State Plans

Hey, Nate Glubish, You Can Fix The Clock for the Whole World

July 26, 2021

Dear Nate,

I hope you don’t mind me calling you that. I know you are a duly elected member of Alberta Legislative Assembly, but you are also Canadian, so my guess is that you are not overly formal.

Recently the news came out that you are going to call for a referendum to ask voters what they think about Daylight Saving Time. You have good reason for wanting to do this:

“Albertans are passionate about this and a change on this matter should not be taken lightly. How Albertans calculate time affects literally everyone in this province, as well as others beyond our borders.”

Indeed, you are right that people are passionate about this issue, even in the under-stated country of Canada.

You are also right that how Albertans deal with time could affect others outside of Alberta. Or, you could be.

You went on to say that the wording of the question has not yet been decided. The wording is so important, and that’s why I am writing to you today in this public format.

You see, there has been a lot of polling done, and there have even been a handful of votes. In every poll and in every vote, it’s clear that the people would like to see something done to fix the madness of changing the clocks twice per year.

The question is: What should be done?

This is where I would respectfully submit to you the question you can ask that will help make some actual progress in Alberta, and as you alluded to, in the other provinces and I would say there may even be a lesson that those of us in the U.S. may listen to.

So, what should the question be? How about this:

If Alberta moves to stay in one time zone all year round, what time zone should it be? Permanent Standard Time (what we have in the winter) or Permanent Daylight Saving Time (what we have in the summer)?

With wording like that you will take away the ambiguity that has existed in so many other referenda and polls. I suppose you could make it two questions: 1. Should we keep changing the clock twice a year? and 2. If not, which time zone should we lock into?

Can you ask two questions? Maybe you just want to keep it to one. If so, then asking which time zone Alberta should lock into is the one that will get you the useful information you need, and will be instructive for politicians in all of the countries that still practice the barbarism of changing the clock twice per year.

If you do ask that question, my hunch is that it will come in at about 80-20 for permanent Daylight Time. In Alberta, a lot of people are already going to work/school in the dark during the winter, so if it is an hour of it still being dark in the morning, meh.

With Permanent DST, at least people will have a bit of sunshine when they get off of work, and the kids will have a little bit of time in the daylight after school to play outside.

I’ve been wrong before, and perhaps people will vote for permanent Standard Time. There will still be plenty of evening light in the summer, and the mornings won’t be quite as bleak in the winters.

There’s plenty of science on both sides of the issue, so asking voters what they think is a great idea, and a way to actually make some progress in Alberta, and around the world.

Happy to talk to you directly if I can be of service,

Your fellow citizen of the Mountain Time Zone down in the States,

I remain,

Yours,

-Scott

Ohio and Daylight Saving Time—Will They Pass The Buckeye?

May 10, 2021

Close readers of this blog my note that I have not written in a while. Sorry about that. Just busy with my day job and personal life.

I’m being prompted back to life by the helpful staff of some legislators in Ohio. As is my custom, when I can’t testify in person and instead am required to submit written testimony, I just write it up and put it here on my blog.

I also try not to just repeat the same thing in every state. I’ve seen that done, and people can really tell.

OK, here goes:

Photo by Benjamin Suter on Unsplash

Dear members of the State and Local Government Committee,

Many of you were in the legislature just two years ago when Ohio passed a resolution that was essentially similar to this. And you may be asking why we are back doing this again?

Fair question. Let me answer with an analogy:

When you were a kid, did you ever ask a parent for, say, some ice cream? And they said no, but when you asked a second time they said yes?

Same kind of thing here. Congress has the power to give America some ice cream in the form of no longer needing to change the clock twice per year. They didn’t give it to us in the last session, so now we are back, and we want that ice cream.

Of course, this is ice cream that comes with a benefit of saving lives. You may remember all the stats from last time, and the research done since then makes it even more clear: The “Spring Forward” time change is deadly. Heart attacks, strokes, car accidents, the whole list. The research that has come out in the last two years is that deaths and hospitalizations for just about every cause go up as a direct result of the government stealing an hour of sleep from the whole population one weekend in March.

So, yes, this is a good thing to do. Saves lives. Makes people happy. And everyone wants it. A recent national poll shows 68 percent approval for passing a bill to #LockTheClock. Only 14 percent opposed.

And now, if I might… a quick personal appeal:

That poll showed wide approval for this change to the law, and the numbers were almost identical among people of both parties.

Also, this issue is blessedly bi-partisan. Washington and Delaware have passed bills, as have Wyoming and Arkansas. Sponsors of the current federal bill include Marco Rubio of Florida and Ed Markey of Massachusetts.

In most states, the bills that I see do well have broad bipartisan support.

This resolution, however, looks like it has only Republican cosponsors.

Really?

I want this resolution to pass, sure, but what I want even more is for our country to heal. To do that, we need to find some common ground and work from there.

This issue is that common ground. There is simply no spin that can turn this into a conservative or liberal issue. Even Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren said they want to #LockTheClock.

