we would be doing more to actually protect them. 

Here’s why:

After the failed experiment of changing into DST in January, 1974, (who thought it would be a good idea to change the clocks in January?!?!?) the Department of Transportation decided to study what actually worked, and what did not work. 

That study debunked the idea that school kids faced additional risk from year-round Daylight Saving Time. A review of the DOT study by the National Bureau of Standards concluded that there was no increased accident risk for students in the morning (pg. 4-5). 

Actually, the opposite is likely true. Year-long DST would probably better protect students overall. A 2008 Wake Forest Law Review piece backed this claim. It looked again at the 1974 changes. While perhaps 10 additional children were killed during the morning hours, there were “sixty fewer afternoon school children fatalities during the same period,” the authors reported (pg. 87).  

That’s not all. In 1995, researchers studied car accidents and lighting levels. Pedestrians—a group which certainly includes students walking home—faced a 300 percent increased likelihood of being in a fatal crash once light was shifted from the afternoon to the morning. That’s exactly what Standard Time, the time we’re on now, between November and March, does. 

Other studies indicate similar things. Lighting changes and sleep loss throw off normal driving habits and increase the risk of being in a wreck.

But permanent DST protects children in other ways. Criminals, who are more likely to be active at night, are deterred during DST. Robberies go down during DST, as compared to Standard Time. Homicides, too, decrease in DST. 

No matter what side of the issue you’re on, then—permanent DST, permanent ST, or the convoluted system we have now—it’s fairly clear that Standard Time does not protect students from crime or traffic accidents. It’s an argument lacking empirical merit. 

Of course, apart from protecting students, there are numerous other reasons to #LockTheClock. More sleep, less stress, fewer heart attacks, etc. Either permanent ST or DST would be better than what we have now, regardless of the school situation. 

But the question of school start times relative to the clock is a legitimate one. In the past school advocates have said that changing what time schools start is just too hard. Well, if we’ve learned anything this last year, it’s that schools can indeed be flexible in scheduling to protect students and do what is best for them academically. Changing start times for school will be a modest change indeed compared to all the other changes made recently.

More than a dozen states have already passed bills in favor of permanent DST. That is clearly the trend, especially for states on the eastern edge of their time zones. That is also the trend in all the federal legislation proposed. Given that, if you are involved with schools in any way, it might be time to start having the conversation about finding the right start times for school if what now seems almost inevitable happens: the country decides to #LockTheClock. 

image from www.locktheclock.live-website.comJonathan Helton is an independent researcher and aspiring graduate student  He covers policy topics from transportation to foreign aid and has published with The Strategy Bride, The Borgen Project, and elsewhere.

Ohio Legislature and Daylight Saving Time

Here is the transcript of my testimony to the House State and Local Government Committee, which is considering a Joint Resolution.

 

 

Dear Chairman Wiggam,
Ranking member Kelly,
And members of the Ohio House State and Local Government Committee,

I am the leader of the international movement to #LockTheClock, also known as a guy and his blog.

For more than six years now I’ve been writing about this topic, but in the last couple of years the volume has turned way up, and I’ve now testified in a dozen states, been featured on the BBC, the New York Times and the Daily Show.

I’m very sorry I can’t be with you there today in person, and I look forward a post-Covid era when I can be there.

Yates-DST-Ohio

I could wax eloquently for hours about the evils of changing the clock twice a year. Just ask my wife, she’ll tell you this is true. But I’ve seen how this joint resolution sailed through the Ohio Senate, and I watched the sponsors introduce this bill and saw the positive overall reactions, so I don’t think there’s a need to do a lot of convincing.

Several questions did come up that I thought I might shed a bit more light on.

First was a question from Rep. Ginter, who first expressed huge support, and then asked: Why hasn’t this been done before?

The reason is this: Tied up in this issue are two questions.

1. Should we stop changing the clock twice a year.
2. What time zone should we land in.

The confusion about the second question is what ties up progress on the first.

That seems to be fading away now. When I first started blogging about this there was no action anywhere in the country. Then I put together a research page showing all the death, economic hardship and overall negative consequences that result from stealing an hour of sleep from the whole country one Sunday each Spring.

After that research started spreading, states started treating this like the serious public policy issue that it is, and not some quirky issue. We now have 15 states around the country that have passed something in the last two years. And federal bills have gotten more great bipartisan support than ever before.

As to the second question… That’s something that I think individual states should grapple with after the decision is made to Lock the Clock.

Rep. Becker brought up the temporary change that was made in 1974. That was a disaster. It was ordered by Pres. Nixon in the depths of Watergate, and instead of being planned for in advance it was put into place in January. Changing the clocks in the spring or fall is bad, changing the clocks in January is just torture. Congress got rid of that after one year. It was such a failed experiment that it is part of why we haven’t had a lot of progress on fixing this in the years since then. Now people in general are suggesting a much more phased in and science-based approach.

Rep. Wiggam brought up the fact that constituents really want to fix this, and he is exactly right about that. He also brought up studies about the health effects. Yes. There are a lot. Heart attacks, strokes, workplace accidents, traffic accidents, and just overall deaths climb in the days after the Spring Forward time change.

And thank you Rep. Wilkin for bringing some levity to the issue. There is a lot of that, and it’s why some of the best explanations of why we need to fix this are found in memes and funny videos. I collect those on my blog, and they are always the most popular pages I have each year.

This resolution is a great first step. The next step will be a bill. I’m happy to work with you in any ways that I can to help you take that next step in the coming months.

Yours very truly,

-Scott Yates

Daylight Saving Time and Dysregulating our Children with Autism

When I first started fighting to #LockTheClock six years ago, I knew that clock changing was annoying. I have come to learn that it’s also deadly, and we have lots of stats about that on the research page. Then came the day I went to testify in Nebraska, and the young man who testified before me made a statement that was so clear and powerful about how clock changing is hugely exacerbating for his seizure disorder. 
 
If a person dies or ends up in the ER, that’s bad. Also bad, but harder to quantify, is the disruption for families like the Fausett family from Nebraska, or the family that you’ll read about below.
 
The writer of this post came to my attention because she contacted her state legislator, and the staff for that legislator then contacted me. When I heard this story, I thought it would be much better to get the story on this blog first-hand, and boy I was right about that. (The photos are from the mom, art creations from her kids.) 
 
I hope you find it as moving and touching as I do, and I will keep this family — and all other families that deal with special issues like this — in mind as I fight to finally, once and for ever, put an end to the barbarism of clock changing.
 
— Scott

 
 

pastedGraphic.png

 

Hi there. My name is Amy. My children both have the diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder, in addition to many other special needs. Life is challenging, and we spend hours every week in therapy and with specialists trying to support my children with their disability. My children require routines and schedules to navigate the world. The routines help them to stay regulated and in control of their emotions and bodies. 

Daylight Saving Time (both when it starts in the spring and ends in the fall) is an incredibly challenging time for my family. The impact of arbitrarily changing the time twice a year is disruptive, dysregulating, and presents real safety concerns for my family. While others might find the practice of DST merely annoying or unimportant, to my family it is dangerous. 

Let me ask you to think back to the Monday after Daylight Saving Time began in March. How were you feeling that morning? Maybe a little tired because it felt like you lost an hour of sleep? Maybe you wondered why it still felt so dark when it was time for your morning commute? Maybe when you ran out for your coffee you were surprised by how different the quality of the light was? Maybe you were surprised that you didn’t feel as sleepy as you usually do when it was time to turn in?

My children were extremely dysregulated that morning. There were tears, there was screaming, there was aggression, both physical and verbal towards me. I think we can all agree that resetting the body’s sleep pattern is not as easy as resetting a clock. At my house, we try valiantly twice a year to ease the transition, but bodies have their own internal clock. My son could not articulate why he felt so sleepy and off that Monday. This caused my son real physical and emotional stress–the fallout of which is termed a meltdown. For the rest of the day, he was stressed out and felt as if the world was not quite right. For all of us there are little reminders throughout the days after DST begins or ends that we switched the clock—we forget to reset a digital clock on the oven, we aren’t as hungry for our meals, the shadows are a little shorter. For most of us this is no big deal. We know why everything is a little different, and we adjust to the differences pretty quickly. For my children, this is incredibly upsetting and stressful. Nothing feels right to them. They don’t understand why they had to wake up early. They don’t understand why it feels as if their therapists are an hour late in arriving, and they don’t understand the explanations of DST.  

For my children, adjusting to the new time takes three weeks to one month. Imagine missed naps, refusal to sleep at bedtime, and groggy mornings for a month! And that’s just their disrupted sleep pattern. 