So I’m directly challenging every single one of the co-sponsors to go out and recruit one Democratic co-sponsor. If you can’t work together on this, what can you work together on?

New Daylight Saving Time Polling Shows Change is Coming

March 18, 2021

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.

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!

Permanent Standard Time vs. Daylight Time — The Ultimate Guide

February 15, 2021

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:

Wayne’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.

Kansas Testimony on Daylight Saving Time Resolution

February 11, 2021

Testifying in Kansas, I think my seventh state already this year, but this Sunflower State wanted written testimony first, so I thought I’d just share it here, too…

Dear Chairman Barker, Vice Chair Arnberger, Ranking Member Ruiz, Rep. Francis, and members of the Federal and State Affairs Committee,

My name is Scott Yates from the neighboring state of Colorado. I’m the leader of the international movement known as #LockTheClock, otherwise known as a guy who blogs about Daylight Saving Time as a hobby.

I’m sorry I’m not there in person with you, though I did very much enjoy a visit with my son last week, and Rep. Francis was a gracious host.

I’ve been at it for seven years now, and I can tell you that this year the activity is off the charts. When I first started there was just me and a few other sleep-deprived people complaining on the internet. Now we have 15 states who have passed something to fix the barbarism of DST clock changing, and the dozens of bills introduced this year are flying through committees.

In previous years a couple of legislators reached out to me, but most of the bills didn’t go anywhere, and the general feeling was that nobody wanted to be the state that goes first.

Then the last couple of years a lot of legislators reached out, and a lot more bills passed.

This year something shifted and now we are to the point where states don’t want to be the last one to pass something.

Also, my inbox is packed nearly every day with notes from staffers of Representatives and Senators in D.C. A couple of years ago there was no traction, and this year there are at least three bills circulating and there’s a bit of a competition to see which will be the first to get a hearing.

One thing I heard loud and clear from bill sponsors jn Washington is that the absolute best way to get cosponsors of federal bills is for the sponsor to go to lawmakers from one of the 15 states that have passed something to fix DST. Your state, as made clear by your legislature, wants us to fix this. Will you join us? That was the pitch, and that pitch worked more often than it didn’t.

Which brings me to HCR 5008. Is this resolution a good idea? In my view, it is the perfect idea.

In other states there are a lot of arguments that come up around bills, and they are pointless arguments. The federal law simply doesn’t allow states to do what all those bills want to do, and that’s to lock into DST. The bills pass anyway, and essentially what happens is that they become like a resolution, a signal to Washington D.C. that a particular state is demanding action.

That’s why a resolution is perfect. It avoids the mechanics of a pointless law, and gets right to the heart of the matter.

One other short note about potential opposition to this resolution from those who think that Kansans should opt for permanent Standard Time:

If your constituents wanted that, you probably would have heard that. If you haven’t heard that, then that’s probably instructive. The science is decidedly mixed. Some sleep researchers say that permanent Standard Time is better for sleep while others say it is negligible. Other research in the fields of adolescent exercise, mental health, traffic safety, crime and workplace productivity say that Permanent DST would be better. The one thing they all agree on, and why this resolution is such a good idea, is that it helps with what all science agrees on: that the twice-yearly clock changes—especially the one in the Spring—are deadly. The research on that is unassailable.

That said, I am working with the U.S. Congress to ensure that if in the future you decide that you want to switch from permanent Daylight Time to permanent Standard Time, you will be able to do that with as little hassle as possible.

In the meantime, this resolution is another step along the road to end the historical anachronism that is the “Spring Forward” time change, and will make it easier for everyone to get to church on time, even on the time change weekends.

With that, thanks again for your time, and I am happy to answer any questions that you might have.

p.s.: I got a couple of good questions, and all of them are basically answered on the Research Page. Also, thanks again to Rep. Francis for bringing up this issue.

DST Is Getting Fixed Everywhere But North Dakota, and It’s My Fault

February 6, 2021

I live in Denver, and recently had my first overnight trip in more than a year, going to Nebraska and Kansas to testify and talk to legislators (and to… you know… get out of the house and have a bit of father-son road-trip bonding time.)

And now I’m feeling really bad that I didn’t make the trip just a bit longer.

I knew that North Dakota had a vote Friday, and I thought about driving north from Lincoln, making a quick stop in Pierre, and then heading to Bismarck to talk to legislators about their Daylight Saving Time bill.

The mistake I made was looking at the forecast, which showed that the expected high was going to be 9 degrees above zero. If you have to designate that a temperature is above or below zero… that’s cold. And that was the high, and didn’t count the wind chill, and from previous trips I know how the wind blows up there.

If I had as much fur as this North Dakota bunny, the bill might have passed!

Photo by Atharva Tulsi on Unsplash

Well, I didn’t go, and the bill lost by ONE VOTE. Put into temperature terms, it was “one below.”

The issue was that some legislators were concerned that if they lock the clock, it might be confusing for people who have business over state lines, or live and work on two sides of the state line.

If I had only met the sponsor before he wrote up his bill, I might have guided him in how to get a DST bill passed.

And if I hadn’t have been such a wimp about the weather, I probably could have convinced just one legislator that the bill won’t take effect until there’s a change in federal law, at which point all the neighboring states will also stop DST clock changing, so passing this bill will just be a signal to the feds that N.D. wants to #LockTheClock.

And maybe one of the legislators—we only needed one!—would have switched if they heard about the experience in Arizona where a lawmaker proposed that they start DST switching to make it less confusing, and was so flooded with constituents telling him that they liked it the way it was that he held a press conference announcing that he was killing his own bill.

I gotta not worry about it. The bills this year are absolutely on fire, and are winning at a higher percentage than they ever have before; indeed the Flickertail State is the only one with a loss so far this year. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get to 30 states this year who have passed something to #LockTheClock.

But like the Prodigal Son, the loss of even one state (by one vote!) is rough when I could have helped.

Update: It turns out I didn’t kill it!

Daylight Saving Time Is Dead, The Clocks Just Haven’t Gotten The News Yet

February 4, 2021

Just a quick post from a hotel room in Topeka, the Kansas state capitol, to let you know that Daylight Saving Time is dead.

Now, we will still have to move our clocks this spring, and there’s a 50-50 chance that we will have to do it again next year, but I think that will be it.

You see, I’ve been writing about this issue for nearly seven years now, and I have seen the evolution firsthand. When I started people thought I was a kook. (I probably still am a kook, but that’s another story.)

When California’s initiative passed by a huge margin, and then Florida’s legislature passed a bill in 2018, people started taking the issue a bit more seriously.

In 2019 and 2020, when I talked to legislators and testified around the country, people would ask me if this was really going to happen, really wanting to know.

Well, after years of pushing the rock up the hill, this year I’m just kind of a witness as the rock rolls down the hill.

A good example is Nebraska, the first state outside of my own where I’ve testified in person twice.

The first time I came I got a polite reception, made all my points, had great discussions with lawmakers, but the bill just died.

This year I came to testify, but the sponsor of the bill, Tom Briese, (with the help of his staff) made so many good points that my main job was to talk about how this bill interplays with what is going on in Washington. The feeling I got from the hearing, from talking to a couple of other lawmakers in the hall, and from the staff, is that this bill is a done deal.

Me having a bad hair day in the Nebraska wind.

Lincoln is just a couple of hours drive through the heartland to Topeka, so I buzzed down to talk to the sponsor of a resolution introduced yesterday in Kansas, Shannon Francis. He’s got so many cosponsors for his resolution that he doesn’t see any problem getting a positive vote for it this year.

It’s not just in America’s Breadbasket, either. New York State has a promising bill and an active sponsor and staff. The silence in years past from N.Y. was disheartening, so the fact that it’s now an open question is huge.

And in many of the 33 states that have yet to pass something, the feeling of inevitability is in the air. Get something done so that we’re not the last state in the country seems to be the new attitude.

So that’s why I say that DST is dead, and the clocks just don’t know it yet. It’s sort of the way that a fish flops around even after it’s been caught and is on the deck of a boat. DST is still flopping around, but…

(And by the way, when I say that DST is dead, what I mean is that the clock changing is dead. The only decision to be made is which time zone each state will lock into, and lawmakers in nearly every state seem pretty clear about that. Texas is looking at asking the voters if they should lock into Permanent DST or Permanent ST, and a couple of others may do that. Once those decisions are made, the time zones will just be known as Eastern Time, Central Time, Mountain Time, and Pacific Time, etc. What a relief that will be!)

So, there’s still some work to be done, and I’m still happy to work with lawmakers around the country and in DC, but now it’s just me giving a slight nudge or hint here and there. The ball is rolling down the hill.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Ohio Legislature and Daylight Saving Time

November 17, 2020

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.

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 Legislative Guide for 2021

November 9, 2020

After the year we’ve all had in 2020, I gotta say I’m excited to be writing about 2021.

This post is available to all, of course, but is specifically written for state legislators, and staff. For the first time ever, you now have the wind at your back as you think about carrying or voting for a bill to fix Daylight Saving Time.

Indeed last year, before Covid hit, we saw a record number of bills and resolutions pass, and a bunch of others looked like they were on their way, but then… Well, you know what happened.

But this year, I think, we will see a real focus on legislation that actually helps real people. And after the difficult political year we’ve all just had, some honestly bipartisan solutions will be a breath of fresh air.

Fixing Daylight Saving Time fits both of those to a T — and the T stands for Time to #LockTheClock.

Much of this blog post is adapted from a presentation I recently made to legislators via the crack staff at the National Conference of State Legislators.

Here’s the slide deck:

I realize some of that won’t really make sense without my explanation, but I’ll try to do that here.