 

pastedGraphic_1.png

 

But my children don’t process the world the same way most of us do. The sensory input is far more overwhelming to them and can very easily dysregulate them—leading them to at times shut down and withdraw or at other times to meltdown and tantrum. We’ve all experienced days where little irritations can accumulate and build up until one last straw sets us off. This happens often with my children; however, they have more limited language and more limited social tools to understand how to deal with their emotion. So they meltdown. Aggression towards themselves, their peers, or an adult like me is often part of that meltdown. This is what I mean when I say that DST poses real safety risks to my family. It creates for weeks these situations where my children feel as if things are off, in addition to messing with their sleep, and rather than being able to talk and process this, it builds until there is a meltdown. My children have a hard enough time coping with everyday life, but because we want time to “spring forward” or “fall back” we have to make everything harder for them. Adjusting is hard when you have Autism. The meltdowns that my children experience are not choices. My kids are not naughty, spoiled, or bratty children who are tantruming to get their way. They are special kids, who see and experience the world differently and deserve our help.  

So let’s go back to that Monday in March. My son had a meltdown, but for the rest of the day his fight or flight instincts were activated. His stress level, already elevated, continued to build until a sensory stimulus (a car passing by too fast as we were out for a walk, a food that is the wrong shape or color, a smell that is too strong) pushed him over the edge. Then another meltdown happened.

Unfortunately, meltdowns can grow in their duration and severity. 

Have you ever had to physically restrain a child for their safety or your own? I have during my son’s meltdowns. Have you needed to be trained and certified in how to physically restrain a child in crisis? I have. And while aggression towards self or others is not always a hallmark of a meltdown (although it is certainly a hallmark of my son’s), it is very common. Also common is property destruction, elopement, verbal aggression, and vocal disruption. 

These are sobering experiences, and they motivate me and other parents like me to look for patterns and anticipate situations that could lead to meltdowns. Arbitrarily changing my children’s routines and throwing them off twice every year for DST leads to a whole lot of meltdowns which results in increased incidents of aggression. Daylight Saving Time isn’t worth it, y’all. But helping my children out and other children like them is worth it. I love my children. They are wonderful, intelligent, creative people who see the world in cool and unique ways. They are working hard to learn how to use language and calming strategies to stay regulated and stay in control of their emotions and bodies. We can help them and by locking the clocks and ending the practice of Daylight Saving Time. 

 

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My job as a parent of disabled kiddos is to advocate for their special needs. Before you dismiss the movement to #locktheclock as unimportant, consider how the practice is not only really challenging but dangerous for my family and other special needs families. 

The European-style solution for Daylight Saving Time is failing. In Europe.

Good morning, Europe! Did you enjoy your extra hour of sleep last night?

Marcus-lenk-vlQYKcmfcYQ-unsplashPhoto by Marcus Lenk on Unsplash

 

It’s been six years now that I’ve been following Daylight Saving Time news, and at least a couple that I’ve been paying attention to what’s going on in Europe with a fix for what they call Summertime and Wintertime.

I do not claim to be any kind of expert in the intricacies of European politics, but I was encouraged by news. And now I have to admit that I just got it wrong.

The stories I read made it seem that the E.U. made a decision in 2019 that there would be no more clock changing starting in 2021, and that each country had until then to decide what time zone it would be in permanently.

So as we go into this weekend for the “Fall Back” change in Europe, I went searching for what I was sure to be a raft of stories about what decision each country is making.

Nothing, really.

There was so little coverage, that I actually had to go look on some German-language sites and use Google Translate to figure out what was going on.

It turns out I had one small key piece of the puzzle wrong.

The EU didn’t say to countries that they had to pick, it said that they should pick one time zone and stick with it.

So a lot of the countries started talking about it, but they all wanted to be in synch with other neighboring countries, and all are now waiting for someone to make the first move and so the conversation went about like this classic scene from Jungle Book:

 

With no clear leadership, the idea has just kind of languished. So, alas, it looks like there will be no #LockTheClock anytime soon in the E.U.

As a side note, the U.S and the E.U., will also remain out of step with each other, as Europe changes clocks a week before America in the fall, and several weeks later in the spring, leading to this kind of mess:

 

 

This is all really a shame because I have been touting this brilliant European solution for us in America. It makes sense here.

The federal government could say: In two years (or less, based on when the law is enacted) there will be no more clock changing. If you are on the border of a time zone line, you have until then to figure out if you want to be in permanent Standard Time like we have in the winter, or permanent Daylight Saving Time like we have in the summer. If you do nothing, you will be in permanent Daylight Saving Time.

Why the bias toward permanent DST? Just political reality. There are so many business interests aligned behind keeping more sunlight later in the day that there’s no sense fighting them. Also, there have been nearly 20 states that have passed a bill through their legislature in the last two years, and every single one of them has been a move to stay in DST year round.

Right now, under the law, any state could move into permanent Standard Time right now, and not a single state has done that since Arizona did it in the 1960s.

That’s not to say it couldn’t happen.

I recently made a presentation to the National Conference of State Legislatures, and included these two maps:

Screen Shot 2020-10-20 at 8.29.40 PM
Screen Shot 2020-10-20 at 8.29.40 PMMy point was to show that it is maybe a little bit nutso that Indiana is in the same time zone as Boston, and is in a different time zone from Chicago.

Facing a situation where the sun wouldn’t come up until 9 a.m. for a few days in the winter, Indiana may make the decision to switch to Central Time permanently. That would be the same as what they have right now for the Standard Time part of the year. 

Who should decide that? Me? Some research group? The Federal Government?

No, no and no.

The people of the great state of Indiana, via the established form of government known as the state legislature, should decide. The golf industry, et. al., may make a case that they need the sunlight in the summer, but it will be a hard case to make. The state is so far west in the time zone that there’s plenty of light to go around in the summer.

I’m the first to concede, this answer is a bit complex. Sorry about that. If there was an easy solution, we would have done it already.

Quote-there-is-always-an-easy-solution-to-every-problem-neat-plausible-and-wrong-h-l-mencken-19-68-69

Covid is still the main issue that our government needs to deal with, and the elections in the U.S. truly are historic and important.

But visits to my site, emails, and general interest in this issue are rising in the ways they do every year about this time. (It’s true, a lot of people are just looking for Daylight Saving Time memes, and I’ll be sure to make a post with those soon enough.)

And the state legislators are starting to think about what bills they are going to introduce in the coming sessions. Federal lawmakers are plotting how to get something done in what may be a new-look Washington.

My hope is that even though the European solution has not yet actually worked for Europe, with one small tweak it could work here.

That’s what I’ll be pushing for, and I hope you’ll join me.

 

Model Testimony to Fix Daylight Saving Time

I’ve been working with state and federal lawmakers and staffs for years now, and often testify when it works out with my schedule and frequent flier miles.

There’s a hearing tomorrow in Maryland that I would love to be at, but I have a small cold with a cough, and given the Coronavirus fears, I’m worried that the other passengers on the plane might toss me out the emergency exit door somewhere over Ohio.

So, here’s a version of the testimony that I would have given.

If you live in a state that has a pending bill, I recommend that you go and testify if you want to see an end to the clock-changing insanity.

To do that, just find the bill on this page, and then look for the lead sponsor. Contact that person, and tell them that you want to testify.

When you get to the statehouse on the day of the hearing, there will probably be some kind of sign-up form. Find that to make sure they call on you.

Then when it is your turn, you can either speak from the heart, or read prepared testimony. I typically write something, but then just end up speaking without the notes. Writing it beforehand just helps me make sure I’m going to get all my points in.

Sometimes the sessions are recorded, sometimes not. If you do it, be sure to get someone to take your picture. You’ll want that later for sure. (You can send it to me and I’ll tweet about it from my #LockTheClock account or write about it on this blog.)

To help, there are some videos of a couple of the times I’ve testified on my videos page.

If you can, ask the sponsor to sit next to you, so that if there are questions about the legislative process, or whatever, you can defer to the lawmaker. That’s what I did recently in Atlanta:

Scott-Atlanta-testimonyPicture from WSB TV

 

And then just speak as clearly as you can, and make sure the mic is turned on.

If I was in Maryland tomorrow, this is more or less what I’d say:

 

Dear members of the Education, Health, and Environmental Affairs committee,

My name is Scott Yates. I’m the leader of the international movement known as #LockTheClock, but really I am just a citizen with a blog. There’s no foundation or institute or whatever. It’s just me.

Six years ago I started writing a blog because changing the clocks just annoyed me. Rather than complain about it, my wife challenged me to do something about it.

At first, I didn’t do much, I just wrote blog posts. But then I started reading the academic research about what happens when we change the clocks.

These studies were alarming. Heart attacks go up. Strokes. Traffic accidents. Workplace accidents. 

I collected that research, and put it on a page on my blog. That collection of research then lead to legislators contacting me, and journalists around the world asking me to help them understand this issue.

You see, this was once viewed as a quirky, almost meaningless issue. The clocks are the clocks, and certainly somebody somewhere has a reason why they are this way.

It turns out that there is no good reason for changing the clocks. The history is a painful collection of diversions from other issues.

In short, the farmers are not the reason for Daylight Saving Time, and in fact the farmers have always been against the clock changing.

We do it now, really, only because we’ve always done it. The reasons are lost to the mists of history.

The thing that we know now that we didn’t fully understand when the Uniform Time Act of 1966 was signed into law was that the actual changing of the clocks is deadly. The most recent study issued just on the single issue of traffic safety says that 28 deaths per year are directly attributable to the Spring Forward time change. That’s on top of all the other deaths from heart attacks and more.

This is no longer a quirky issue, it is a legitimate public policy health issue. If a toaster came out that killed or injured hundreds of people every year, how fast would the government take action?

In short: The Government is in charge of the clocks. The clocks are killing people. It’s time to Lock The Clock.

Now, your next question may be: What good does this bill do? We need the federal government to take action.

I can tell you that every time a state bill passes, I let the sponsors of the two main bills in front of Congress know, and they are very interested for the news. And they use that information.

For instance, Sen. Marco Rubio has a bill to #LockTheClock. His co-sponsors include Senator Patty Murray of Washington State. She signed up immediately after the Washington state legislature passed a bill to put Washington State into permanent Daylight Saving Time.

So will this bill in front of you today actually fix the clocks for the people of Maryland, or will it just be a signal to the U.S. Congress? I don’t know, but either way, it is progress in the right direction.

There is no partisan angle to this bill at all. There is only good government. In these fraught times, the citizens are looking to our leaders to actually do something to show that government can actually work on behalf of the people. This is just the thing that you can do today that will make things better for real people.

Thank you very much, and I’m happy to answer any questions you might have.

 

Killer Clocks – The Hotlanta message about Daylight Saving Time

Because this effort to fix Daylight Saving Time is basically just me writing blog posts, emailing legislators and talking to people, I never really step back and do any kind of planning or organizing.

I certainly never have marketing meetings to talk about the message.

But yesterday that happened for me in the Georgia state capitol.

And boy did it pay off.

OK, first the message, and then the back story:

#LockTheClock-fix-DST

Great, eh?

Only took me six years to come up with that. Jeesh.

OK, here’s the backstory:

For a while now I’ve been communicating with Rep. Wes Cantrell in Georgia. Like other legislators around the country, I immediately liked the guy. There are definitely both Democrats and Republicans who care about this, and the thing they always have in common is a tendency toward Good Government and being responsive to their constituents.

He told me the bill was coming up for a crucial hearing, and I have a bunch of frequent flier miles and hotel points, so I told him I’d be happy to fly down to testify. I’m so glad I went, because I got something really valuable in return: A clean, coherent message.

When I go to states to testify, I typically spend some time with the sponsor, and then sometimes there’s some impromptu lobbying, and quite often some talking to reporters. As a former reporter, I’m always happy to do that.

But I never really listen to what I’m saying, I just blurt out as many facts as I can. 

Yesterday, however, after the hearing, I got to sit down with Rep. Cantrell and a couple of other people who had been in the hearing room, including his wife. One of those in the room said that when I said one thing, the whole issue really crystalized for him.

The government is in charge of clocks. The clocks are killing people. It’s time to Lock The Clock.

And then one of the reporters who was there featured that snippet in his excellent report from the hearing. (Also, loved the Girl Scouts!) (Also, the local Fox station also did a fantastic story.)

So now I have it.

I got the hashtag #LockTheClock when I testified in Michigan, and now I have, essentially, a vision statement for the movement.

The first line is a given: The government, properly, has an interest in a unified and coherent system for time.

The second line is the gut punch. It may not have been clear when the Uniform Time Act of 1966 passed, but it is crystal clear now that the time change kills people every year.

And the last line is the call to action. 

Feel free to share that however you like to share these things.

 

Thanks to Rep. Cantrell, and all the people I talked to in Georgia, who were as lovely and helpful as could be. Thanks to Noor Younis for the background photo. 

And thanks to you for reading this, and helping to get that message out.

This just may be the year!

I’m out of order? You’re out of order! This whole thing is out of order!

I testified Monday in Wyoming on a very sensible Daylight Saving Time bill, and it sailed out of committee on an 8-1 vote.

(That one no vote was sort of smiling as he voted no. I think he was fine with it passing. He was distinguished — my way of saying he was really old — and I think he was voting to represent the constituency of people who remember when Standard Time was more common before the Uniform Time Act of 1966.)

My testimony was impromptu, mostly just answering questions. It was a respectful and legitimate conversation on the merits. I was very happy to hear the Farm Bureau testify that it supported the bill. The lobbyist from the bureau alluded to the tortured history that farmers have with Daylight Saving Time, and in a sense he saw this bill as a chance to put all that, finally, to rest.

Yesterday I testified in my home state of Colorado. The last time I testified in Colorado the proceedings were not so respectful as I was personally attacked by members of the House, and I was even told that my comments were out of order. I wanted to stand up, like Al Pacino, and yell: “I’m out of order??? You’re out of order! This whole place is out of order!!!!”

But I didn’t. I just apologized meekly and moved on. That was two years ago.

My plan going into this year was to speak truth to power, and if I got ruled out of order, well, maybe those interested can just read this or watch this video and see what I would have said before I get cut off.

In the end, I didn’t deliver these remarks below exactly. You can read an excellent writeup of what happened from Alex Burness in the Denver Post, but the comments below were the heart of what I wanted to say. What I learned after my testimony made me grow even more cynical about the process. See below for that.

 

 

Dear members of the kill committee,

My name is Scott Yates, and I’m the leader of the LockTheClock movement to end the insanity of changing the clocks twice per year.

I’ve testified all over the country on this topic, and the interchange with the lawmakers is always respectful, and very much on the actual topic of the significant health and safety concerns related to the government mandating that the entire population change all the clocks by an hour twice per year. Except in Colorado.

When I testified here in Colorado, I pointed out that the main reason that the ski industry said they were against fixing what is broken with time is that they needed morning sunshine to examine the ski lifts. I suggested that we all pitch in and buy them some flashlights.

That’s when I was ruled out of order.

So I won’t do that today. No way.

After that, I started doing some research, and came to a startling conclusion. In short, the whole “morning light” thing was not the real reason. I don’t know for sure what the real reason is, but I suspect money is involved. Once a ski resort has sold you a lift ticket, it doesn’t make any more money on you the more you ski. It only makes more money if you stop skiing and get into a resteraunt. The only way to get you off the mountain is to make it dark.

But as I sit here today, I don’t actually think the ski industry even cares that much about this issues. Indeed, I think that if you kill this bill today, what is happening is simply a raw expression of power.

I have been working on this issue for six years now, and I pay close attention to what’s happening around the country. Two states—Arizona and Hawaii—have locked the clock in Standard Time. Another 11 states have passed some kind of bill or resolution to stay in Daylight Time year round. Nearly all the rest have some kind of bill working to #LockTheClock. Only six states aren’t doing anything right now.

Also I’m working closely with the office of Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Rob Bishop, both of whom have federal bills that would Lock the Clock, or allow states to do so more easily. Both have lots of bipartisan support, and in this post-impeachment world where legislators are anxious to say that they indeed did get something done and the only way to do so is with a bipartisan bill, both offices are optimistic that they will pass something this year.

But I’d like to draw your attention to five of the states that have passed legislation to fix Daylight Saving Time:

  1. Washington,
  2. Oregon,
  3. California,
  4. Utah, and
  5. Maine.

From Mount Hood and Olympic Valley in the west to Sugarloaf in the east, or Jackson or Park City here in the Mountain Time Zone, there are a lot of ski resorts in those five states.

On Monday one of the 8 Yes votes in Wyoming was the representative whose district includes Jackson. No pushback at all. In the other states with a significant ski industry, absolutely no opposition. Nothing.

Does the sun interact with mountains differently in Colorado than it does in California? Do clocks work differently for skiers in Maine or Oregon?

Which leads me to think that maybe I was wrong, that the ski industry doesn’t really care about getting more people off the mountain and into restaurants? What if they don’t care about this issue that much at all?

Then what are we left with? What possible reason could the ski industry have in wanting to kill this bill year after year?

The only possible explanation I’m left with is that the ski lobbyists are killing this just because they can.

Larry Bird, one of the greats of the game of basketball, would sometimes deliver a hip check or make some unsportsmanlike comment, and not get called for it. Why would he do that? Precisely to show that he was the master in that building.