(This presentation came after an excellent slide deck and talk from Rep. Ray Ward of Utah, who is also a doctor. He spoke about the tortured history of DST, and the real world health dangers of clock changing. Rep. Ward included in his presentation this video from John Oliver about the history of DST. The history is so convoluted, that it seems only comedians do it justice… Here’s another DST explainer from The Daily Show with Trevor Noah featuring yours truly. And if you want to see a collection of research into why the clock changing is deadly, see this page of DST research.)

So, working from the (correct) assumption that fixing Daylight Saving Time is a good idea for public policy, health, and good governance, here are some considerations for you for the 2021 session:

Who will be for you, and against you?

With an unusual issue like this, you’ll have an unusual set of lobbyists working both for and against you.

Before we get to the lobbyists, however, let’s look at what the constituent response might be.

In general, people really hate clock changing. All the public polling I’ve seen is super clear on that, and a referendum in California passed by a huge margin.

The problem with most polling is that they ask questions like: Are you for or against Daylight Saving Time? An answer to that could mean almost anything.

Rep. Ward asked the question of his constituents that I wish some big pollster would ask: If we don’t change the clocks any more, which time should we go into permanently? The answer was more than 2-1 for staying in Permanent DST.

So… we know that constituents care, and we know that they prefer year-round DST. What about the lobbyists?

The most active lobbying I’ve seen when I’ve testified around the country is from the golf industry. They show up everywhere pushing the idea that more sunlight later in the day is great for golfers, especially students.

Other lobbyists have been spotted working more behind the scenes. This includes the television industry, especially broadcast sports. (They want it dark outside so people will go inside and sit on the couch and watch TV.)

Here’s how I broke it down in that presentation:

If you propose anything at all related to Daylight Saving Time, you should expect to get a great constituent response. Just mention it in your newsletter or on your Twitter feed or whatever, and be prepared for a much stronger response than any vote you might take on the budget, etc.

Also, you should do some press outreach, and you may or may not be surprised at the response you get. I was a reporter, and I dreaded getting pitched by legislators in general, but a story about Daylight Saving Time? Now there’s one that’s fun to write, that editors eat up, and that will get the most clicks of any other story on the day it comes out.

One other thing you’ll have going for you is… well… me. If the logistics work out I can come to your state and testify as I have all over the country. If I can testify remotely (something that seems way more possible in this Zoom-world we now live in) all the better. If you want, I can put you in touch with the sponsors of bills that I’ve testified for, and I think they’ll all tell you it helps elevate the conversation quite a bit.

Who will be against you, no matter what?

Really, there’s nobody that is in favor of keeping the twice-yearly time change. The whole thing with the farmers is bunk, and in fact farm lobbyists have started supporting bills that Lock The Clock. And while some school groups may have an opinion about what time zone your state should lock into, they are not automatically against any changes to DST.

So, you start out in a good place.

Permanent Standard Time

Now, if you want to introduce a bill to lock into Permanent Standard Time, the time we use in the winter…

I have always been clear that this blog doesn’t take an official position on the question of what time zone a state should go into permanently. There are legitimate differences from state to state.

So, if you want to propose having your state move to permanent Standard Time, I will support you and work to help you in any way I can.

That said, you should understand the dynamics you’ll be facing.

On your side most prominently is federal law. The way the law is written your state can move into permanent Standard Time right now. Just pass a bill, get it signed by the governor and send it to the federal Department of Transportation, and it’s done. That’s what Arizona and Hawaii did back in the 1960s.

Also on your side will be a certain very vocal and organized subset of sleep researchers. In the last year this group has suddenly (and somewhat mysteriously) become very active, and has been sending researchers out to testify for or against bills. If you propose permanent Standard Time, they’ll testify on your behalf, and sound super authoritative while doing so.

Working against you, however, will be any number of lobbyists. The golf industry really does make a lot of extra money for every extra month of Daylight Saving Time, so they will work hard to kill your bill.

I haven’t seen as much active opposition from other interested groups, like outdoor cooking, retailers, public health advocates like the heart and stroke associations, depression and mental health advocates, etc., but I do know that their awareness on this issue is growing, and their interest in actually working against your bill may be growing along with their heightened awareness.

Permanent Daylight Saving Time

If you think the best thing for your state is to move to permanent Daylight Saving Time, here’s what you have going for you:

First, of course, is that most of your constituents want this. That alone is pretty strong, and if you want to pack a hearing room, just send out a newsletter and tell them this bill is happening, and people will show up.

And then you’ll have the inverse of the situation above. You’ll have someone from a sleep research group show up to talk about the chronic problems with the sun coming up later relative to the clock. They will do this no matter how far east you are in your time zone.

Also, the TV people may lurk in the shadows and work to kill your bill without leaving any fingerprints.

(If you are in Colorado, my home state, you are doomed. Or at least, you had been in the past. Maybe things are changing?)

And you will also have to deal with the federal law, which is the perfect segue to talk about what’s going to happen this year in Washington.

Federal DST action

I’m writing this post in November, and it now looks like we will probably continue with what we had before: a Democratic House and a Republican Senate.