Similarly, I think the ski lobbyists use this topic simply as a way to flex.

Think about it from this perspective: Let’s say that you are doing a town hall in, say, Aurora, and a constituent stands up and says, “I understand that federal law may change, and we could have had a chance to vote on which time zone we like best, and you voted against giving us, the people who elected you, a voice. Why is that?” And then you respond with your voice trailing off: “The ski industry doesn’t have enough flashlights.” 

It is beyond absurd—it is the stuff that turns people off to politics, and especially in this era, that is a shame.

This is good government 101. The government regulates time. The way that it does so right now kills and injures people. There is no partisan angle, just historically bad management of clocks. Previous generations of politicians didn’t fully realize the high cost in life and money that clock-switching caused, but now we do know and yet we do nothing. Why?

Because of some lobbyists? Because of the raw exercise of power under the gold dome?

Imagine yourself again at that town hall, and when that constituent asks, imagine how great it would be for you to say: “You know what, I voted for you. I voted to give you that choice. It cost me politically, but I did it anyway because my job is to govern, and if we can’t even govern the clocks, then what does that say? So I voted to bring some sanity to the clocks, and to give you a chance to be heard.”

So I ask you today: Hold your head up high and vote yes.

Thank you very much.

Colorado-dst-testify

Postscript: How Democracy Dies, Just a Little

So, that was the testimony that I didn’t give, but my comments included a lot of that, but not the part calling out the lobbyists so directly.

Also, the reason that I had used Aurora as my hypothetical is that I thought the person most likely to buck the party leadership and vote would be Rhonda Fields of Aurora. If you click on that link you’ll see that she’s on the “Kill Committee” also known as “State Affairs.”

And she may have been willing to go her own way on that day. But she wasn’t on that committee on the day that bill was heard. 

Colorado is a pretty clean state. We have these great rules that, for example, make it so that every bill gets a hearing. Most states aren’t like that, and bills often just die with no hearing at all.

But there are still ways to kill bills, and one is to assign them to the “state affairs” committee, a group whose mandate is so nebulous and membership so small that it can kill just about anything.

So the ski industry lobbyists worked with the leadership of the State Senate to assign this bill to the kill committee, and then just to make sure it would die, the leadership changed the membership of the committee just for one day.

Yes, just on February 19th, 2020, Sen. Fields was not on that committee, and she was replaced by Sen. Kerry Donovan. 

Why Donovan?

Well, for one she’s from Vail. Not just from Vail, her family practically founded the town. She talked about how her brother worked as one of the guys who inspects ski lifts, so she was insulted at my “flashlight” comments.

In short, she was about as reliable of a vote as you could find who would be willing to carry water for the ski industry lobbyists.

I was sunk before I walked into the room.

But the fact that the ski lobbyists had to go to such extreme measures to kill the bill, I think means the gig will soon be up.

And besides, the amendment that we offered was a good one. It didn’t commit Colorado to do anything, just to take a preference poll that will only take effect if the federal law changes. Really, if the ski industry was smart they would agree to it so that they can try to convince Coloradans to stay in Standard Time year round. If daylight time would really mean death and dismemberment of ski employees, they can try to make that case to the voters and see if the voters believe it more than I do. Maybe the voters will buy it, they’ve believed less credible claims than that.

If the ski industry does not make that case, it will be stuck with the federal law, which most likely will be putting us into permanent Daylight Time.

The Denver Post story by Alex Burness was so great, because it put right into print so everyone now knows what was formerly known only by people who hang around the capitol a lot: The ski industry is super powerful in Colorado, and is stopping the legislature from doing what it would otherwise want to do.

Take on the ski industryNow that the very concept of going against the ski industry is out in the open and being talked about, it’s kind of like the Emperor with No Clothes. It only takes one person saying it publicly, and the gig is up.

Times are changing, and the time is going to be changing.

Model Daylight Saving Time State Legislation for 2020

There were two basic approaches through last year to fix DST:

  1. A bill that says the state will go into permanent Daylight Saving Time, either when neighboring states do it, or when it is allowed by the federal government to do so.
  2. A resolution calling on the federal government to allow the states to go into permanent Daylight Saving Time.

This year, we came up with a third approach in Colorado, which is to ask the voters which time zone they prefer once the feds pass an act.

I posted links to model language for all three below.

If you are a legislator currently working on this topic, well, you might consider this third way.

If you want to do it the first way, and think you have the votes to get it enacted… Go for it! (And let me know how I can help.) If you do not have the votes, however, maybe you could amend your current bill with this “Colorado” approach?

It is more substantial than a resolution, and it may help spur the change that we need out of Washington.

Model Daylight Saving Time bills – Neighboring state dependent

Some of the ones that have been enacted are:

Delaware

Maine

Oregon

Washington

You might also check in for the latest on this legislative page because there are a lot of these.

Model DST bills – Waiting on the Feds

The three enacted so far are:

Florida

South Carolina

Tennessee

Model DST resolutions

Utah

Kentucky

Arkansas

And one that I wrote back in 2015.

Third Way: Call for vote of the people before Federal Mandate

This is the complex, but legally sound way to ask for a vote of the people to figure out what permanent time they would prefer in the (likely) event that federal law suddenly takes away the clock-changing.

DST-colorado-ammendment

To download the PDF as created by the legislative lawyers in Colorado, click here.

If you have another approach, or think there is some language that would be helpful to legislators, please contact me.

And Good Luck! This really seems to be the tipping-point year.

Want to fight the obesity epidemic? #LockTheClock

Editor’s Note: I was happy to run a guest post from my own son, and now I’m happy to run one from a young person I’ve never met! (Don’t worry, I checked him out, and he’s a real person.) I will have another post about the amazing experience of being featured on the Daily Show soon, but wanted to get this post up first. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. As we saw in Illinois, student involvement can go a long way! —S.Y.

Carles-rabada-reZbnolscDo-unsplash
DST and Obesity (Photo from Unsplash)

The obesity epidemic is no joke.

The rate of obesity in the United States is rising among both adults and children. From 1990 to 2015, the rate of obesity among adults rose from less than 15 percent to almost 40 percent. Children are not immune either. CDC data indicates that 13.7 million children are obese.

The economic cost of obesity is also a concern. The CDC reported that it cost $147 billion in 2008 dollars.

Of course, the obesity debate is subject to partisan squabbling, pitting the “food police” versus those among the more libertarian camp. Thankfully, there is a bipartisan response to the epidemic that would anger neither of these groups. 

That response? #LockTheClock. 

Numerous studies have shown that shifts into and out of Daylight Saving Time (DST) increases laziness. One 2012 study looked at cyberloafing and found a positive correlation between cyberloafing and the spring transition into DST.

The spring shift into DST—when the light is moved into the afternoon—has been demonstrated to increase physical activity among children in the afternoon.  

This effect is not limited to children. Measuring the time before the fall back to Standard Time and the transition into DST, two researchers writing in the Journal of Environmental Psychology found that improving lighting conditions in the afternoon was likely to cause an increase in both cycling and walking. 

The researchers studied cycling and walking patterns in Arlington County Virginia from 2011 to 2016. Their findings showed that when compared to dark evening conditions, the hour of “extra sunlight” from DST “resulted in a 62 percent increase in pedestrians and a 38 percent increase in cyclists.”

An additional study from the University of Washington estimated the economic costs of the DST extension in 2007. This extension put the United States on DST for an additional month in the spring. The researchers used this change as a study period and found that the extension resulted in $250 million in health expenditure savings. And this was a conservative estimate, as they note that savings could have been as high as $8.33 billion. 

Why? Simply put, more daylight in the afternoon means that more people spend time outside instead of sitting and watching TV. People spent as much as 30 more minutes outside per day, compared to the previous DST-ST transition time. This translated to a 1-lb reduction in fat every 2.5 weeks. Not bad for just moving daylight around. 

So sure, DST won’t singlehandedly defeat the obesity epidemic. But considering everything else the DST-ST transitions do to people, locking the clock for permanent DST is a cost-effective way to incentivize exercise. 

So, Congress, your move. For the health of your constituents, please #LockTheClock.

 

20191119_232828Jonathan Helton is a student majoring in Law and Politics at Freed-Hardeman University. He is interested in miscellaneous types of public policy and has published articles about foreign aid and U.S. maritime legislation. While in high school, he was an active member of his debate club and had the pleasure of debating about DST during one year. This article represents some of the research he compiled. 

Sleepy Teens Agree: #LockTheClock. OK, Boomer?

Editor’s Note: I always love running guest posts, and especially love them when written by my son! Truth be told, this started out as a class assignment, but when he told me he linked to my site from his paper, I had to read it, and I love it. (Proud dad, etc.)

And by the way, this is becoming a key part of the #LockTheClock movement: One of the last arguments made against getting rid of clock changing is that we shouldn’t force students to go to school in the dark. My response has always been the same: They are already mostly going to school in the dark in rural areas and in the northernmost parts of the country, and it’s time to adjust the start times, especially for high schools. That’s why I say we should have a year-long phase-in time for fixing DST so that schools can look at what the clock time will be relative to the sun time for the next school year, and make adjustments that are right for their districts.

In some places, that may mean high school starts at 9:30 or even 10 a.m. Do you know one teenager who would object to that?

Anyway, here’s that post:

Dst-teens-need-sleep
Teens Need Sleep!
Unsplash photo by Kinga Cichewicz

Through no fault of their own, teens are sleep deprived.

The current education system in the US is not set up for the success of teens. Despite the plethora of evidence in support of later start time, there has not yet been the shift. While there are obstacles to the move, there is nothing that is big enough to outweigh the clear benefits of a later start. If the US wants to have successful teens, it needs to shift its school start times to later in the day. 

Teens need sleep, and lots of it, if they want to function at a normal or excellent level. In order for teens to get this sleep, they need to sleep in until later in the day. Teens don’t start secreting melatonin until, on average, 10:45 p.m. Additionally, teens don’t stop those secretions until eight in the morning. When combined this is a brutal double punch that prevents teens from going to bed early, and makes it difficult to wake up in the morning. The obvious solution here is not to change biology, but instead to accommodate for it by delaying school start times.

The consequences of teens not getting enough sleep are drastic. Teens are more likely to use cigarettes, drugs and alcohol. Teenage depression is shown to be closely tied to the amount of sleep that individuals get. In the age of higher than ever rates of depression, the only logical action seems to be taking steps to reduce this statistic. Additionally, the highest killer of teens, car crashes, is only aided and abetted by sleep deprived drivers; yet another example of avoidable suffering. 

To be fair, there are arguments for maintaining the current system. New start times would require a reworking of many transportation patterns. While this may have slight initial challenges, it is nothing that can’t be worked around. Additionally, many teenagers are responsible for getting themselves to school and would appreciate the later start. Despite the argument that teens would simply stay up later, the research finds something different. Some parents and professionals worry that a later ending time would leave students too worn out for their sports, arts, and other activities. In truth, however, the well rested students would train harder, think more creatively, and excel throughout the day. While the points exist against later start times, the reality is, in fact, in support of the pushback.

A later start time would also help solve the problem of Daylight Saving Time. One frequent argument for not moving into year-round daylight time is that it would force students into traveling to school while in the dark. Later start times would fix this, giving not only the benefits from the later start, but the benefits from permanent DST. The shift to later start times could be the event that triggers the move, or vice versa. Either way, everyone comes out on top.

Teens need sleep, it’s about time they were given it. Moving the school day later saves lives, improves performance, and generally improves life for the world’s future leaders.

Could Massachusetts Fix Daylight Saving Time?

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. 

Daylight saving time 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.

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

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.

Hospital-room
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?)

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:

  1. This is the official site for trying to do away with switching the clock in and out of Daylight Saving Time.
  2. 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.
  3. If you are a citizen and want to know what you can do to help, read this post.
  4. 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.

 

Buddy-sun-up

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.

 

Summer is almost over. Is DST clock-changing almost over, too?

First, welcome to visitors just finding us after reading the excellent story on NBC News.

NBC on #LockTheClock

I wanted to write a quick post so that new visitors know that we are indeed very active here, just not as active during the summer. The lack of posts this summer is because of… summer… not because my activity is any less.

In fact, it’s been the busiest summer ever for the #LockTheClock movement.

Just recently, a state legislator from Utah made a presentation to the Council of State Governments, and it went really well! I’ll have more about that coming up on this blog, but in short we may have switched a state over.

And the numbers for this blog, my very occasional email list, and my very modest FB page, all keep growing.

Many people also write to me and ask me what they can do to help, especially with state legislatures.

The answer is simple, but not that many people do it.

  1. Find your state legislators.
  2. Reach out to them by email, phone, social media, or show up to a town hall or whatever.
  3. Ask them, politely, if they would be interested in doing something to help sleep-deprived constituents.
  4. If yes, either present them with all the research on this site, or introduce them to me and I’ll take it from there.

I think the best way you can get something done is at the state level, with one exception: Mississippi.

It turns out that one guy from there, Sen. Roger Wicker, is single-handedly stopping federal legislation. There’s a nice bill with sponsors from both parties that’s currently stuck in the Commerce committee because Sen. Wicker won’t give it a hearing. Do you know him? Is he going to show up to an event in your town? If so, try to stop in and see him. I’ve been working on contacting him and so far it hasn’t gone well, but I don’t live in Mississippi. If you do, you could help a lot! (Contact me for more on how to do this if you are interested.)

That’s it for now, but do keep in touch!

Spring Forward 2019 in Europe is this Weekend, but Change is Coming!

It’s the weekend for the “Spring Forward” clock change in Europe. Everyone in all of the 28 member states set their clocks forward this weekend, and face the harsh reality of the alarm clock waking them up an hour earlier than their body is expecting on Monday morning.

(If you are in Europe, please think about going into work late on Monday, and #SleepInForSafety!)

And while we in the U.S. have hope that we will be able to #LockTheClock and stop changing our clocks twice per year, in Europe they have a solid plan, and 2021 is when the clock changing will end.

Now, I should be the first to say that this is not the most pressing issue in Europe right now. The Brexit issue is overwhelming, and the other issues like the Article 13 copyright rules are important and not to be dismissed. 

That said, this Monday in Europe will see a spike in heart attacks, strokes, traffic accidents, etc. The list goes on and on. So it was proper for the European Parliament to take up this issue, and I was glad to see that it passed so handily, 410 to 192.

So the argument that we should do nothing because there are other things we should do (probably the most common argument I hear, right after “The Farmers” as a reason not to fix the clocks) did not carry the day.

Big-ben-summertime-spring-forward
Maybe when Big Ben is fixed, the time will be fixed, too?
Photo by Guilherme Stecanella on Unsplash

And the parliament also did something that our U.S. Congress should take note of: They decided to give power to the individual countries. The year 2021 is the year that the clock-changing stops, and each country has until then to figure out what time zone it wants to stay in year-round.

(By the way, that is a PERFECT approach for the United States. Geography and parochial interests play a part in this discussion. What’s best for Maine may not be the best for Nevada.)

What really made me laugh in the arguments in Europe was a claim that somehow the Parliament wanted to be “Time Lords” by saying that we should not change the clocks twice per year.

“You would think they had other things to worry about without wanting to become time lords,” [John Flack] said, in an apparent reference to the BBC sci-fi drama Doctor Who.

So, right now the government makes us change clocks twice per year, but somehow ending that barbaric practice makes the government more of a Time Lord? I think it’s just the opposite.

As I told The New Yorker, the very concept of “time” is an agreement among people, just as is “government.” It seems like a good goal for both is to keep the health and safety of the people in mind first of all. If we know that changing clocks is bad for people — and we do — then stopping the practice of being a Time Lord twice per year is exactly the right thing for government to do.

So, good luck to my friends in Europe, especially those in England, where losing an hour of sleep seems like exactly the wrong thing at this perilous moment in history. Get as much sleep as you can, and know that we are all pulling for the right thing to happen for you with your government, and with your time, and we in the U.S. hope to follow your example and #LockTheClock.

Fixing Daylight Saving Time – It’s Getting Real

This is my fifth year advocating that we stop changing the clocks twice per year.

Majid-rangraz-643386-unsplash

Photo by Majid Rangraz on Unsplash

In some ways, it is getting easier.

For instance, I once compiled a bunch of research, but then kept adding to it in various blog posts. Then I finally had the brilliant idea that should have come to me two years earlier: Just make a single page that has all the best research about DST.

That makes it easier when I discover yet another study showing that driving in the dark after work is more deadly than in the morning, I can just add it to the page. 

Idaho on Line 3

It is also getting easier because instead of me calling legislators and trying to get them to take this issue seriously, I have legislators calling me, asking for advice, wanting research, model language, and just support. That is fun, and I wish I wasn’t so busy fixing fake news to be able to spend more time doing that.

But I can find some time, and was happy to get to testify in Connecticut recently.

It was great being there, and for those of you who (gasp!) don’t watch the whole thing, you should know that me being there may have helped broker a compromise that will help the bill pass, and help get the concept moving forward in Connecticut.

Indeed Connecticut is just one of more than two dozen states working hard on passing legislation. And they are getting further than ever before.