Daylight Saving Time is now, always has been, and always will be a totally bipartisan issue, so that’s fine, with one exception: The chairmanship of the Senate Commerce Committee will likely stay the same.

That chairman, Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, has yet to allow a DST bill to even get a hearing. He could kill the bill in the committee, but that would be more work than just not even letting the bill get a hearing in the first place.

If Democrats do get control of the Senate, the chair of the Commerce Committee will likely become Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington State. This is great news because Washington State’s legislature passed a strong Permanent DST bill, and in general U.S. Senators like to represent their constituents as signified by movement from the state legislature. (It was almost immediately after Florida passed its groundbreaking bill in 2018 that Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida introduced a bill to put the whole country into permanent DST.)

But there is good news. One new member of the U.S. House is Jay Obernolte, who has been a longtime advocate for fixing DST in the California legislature. He can join with his fellow Californian Rep. Ro Khanna, who has publicly been a big supporter of fixing DST.

Also good news is that Mississippi, where Sen. Wicker is from, had eight different DST bills last session, but as in so many states, they all essentially died when the legislature went home because of Covid in March. If Mississippi can pass a bill this year, maybe that will get the attention of Sen. Wicker and he’ll let a bill get a hearing.

If not, we’ll just have to assume that he’s in the pocket of the TV industry, and I just refuse to believe that.

How to actually pass something

Here’s the last slide I’ll leave you with in this post:

What I’ve learned from watching all the bills that pass, and that don’t pass, is summed up on that slide.

Go regional. If you make your bill dependent on other states around you, you’ll have an easier time passing a bill. It makes sense: It’s a lower risk vote, and it shows the regional nature of the topic.
Go for permanent DST. In a handful of states like Indiana, Kentucky, Nebraska, Idaho and perhaps a couple of others for regional reasons, permanent Standard Time may make more sense, but for nearly all of the others you are just going to get too much opposition from lobbyists and constituents to get a bill signed.
Pass a resolution. Sure, it doesn’t have the force of law, but it will be a great signal to your federal delegation that they should get on board of a federal solution that allows you to Lock The Clock.
Run a referendum. If your state allows it, you could ask the people of your state which time zone they want to lock into. The background of this idea is here, and the actual text from Legislative Council is here.
Ask for a study. This is what Massachusetts did and New York probably would have done had Covid not hit. (By the way, a study in your state is probably going to show the same thing that the Massachusetts’ study showed: moving to permanent DST is the best solution.)

Thank you very much for your service to your district and your state and your country, and the fact that you are interested in this topic shows that you are interested in being a real servant to your constituents.

Please be in touch and let me know how I can be helpful to you.

First Time Request, Long Time Anti-Clock-Changing Advocate

March 8, 2020

This is the sixth year I have been blogging about this, and in all that time I have never really asked you, the reader, for anything.

I have never, not one time, asked anyone for money for this cause.
I’ve never sold any “merch” as the kids like to call it.
There are no pop-ups begging you to join my email list. (I only added an email list last year, and have only sent, I think, three emails. If you would like to, you can sign up here.)

Just yesterday, however, I decided to do something that I have openly mocked in the past, and that is to start a petition.

I have seen dozens of these things, and they have all done the same amount of good: Zilch.

But people like signing them because it feels like you are doing something.

Well, I decided to merge that desire that people have to do something with a petition that might actually make a dent.

You see, right now there is one person who is blocking progress on #LockTheClock.

That is Sen. Roger Wicker from the great state of Mississippi. He is also the chairman of the Commerce Committee in the U.S. Senate.

For reasons that only historians can love, all of the clock management happens through the Department of Transportation, and that department fall under the purview of the Commerce Committee.

Right now there is a bill in front of that committee called the Sunshine Protection Act. It has not yet gotten a hearing.

Now when I was a kid and I learned how a bill became a law, I never imagined that a bill could get introduced and then NOT get a hearing. I mean, if a senator cares enough to officially submit a bill, it seems like a committee should have to at least look at it. If it loses a vote, fine, but it should be able to get a vote, right?

Well, that is not how it works. It turns out that a bill only gets a hearing when the chair of the committee says it gets a hearing.

That’s where the act is sitting right now, waiting for a hearing.

Now, I don’t think that Sen. Wicker is actually against this idea. I mean, consider:

He is a Republican, but the bill is sponsored by another Republican, Sen. Marco Rubio.
He is from Mississippi, but a co-sponsor of the bill is the other senator from Mississippi, Sen. Hyde-Smith.
He can’t be thinking that people hate it because so many states are now specifically asking for it, and polls are always really clear that people hate the clock-changing.
He served in the Mississippi legislature, which now has nine different bills basically all in line with the Sunshine Protection Act.

I think he just doesn’t know about it.

So, I want to help him learn about it. Hence the petition. I will personally deliver all these signature to him, his staff and anyone else that might help him to decide to give this bill a hearing.