One small example: I’ve been working with a legislator in Wyoming for years, a very humble guy. He’s the opposite of the saying up there: “All hat, no cattle.”

In the past his bill died unceremoniously and quickly. This year his bill made it out of the House and came one vote away in the Senate. One vote! We’ll be back and get that one vote next year.

Getting the word out

The media has always been great about calling. Probably the highlight for me so far has been an interview with the New Yorker, but there could be a new highlight coming up soon. Stay tuned for that!

But I’m always happy to help local reporters around the country, and I always seem to be getting up extra extra early on the one day that I’d like to sleep in to do radio interviews. 

That’s fine, though, happy to help. Just be in touch.

The hard part about #LockTheClock

The hard part of trying to fix Daylight Saving Time is that it hasn’t happened yet. It was totally clear five years ago that this needed to end, and yet nothing happened.

It was still clear four years ago, but that’s when a handful of states started taking this seriously.

Three years ago when a California legislator passed a resolution based on what I had written, that was awesome, but it did not create the tidal wave I was hoping.

Two years ago when politics seemed so broken after Brexit and Trump, I actually had some hope that fixing DST might be a way to move the conversation forward. It wasn’t.

Last year saw a huge number of bills going through state legislatures, and at the end of the year saw California voters overwhelmingly pass a measure to try to fix all this.

But this year, once again, the clocks will move forward. Once again the alarm clock on that Monday after will seem like an insult piled on a historical travesty.

And next year will probably be the same.

 

But still, I have hope. Things really are getting better, it’s just that I am only one person, and I don’t have a big business coalition behind me. That is fine, and maybe even better in the big picture because it is clear this is a genuine initiative, not something created in a soulless conference room somewhere.

It may not come this year, but it is coming. It is a rebellion, and those are built on hope, so I’m told.

Hope

Legislation and Daylight Saving Time – The Magellan Straits

The 2019 legislative season is shaping up to be the busiest ever in the fight to #LockTheClock and fix Daylight Saving Time for good.

So busy and so hot, in fact, that it’s making me lose sleep.

Do you have a trick when you can’t sleep? I do. I listen to an audio book. The trick for me is to find one that is boring enough that it lulls you to sleep, but not so boring that your mind wanders instead of listening.

I was trying to fall back asleep in the wee hours this morning, so I listened to a book about the Middle Ages. I came in at a section about Magellan.

Ferdinand-Magellan

He was, of course, the Portuguese sailor who was the first to sail from the old world around the new world, and then back home going west the whole way. He was the first to circumnavigate the planet, importantly around the bottom of South America where the straits are now named for him.

(Well, his expedition made it around the world, anyway. He didn’t personally make it, having run afoul of some native chiefs on a Pacific island unhappy with how the sailors were taking advantage of the native women.)

He set out with five ships and 270 men. One ship and 18 men made it back to Europe, and when they got home they had lots to tell about things that had never been seen by Europeans before, including penguins and bananas.

And they also noticed something strange: Although they had kept meticulous logs of their days away, their calendar was off by one day from the calendars kept in Europe.

This was the first group to circumnavigate the planet, proving that it was round, something that had been theorized by people going back to the ancient Greeks.

But none of those theories, and none of the astronomers or big thinkers of the day had figured out the need for an International Date Line. It took actually sailing around the world to make clear the need for that.

No Date Line?

Just to be clear, the planet spun on its axis for eons with no need for an International Date Line. That line was only needed so that as people who kept calendars traveled around the world, they could all keep in synch. The idea of the calendar, and the need to keep it in synch with other calendars, is entirely a human invention.

So it is with time zones. I’ve written about this before, and the history is clear on this. We have time zones because as the trains started zipping across the land, we had a need for uniform times. No longer could the time be set by the one guy in town who set the town clock and looked up at the sun to decide when it was noon.

That’s why time zones are controlled in the U.S. by the Department of Transportation.

Time Zones Kill

With all that in mind, I’m now volunteering to help legislators from around the country (when I can spare the time from my day job of fixing fake news.)

With all of them, I share the research. I talk about the politics (including the story of the legislator in Arizona who tried to start changing the clock twice a year and was so overwhelmed with angry constituent response that he held a press conference to announce he was killing his own bill.)

And the bigger message that I try to share with all of them is just this: The very notion of “time” is just an agreement among people. Shouldn’t we strive to live in a world where such an agreement does not kill people?

I mean, imagine this scenario:

 

Bob: Hey, Ralph, want to get lunch? Say 1 p.m.?

Ralph: Well, I’d love to get lunch, but if we do it at 1, there’s a chance I’ll have a heart attack and die. Can we do it at 12:30 instead?

Bob: No way.

Ralph: Why not?

Bob: The farmers.

 

People who have looked into the issue (and fans of John Oliver) know that the farmers have nothing to do with Daylight Saving Time, and never have, except as a giant PR stunt and a scapegoat.

No, the reason we are forced to change clocks twice a year is, well, inertia. We do it because that’s what we do.

All the science, all of it, says that changing clocks is a bad idea, and yet we keep doing it.

But with the flurry of activity in the state legislatures here in the U.S., and in the European Parliament, and the vote by the people of California, it is becoming clear that the clock is ticking for mindless clock-changing.

And it can’t come soon enough. It will be too late for Magellan, but it’s not too late for us.

Do not take New Hampshire’s plan to fix DST for granite!

OK, sorry. The headline is a small play on the fact that New Hampshire is the Granite State.

I am a huge fan of New Hampshire. My most famous relative lived there for decades, and donated her home and some acreage to the state, and it is now a lovely and quaint state park.

Shieling-forest-daylight-saving-time

Our children will have more time after school to hike the Shieling Forest in Peterborough
if we have Daylight Time year-round. Photo from this FB Group.

 

My relative was Elizabeth Yates, the writer. She wrote dozens of books in her 95 years, the most famous of which was Amos Fortune, Free Man.

She wrote that book after being inspired by a headstone she discovered on a walk through Jaffrey, New Hampshire. It read:

Sacred
to the memory of
Amos Fortune
who was born free in
Africa a slave in America
he purchased liberty
professed Christianity
lived reputably and
died hopefully
Nov. 17, 1801
Aet. 91

With just that, she went to the state librarian in Concord and researched as much as she could about him, and then wrote a piece of historical fiction that was so lyrical, touching and powerful that it was awarded the top U.S. prize for youth fiction, the Newbery Medal for 1951.

A slave to the clock?

What does this have to do with Daylight Saving Time?

Perhaps just this: As the saying goes,  “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.”

I wouldn’t presume to say that fixing daylight saving time is the most important social justice issue of our time, or the most significant freedom and states-rights topic of the day… but it is a real issue.

It wasn’t, of course, in Amos Fortune’s day. Clocks back then were set to a town clock, and that was set by someone in the town figuring out when the sun was most straight overhead.

After the train came through, train conductors wanted synchronized time, so the Department of Transportation took over the regulation of time, and does so to this day.

When my great aunt Elizabeth Yates was a small girl, there was no DST, just Eastern Time. When we entered W.W. I, we started switching the clocks twice a year to stay in synch with the Brits, who themselves did it to stay in synch with the Germans. Why the Germans did it is a matter of some controversy.

As a country we Locked The Clock as soon as the war was over, and then we started switching twice a year again in W.W. II.

(Notice that “The Farmers” are not part of that history. They were not, and never have been and anyone who says they are is just repeating fake news.)

Why are we talking about DST?

Life in New Hampshire is just so much better than it was in the old days. People aren’t enslaved, and don’t have to purchase their own freedom. If you get influenza, you probably won’t die — that wasn’t the case 100 years ago.

So the things that we have to fix these days seem, perhaps, a bit prosaic, compared to the days when we did things like send a teacher into space, as we did with the great New Hampshire citizen Christa McAuliffe, God rest her soul.

But historians like Ken Burns of New Hampshire know that sometimes even small things can mean a lot.

So, what is this small thing we are fixing?

It’s the clock. Twice a year the government makes us change it. Why? It really isn’t the farmers. We change it, basically, because that is what we have done for as long as most people alive can remember. 

And while it won’t save as many lives as George Whipple, (born in Grafton County, he’s the guy who figured out how to keep people from dying from anemia) fixing DST will save lives.

How? The research is very clear that the spring-forward change is deadly. 

In a state as far north as New Hampshire, jolting an entire populace awake an hour before their bodies are ready for it causes traffic accidents, heart attacks, strokes, epileptic seizures, workplace accidents. Even judges are more harsh in their sentencing.

Worried about school kids going to school in the dark? Well, kids don’t die from that, and if the legislature wants to take up the idea of starting school a bit later, I’m sure you’ll have kids and families fully behind you.

The thing we actually need to be worried about these days is childhood obesity. The experts there tell us that another hour of daylight after school gives kids that much more time to play outside, not sitting inside looking at a device.

Regarding House Bill 567

Now, it is the case that it would be pretty disruptive for New Hampshire to be out of synch with Massachusetts and Maine. That’s why the bill being considered now smartly is following the trend of other bills around the country that say states should move as a group.

It’s very good planning to pass this measure right now. I hate to be the one to point this out, but Massachusetts may not be as neighborly, and could just pass a bill to #LockTheClock and not pay attention to if other nearby states are going to do it or not.

If New Hampshire passes this bill right now, you’ll know that you’ll be set if your noisy neighbor to the south takes action.

And there’s a good chance Massachusetts will act. They performed an excellent service for the whole country by really researching the topic in depth. The report they issued after interviews with the best experts is that staying on Daylight Time year-round is the best overall for everyone.

The panel also recommended that Massachusetts move to year-round DST in coordination with other New England states, but that could just end up being Connecticut and Rhode Island. 

So this bill is the exact right solution at the exact right time.

Passing this bill will follow in the tradition of my great aunt, Amos Fortune, and so many other great residents of New Hampshire to lead on an important issue, and not just wait for the rest of the New England states to act first and then play catch-up.

New Hampshire has a proud tradition of going first in the nation with the primaries. Passing this bill will give New Hampshire a chance to also go first in bringing some sanity to the government’s mandate of us moving the clock around twice a year.

If you’d like to be a part of history, come to the hearing on Wednesday!

Daylight Saving Time and the 2019 Legislative Sessions

This is the fifth legislative session that I’ve been paying attention to the Daylight Saving Time issue, and I can tell already that this one is going to be huge.

David-hertle-766994-unsplash

Photo by David Hertle on Unsplash

The quality and thoughtfulness of the bills is great, and the quantity seems much greater for the first couple weeks of January than I can ever remember.

To what do we owe this surge?

  • The overwhelming victory in California was certainly part of it. The vote was technical, obtuse, and didn’t offer immediate relief from clock-changing madness, and still it passed with more than 60 percent of the vote. I give credit to the farmers and the housewives. 😉
  • Also perhaps is the moves the European Union is making to scrap what they call “Summer Time.”
  • And it may have been Florida, which passed into law the notion that if the feds ever fix the national law, Florida would very much like to just move to permanent DST. One of the U.S. Senators from that state, wanting to catch up to the people he’s leading, immediately said that he would try to fix the federal law. So far all we’ve seen on that front is a press release, but at least that’s more than we had before! 
    (I’ve decided not to grumble too much that the research in the press release from Rubio’s office shares more than just a passing resemblance to the research page on my site. A thank you card might have been nice.)

Other than that, there’s no single thing. The notion that we should #LockTheClock is just catching on.

Legislation getting smarter

And legislators are getting smarter about how to pass bills. For instance, in Wyoming and Connecticut, legislators are proposing that they go to permanent Daylight Saving time (which, for reasons that have to do with the intractability of federal law, involve moving themselves one time zone to the east and then declaring themselves on Standard time year round.) But both of those bills say their state should do it only if neighboring states join in. That’s a solid idea that has been floated around the country before, and may help those bills get passed.

New Mexico had come very close to passing a really smart bill that would have done things properly, but that bill died an ignoble death. I saw it, it wasn’t pretty.

As a guy who’s been working this issue for a long time now, I have some institutional history. So one of the things I need to do is try to contact the sponsor of the new bill in New Mexico, a guy named Bobby Gonzales, and encourage him to talk to Cliff Pirtle. They are in opposite chambers and opposing parties, but if there ever was an issue that is nonpartisan, it’s this one.

PirtleMaybe Bobby can do what Cliff could not do, in spite of his truly amazing beard, and that is to convince Gail Chasey that fixing DST is not some Nixonian plot, as she currently thinks it is.

(Yes, it will make you cynical, but one person really can thwart the will of the people, and in New Mexico that one person is Gail Chasey.)

Working together, we can make this work

If you are a legislator with a Daylight Saving Time bill, or if you are just thinking about one, drop me a line. I’m happy to talk to you privately, to come and testify, to do whatever it takes to help you.

Although there are not a lot of lobbyists working on this issue, there are a few that can crop up, especially from the golf industry. I can let you know what their interests are, and how you can work with them so they won’t fight you, and instead work to help you.

…

If you are a citizen, why not contact your local legislator? They always love hearing from real constituents. Well, almost always. They for sure will like it on this issue.

If you aren’t sure who that is, just look them up here. Then contact them and say that you really don’t think we should be changing the clocks twice a year for a bunch of reasons backed by research.

If you do that, and get a good response, let me know about it and I’ll highlight it on this blog.

If you happen to live in a state that has a bill on DST working this year (you can find them here) then for sure contact your own legislators AND the sponsors, and tell them how glad you are they are working on a bill to fix this.

And one word of advice: Let’s say the bill in your state is to move the state permanently to standard time, and not daylight time as you’d prefer. I say that you should still support that bill because if we can make ANY change, we can show that change can happen. Let’s get the ball rolling on change first, and then get it exactly right after that.

 

Thanks for joining me on this journey!

California Prop 7 – Are the Farmers and Housewives Against It?

I’ve been getting a ton of interest from reporters and voters in California of late because of Proposition 7, that would set California on a path to stay in Daylight Saving Time year-round.

To be prepared, I did a bit of research, and was so excited about what I found I had to share it with you here.

California-housewife

Image courtesy of the Library of Congress of a California “Housewife” during WWII.

It does seem odd to have to vote on Prop 7 in 2018. It’s got that weird wording that makes it clear this is the first in what would be a long series of steps needed to #LockTheClock.

So why is it needed at all?

Because of Prop 12, approved by voters in 1949.

Check it out:

DST-Prop-12

You see, just after WWII, Californians had to vote to be able to have the newfangled Daylight Saving Time, which was a new version of War Time. That’s what we used during both the world wars, mostly in an effort to stay in sync with the Brits, who in turn did it because the Germans did it first. Why the Germans did that is not agreed on, at all.

Californians had twice before rejected the idea of Daylight Saving Time, in 1930 and again in 1940, but the war changed a lot. For instance, a LOT of women went to work in the war effort, like the one pictured above. The state also ballooned in size during and after the war, though it was still tiny compared to today.

So when the voters of California, especially the women, read in the information provided by the state this argument against Daylight Saving Time, well, it didn’t go so well.

DST-Housewives

My hunch is that a lot of women didn’t particularly like being called “THE HOUSEWIFE” in the first place.

And once again, the poor farmer was used in the argument on the vote no side:

Dst-farmer-prop-7

As I’ve written about, the Farmer has never wanted to have any part of this debate, and yet the PR types love to trot out THE FARMER whenever they want to get their own way.

So, the measure passed, which must have made Californians feel like they were really living in the future.

But, because 1949’s Prop 12 was, like all the other propositions Californians vote on every year, ensconced in the Constitution, the only way to fix it is with another proposition. Hence 2018’s Prop 7.

Does Prop 7 Go Against The Will of the Voter from 1949?

Hard to say. All we know is that the voters wanted more daylight later in the day during the summer.

If they had been asked: Would you like more daylight near the end of the day in the summer AND the winter? I think there’s a pretty good chance they would have said yes and we wouldn’t be stuck trying to figure out how to fix the clock in our cars on Monday morning, but somehow that question never even came up.

So, there you have it. Just like your forefathers and foremothers in California in 1949, it’s up to you, the California voter of today to fix the clock for good.

Proposition 7 Daylight Saving Time in California — Pros and Cons

It’s been clear to readers of this blog that for years public sentiment has been on the side #LockTheClock — ending clock changing for Daylight Saving Time — but the evidence has been a bit scattered and anecdotal.

That’s about to change.

Roberto-nickson-g-715411-unsplash

photo byRoberto Nickson (@g)

Californians get to vote on Proposition 7 — The Permanent Daylight Saving Time Measure — and we’ll finally have some clear data to show to the world about how the public feels about this issue.

Now, it can be a bit confusing figuring out exactly what this proposition is, and the proposition doesn’t actually do a whole lot. It basically sets some governmental wheels in motion that may lead to an end to the clock changing.

But what it can do for sure is let lawmakers in California and around the world know exactly how popular it is to have the government force all of us to get all goofed up twice a year.

So, what are some of the pros and cons of voting on Prop 7?