That is why for the first time I am genuinely asking you to do one thing that will not take much time, and add your name to this petition:

Get The Sunshine Protection Act a Hearing

One small note: That petition is hosted on change.org. A thing I didn’t know when I put the petition there is that change.org asks for money after you sign. You do NOT need to give money. That all goes to change.org, which is actually a for-profit company. You can if you want, but don’t think the money comes to me. As always, I am not asking for donations.

Thanks for reading, and thanks especially for signing that, and then sharing it with everyone you know. With this one thing, maybe we can get this bill a hearing, and the voice of the sleep deprived around the country will finally be heard.

2020 #LockTheClock Legislative Update On Fixing Daylight Saving Time

March 1, 2020

State legislatures in the U.S. are an amazing part of our democracy. They vary a lot, and in many ways take on the personality of the states they are in.

As a whole, I find them to be far less dysfunctional than the U.S. Congress.

In part because most of them are limited in time, and March 1 is more or less the halfway point for many of the legislative sessions.

So, how are we doing in 2020?

Great!

Just as a recap, I have been following this stuff for six years now. For the first four years I watched as dozens of bills died. In 2017 Massachusetts passed a bill calling for a study, so that was a glimmer of progress.

Then in 2018 Florida actually passed a bill, on the heels of California voters passing a proposition that had been proposed by the legislature.

Then in 2019 another seven states passed some sort of bill. I listed them all on this page.

How many bills will pass this year? My prediction, and my hope, is that nine states will pass something. Then when you toss in Arizona and Hawaii, where the clock is already locked, we will have 20 states in 2020 that have taken action to end the insanity of Daylight Saving Time switching.

Here’s a look at progress here in 2020:

South Carolina

The first state to get something all the way through the process in 2020 is the Palmetto State, where the governor signed a bill into law on February 3rd!

The law mirrors Florida’s law, saying that as soon as the Feds allow it, they want to go into Permanent Daylight Saving Time.

Georgia

The difference between a bill and a law, I’ve found, is often the energy and grit of the sponsor. In Georgia, voters are well represented by Wes Cantrell, who has three bills percolating. I testified there on one of the bills, but I support all three of them.

My bet is that the one that will get signed is the one that will match the laws in Florida and South Carolina, creating a solid block in the southeastern part of the U.S.

Maryland

There’s a hearing this Thursday in Maryland, which may be extra helpful because it will get some headlines in the state many of the lawmakers and staff members in Washington D.C. actually live in.

The proposed bill there is great. It is more like the bills from the South, which just call for Maryland to move to Permanent DST, than the bills from north of Maryland, which often call for moving to DST but only if all the surrounding states do that, too.

As with all the other states, the legal impact of passing something won’t be huge, but the message it sends to congress will be gigantic.

Wyoming

Again here, a hard-working and persistent sponsor makes all the difference. I was honored to come to Wyoming and testify on behalf of Dan Laursen. His bill last year fell one vote short, but this year it looks like it may make it across the finish line.

Illinois

There is a lot of action in Illinois. This could be huge, because if California, Florida, Texas and Massachusetts have all taken action, it will look like New York State is being left out of the conversation among the most populous states. And if New York comes over to the light side, well, that’s the ball game.

Michigan

I had a delightful time testifying in Michigan a couple of years ago, and then I submitted written testimony last year.

When I testified, the proposal was to move the state into Permanent Daylight Saving Time. I pointed out that they might want to consider Permanent Standard Time for two reasons:

Michigan is so far north that the days are very short in the winter and long in the summer so even in Standard Time citizens there would get the sunsets that much of the rest of the country gets in Daylight time, and,
Because four counties on the western edge of the Upper Peninsula are in the Central Time Zone, there could be some weird discrepancies in time in that little zone. Going to Permanent Standard Time would allow them to unify the state.

The bill didn’t change when I was there, but the current bill under consideration does just that.

I’m often falsely accused of advocating for Permanent Daylight Saving Time for all. What I actually think is that we should all #LockTheClock and then the states that are on the border of a time zone should decide what time zone works best for that state. Michigan is a classic example where moving to permanent Standard Time makes sense.

Utah

A real champion of fixing Daylight Saving Time is Rep. Ray Ward of Utah, who is also a medical doctor. We were on a panel together hosted by the National Conference of State Legislatures, and then we got to have dinner together after at the airport on the way home.

In 2019, he was able to get a resolution signed in Utah, which is a nice symbolic step forward, but doesn’t have the force of law.

The bill that has now passed both the House and the Senate and awaits a signature from the Governor, would indeed be a law.

It follows the cooperative model. Before Utah can #LockTheClock, the feds need to fix the law AND other surrounding states need to pass similar laws.

That is another important step forward.

Mississippi

There are six different bills working their way down the great Mississippi legislative process.

I’m watching these closely and working with the sponsors as much as possible for one key reason: The one person in the world doing more to stop progress on #LockTheClock right now is from there.