Pros – Reasons to vote Yes on Prop 7

 

  1. Let politicians know that you are watching.
  2. Send a message to farmers that you know that farmers have ALWAYS been against DST clock changing, and you support them and you like eating.
  3. Let the world know that science and research should drive our decisions about how we set the clocks, not “That’s the way we’ve always done it”-ism.
  4. Give yourself a little hope that government can get something right.
  5. Put California in the spot of leading on this issue, something that Florida is trying to steal away. Of course, Arizona, Hawaii and Puerto Rico are already way ahead of everyone on this one.
  6. Great way to vote for something that will not cause a big fight with your crazy uncle who lives in [insert Michigan, or wherever he lives here] on Facebook.
  7. It’s lucky Number 7!

Cons – Reasons to vote No on Prop 7

  1. You like suddenly having to go home from work in the dark on the Monday after the “Fall Back” time change.
  2. You enjoy that groggy feeling on the Monday morning after the “Spring Forward” time change.
  3. You are in favor of traffic accidents, workplace accidents, strokes, heart attacks, decreased productivity, etc.
  4. You think it’s best to be on the losing side of history.
  5. You think Kaiser Wilhelm got a bad wrap in WWI in Germany, and you want to see his legacy live on.
  6. You enjoy figuring out how to reset the clock in the car, and on the microwave.
  7. You want California to be known as the state that votes for crazy stuff, not stuff that people actually want.

So, there you have it. 

If you live in California, tell all your friends and relatives to vote yes on this one, and if you don’t, this would be a great time to keep in touch with your California pals and tell them to vote yes to make the whole world a better place.

Time Change? Just Don’t Do It!

Editor’s note: Is something going on with DST? Suddenly my inbox is packed, lots of requests for interviews, etc.

Oh, yeah!

I’m on the road today, but will be back in Denver tonight and will try to get one of my own blog posts up soon, with highlights of all the action this year.

But for now, here’s another guest post, and a fun one at that. – Scott

 

by Ron Halvorson

Ron Halvorson
Ron Halvorson

It seemed like summer hadn’t even started when June 21 rolled around and the days began to shorten. By September I got that all-too-familiar feeling in the pit of my stomach: eternal darkness is imminent. All hope is lost.

Oregon’s winter months are tough enough for those of us who suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder. We don’t need any added aggravation, but that’s what the biannual time change is, an added aggravation – especially in the fall.

True, setting the clock back doesn’t decrease the actual amount of daylight in the day, but when your clock says 4:30 p.m. and it’s already dark, it certainly feels that way. Add to that the emotional and physiological effects just from disrupting your body’s routine; one has to wonder if changing the clock is worth it. I say it’s not.

A few weeks ago, as I pondered my impending fate, I had a brilliant thought: “What’s to keep me from not changing?” Just because everyone else does it doesn’t mean I have to. Imagine how great it would be to cruise through the time change like nothing happened, because for me, it didn’t.

Hao-zhang-506551-unsplash
Credit: Photo by Hao Zhang on Unsplash

How would this look? The most obvious challenge is that everyone else would be operating in one time zone while I would be in another. So what? As a retiree I don’t have that many scheduled activities throughout the day. I would just have to make sure
that when there was a meeting time, for example, I changed it to an hour later to fit my personal time zone. If for some reason I muffed it, at least I wouldn’t be late because I’d be an hour early.

Sundays would be great as instead of rising for our “too-early” church meeting at 9:30 a.m., we would go at 10:30. This would be much more reasonable, especially for my night-owl wife, who has agreed to try this tack with only a little reluctance. My challenge
will be to make sure she doesn’t “fall back” anyway, in spite of what the clocks say, just to stay up later!

For the first time in my life I’m excited about the upcoming time change because I will refuse to participate, and I’m eager to see how this is going to work out. I wonder if others are doing this as well.

Maybe this will start a movement. Who’s to keep the populace of an entire state or even nation from doing this if they choose to? Obviously this wouldn’t bring relief to someone with a regular day job who abhorred coming home in the dark. They’d still be at the mercy of their employer’s schedule.

At the very least I’ll get to nurture my rebellious side.

Daylight Saving Time and pop culture

A couple of years back, I published what I thought was a pretty complete guide to all of the videos and memes about Daylight Saving Time.

Well, the creators of the world keep creating.

But it’s not just kids goofing around with meme-makers. Questions about DST are creeping into all parts of our culture, including this gem from the Cartoon Network:

If kids grow up knowing from cartoons that changing the clocks around is a “completely pointless practice” then I know that it’s just a matter of time before we fix it, sort of like gay marriage and gun laws.

But for this year, we are stuck with it. (Blame Trump, really.)

Well, be sure to check out that original collection, but here are some new additions that are worthy of a look or a share here in the 100th year of DST in the United States. Enjoy!

Dst-tweet-boss

 

Dst-facebook

 

Dst-arizona-toast

 

Dst-time-travel

 

Dst-cat

 

  Dst-devices

 

Dst-why-the-hell

Florida and Daylight Saving Time – Hope from the Sunshine State in 2018?

In the years I’ve been paying attention to this issue, I’m fascinated about how it seems there’s always one state per year that leads the way in terms of public attention to the ridiculous clock-changing done in the name of Daylight Saving Time.

Last year it was Massachusetts, which deserves great thanks. True, all they did was study the issue, but at least the study got done. Most other bills on the topic just die. This bill calling for a study actually passed and the study got done.

And the study is terrific, because it says that year-round DST would be the best for the people of the Bay State.

Now Massachusetts basically waits for some other New England states to move forward. I’ll be doing all I can to help, but maybe the people of New England are just too busy praying that NFL referees keep treating Tom Brady well. 

Florida in the Sunshine

Dst-florida-sunshine

This year, the majority of the press and social media attention seems to be going to Florida.

I’m not exactly sure why. I was a reporter a long time ago, so I know it’s always a bit random, but figuring out why one state gets all the attention, when other states are taking more substantive action, is a mystery.

For whatever reason, Florida is it. I’ve read dozens of stories from the state, and the bills both actually passed their first hurdle, which is a lot more than a lot of bills can say.

For the record, the two bills are:

  • The “Sunshine Protection Act” has a cool title, but actually does a smaller thing, which is to move the Florida panhandle (now in Central Time) into Eastern Time with the rest of the state.
  • FL H1013 does not have a cool name, but this is the bill that actually could move the state into year-round DST.

Both bills do something important that many bills around the country do not: They recognize that the federal government needs to change the rules.

They need to watch out though. A couple of noisy legislators from the Panhandle could easily kill your bill, and there’s already some noise being made about that.

DST Nerds-Only Section

Right now the federal law only allows a state to opt out of Daylight Saving Time and stay in Standard Time year-round, which is what Arizona, Hawaii, and our American brothers and sisters in Puerto Rico have done.

A state or territory can’t opt for year-round DST.

What a state potentially could do is opt to move one time zone to the east, and then opt to stay in standard time. That’s what Massachusetts would do if it follows the recommendations of the study. That’s what New Mexico could have done if the bill wasn’t killed by one person.

The Florida bills take the more modest step of politely asking Congress to make a change to the law so that a state can opt for year-round DST, and then Florida would make that change.

It’s a pretty low risk situation for lawmakers in Florida:

Vote yes, and if Congress takes bipartisan action on a bill that makes sense and is then signed by the President, then something will happen. Put another way, if monkeys fly out of my ass then we can have tea at Buckingham Palace!

End of DST Nerd Section, back to Florida

Why are the bills in Florida getting such attention? 

Maybe it’s the story.

A citizen lawmaker, in this case Sen. Greg Steube of Sarasota, went to his barber shop and heard a barber talking about how hard the time-change was on his kids, and then on the whole family.

So Steube decided to do something about it!

That’s fantastic, the American way, etc. I’ve written about that before, with an assemblyman in California who got the idea from his dentist or a representative in Connecticut who got the idea at a Thanksgiving dinner.

Of course the problem is that pesky federal law.

I’m also wondering why it is that Florida’s getting attention this year and didn’t as much a couple of years ago. Rep. Kristin Jacobs carried a bill in 2015, and while it died, I noticed that she’s not a co-sponsor of either of the bills this year. Why is that?

Hey, Greg and Kristin, you two should talk! I hope the fact that you are in different parties won’t keep you from helping each other!

In fact there have been bills on this topic dating back to at least 2008, so there’s a rich history here.

I stayed up all night coming up with an ending for this post. Then it dawned on me.

Sorry about that.

In spite of my pessimistic view of what can and can’t get done in Washington these days, I do think the approach proposed in Florida is a good one.

At some point in the future maybe D.C. will be less dysfunctional and we can get the law changed. Until then, the bills in Florida do a couple of important things:

First, they send a message that states should have the option of staying in year-round Daylight Saving Time. That’s what the research says would be the best for health, best for business, best for people.

And second, if and when Congress does take action, Florida won’t have to wait an extra year after the federal law gets changed to make the switch. It will already be done.

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