You see, U.S. Senator Roger Wicker, a former senator in the Mississippi State Senate, is now a U.S. Senator, and is the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee. Why does that matter? That’s the committee where the Sunshine Act is now stuck, not getting a hearing.

Why is that?

Nobody seems to know.

But my hope and goal is that if the Mississippi legislature—the same body in which he once served—takes action that he won’t be able to help but notice and he will release his stranglehold on the federal bill.

Other states

I could say something about many of the 30-odd states working on this, but this is probably enough for today. Suffice it to say that things are moving, and the states that decide to wait on this are the ones that will be left out of the conversation.

If you are a state legislator and you worry your bill is stalling, or you just want to talk through strategies that will help you get something passed and signed, be in touch. I’m happy to talk.

Model Daylight Saving Time State Legislation for 2020

February 15, 2020

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

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.
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:

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.

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.

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

August 18, 2019

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

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.

Find your state legislators.
Reach out to them by email, phone, social media, or show up to a town hall or whatever.
Ask them, politely, if they would be interested in doing something to help sleep-deprived constituents.
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!

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

January 20, 2019

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.

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

January 13, 2019

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.

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.

Maybe 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!

Huge Win for Clock Sanity in California – Prop 7 Wins Big!

November 7, 2018

I totally understand that this is not the biggest headline of the 2018 midterm elections, but we’ve got big, BIG news from the Golden State: Proposition 7 won by a huge margin.

Thanks to freaking clock-changing, I’m still getting up before 5 a.m. Denver time, so the first thing I did was check the California results and they look great. As of 4 a.m. in California, 91 percent of the vote is in and the Yes side has just a tick short of 60 percent of the vote.

Great day in the morning.

It’s a new day for the fight to #LockTheClock. photo by Viviana Rishe

This does not mean that California will get to stop changing in and out of DST right away (there are still a few more steps including a change to federal law).

Here is how it does help:

That margin is HUGE.

While there have been totally unscientific polls about the popularity of DST clock changing, and the memes run dramatically against the clock-changing, we’ve never had any solid data showing how people really feel.

Now we do.

I know it would be easy to say that California is really different than the rest of the country on this issue, but that’s just not the case. Politics is a part of this conversation, of course, but what I’ve seen first-hand is that this is not a partisan issue. Most of the state bills around the country trying to fix this are carried by Republicans, but then after they are introduced they get wide bipartisan support.

There will be much more on this blog in the future, but for now I just want to say thank you to the voters of California. We are now one step closer to ending the clock-changing insanity forever!

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

November 3, 2018

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.

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:

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.

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:

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.

Fall Back to the Future – DST FAQ for the Easy Change in 2017

November 4, 2017

With the fall-back weekend here, this blog is getting lots of activity and I’m getting lots of requests for interviews, along with e-mails from fellow #LockTheClock citizens, etc.

To make it easy for everyone, here’s a quick FAQ:

I hate changing the clocks twice per year, what can I do?

Given the current situation in Washington, I don’t think there’s much we can do there.

But we can work at the state level. I recommend you find your state legislators, and contact them. Do it now, while most of them are not in session. They’ll be happy to hear from you. Then show them this page, and recommend that they try to pass a resolution.

I have an idea that will fix everything! Will you take my idea and run with it?

No.

Sorry, but I get lots of emails from people who think they are the first person in the world to come up with the idea that we just move the clocks 30 minutes, or whatever. This is a complex problem, and there are no simple solutions.

Also, I come from the world of startups. What I’ve learned is that ideas are easy, doing the work to get an idea out there in the world is hard. This is a hard problem that will take years to fix.

I saw a funny meme once about DST. Have you seen it?

Probably. Either for the fall, or the spring.

My friend in Europe said they changed their clocks a couple of weeks ago. Why are we behind?

It will make you cynical, but the reason is The Swamp. Lobbyists from the candy industry gave a basket of candy to members of congress, and they extended DST until after Halloween for the safety of the children (and so they would have more time for trick-or-treating.)

Can’t I sign a petition or something?

You can. At last check there were 62 different petitions just on change.org. You could also just scream into a pillow. That one might make you feel better.

Look, change is hard, as they say. It’s coming, but it’s going to take a while. So:

keep up with the Facebook page,
follow me on Twitter,
contact your state legislators,
let me know what you are doing in your state.

It may take time and hard work, but anything worthwhile does.

“I’m in favor of DST!” “I’m against it!” These two views may not be different

March 10, 2017

I talk to people about Daylight Saving Time all the time, probably more than any other human on earth.

When I do, however, I always have to be careful, because everyone has an opinion about it, and they often sound conflicting, when really they aren’t.

For instance, what does it mean when someone says they are against Daylight Saving Time?

It could mean that they like it to be darker — relative to the time on the clocks — earlier in the summer. It could mean that they like the extra daylight in the summer, they just don’t like the time change where they have to Spring Forward. It could also mean that they don’t like suddenly having it be dark when they come home from work in the fall.

They are all valid points of view, but different. I’ve tried to explain it with words forever, and then the incomparable Kirk Anderson came up with this cool graphic that does it much better:

I think this makes it clear that if you want to take a position on DST, you’ll want to actually take two positions:

Do you want to change the clocks twice a year?
If not, which time zone do you want to be in, Standard or Daylight Saving Time?

If you have clarity on those two questions, then you’ll be able to figure out what you do want.

By the way, you may be asking what I want. I’ll tell you: No more clock changing, and for Colorado I think year-round DST works best. For many other states, especially ones like Nebraska and Michigan that are on the western edge of their time zones, they may opt for year-round standard time. Whatever they want is fine with me.

The best thing for all of us would be to just stop doing the thing that is deadly, and that’s changing clocks twice a year.

Hey Journalists, “Time” Is Serious. Please Treat It That Way.

December 30, 2016

It’s time for journalists to start taking Daylight Saving Time seriously.

I’ve been the leading activist on ending the clock-changing mandate for a couple of years now, and one of the things I do is monitor every story that comes out about DST.

Look, I was a journalist for a long time. I know how easy it is to think that Big Issues like the state budget deficit or entitlements or whatever are the ones that everyone SHOULD be reading because they are Important.

But if you pay any attention at all to actual readers, nobody is reading those stories.

What they read, and what they care about, is issues that they can understand, and when it comes to politics they want to read about things that they think can actually be fixed.

Daylight Saving Time is just such an issue.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve seen two particularly egregious examples.

The first comes from Curtis Haring of Utah Political Capitol.

It’s dripping with ugly sarcasm. Example: “… the unbearable burden of having to spring forward and then fall back every year.”

Several points:

You, Curtis, don’t get to decide what’s Important, and what’s not.
Dozens of people die because of the time change (heart attacks, traffic accidents, workplace accidents, etc.). Your words are just cruel to the surviving families.
You story makes it seem that those working on this are doing it to the exclusion of all else. That’s just wrong. In all 50 states there are hundreds of bills. They all get their due. The state legislators working on this just want to fix something that the government does that’s clearly broken. That’s why they ran in the first place, to fix stuff.

Perhaps most upsetting to me is how this story chastises Rep. Norm Thurston. I haven’t met him, but looking around online it’s clear he’s an honorable guy trying to do the right thing. You point out, correctly, that previous efforts on this topic have died, but then you lay in to Rep. Thurston for the sin of trying again with a different tactic.

Trying something new is to be applauded. You, Curtis, seem only interested in gridlock.

Shame on you, Curtis Haring. Shame.

And kudos to Rep. Thurston. I look forward to the progress that your new thinking will bring to this issue!

Example two

Here is another one that is not so upsetting, but is way more pathetic. Hey, Brett Barrouquere, I know time is tight for reporters, much so more than when I was one. Still, that’s no excuse to write, “Nearly all of the United States – except Arizona and Hawaii (because they want to be different) – observe Daylight Saving Time.”

In fact, Arizona and Hawaii want much more than to just be different, what they want is to not have to change the clocks twice per year without a good reason to do so, and so they were able to keep their time zones because they were in place before the Uniform Time Act of 1966. Also your flip “yes, that’s a real thing” about that act is unbecoming of a reporter talking about federal law. It makes sense that the government is involved in the setting of time. Would you rather that we go back to a time when every town in the world set the clock how it wanted?

If people in the 1800s could figure out that uniform time is needed for transportation by train, certainly you could figure that out, too, Brett, here in the 21st century.

Message to reporters

In short, if you are a reporter thinking about covering this, you should know that this is a serious policy issue.

It certainly has its fun and funny sides, and I celebrate those as much as anyone, but I do it with respect for the policy implications that simmer under the surface.

Fixing the time does not have big-money interests behind it, so it’s left to us — a band of citizens, part-time legislators, and other activists — to make the case. If this was a good or bad thing for Monsanto or the Trial Lawyers, etc., you better believe that it would have lots of great lobbying being done and you would not be so flip or so dismissive.

The future, the old saying goes, does not have a lobbyist.

In this case, however, it does. It has me, and it has the will of the people.

I’ll be watching and calling you out by name if you don’t treat Daylight Saving Time like the serious issue that it is.

Great DST Progress, But How To Coach Friends?

December 22, 2016

I just looked around, and can say these seven things very clearly:

I have been blogging about Daylight Saving Time for more than two years, and am now pretty much the leading voice on this admittedly very niche issue.
In October of 2014 when I did a piece for CNN, I was seen of something of an oddity.
In the years since, I’ve seen a ton of research come out about how bad the clock changing is.
I’ve also seen a lot more bills proposed around the country. (All but one died, see item 6, below, on that.)
There’s also been a noticeable shift in public opinion, based on Fall Back memes, Spring Forward memes, and just the media coverage in general.
One state (a big one) had a Republican sponsor pass a resolution that I promoted in a very Democratic legislature, showing how bipartisan this issue is.
Now I’m seeing a bunch more state legislators trying to get something done. I’ll list some of them below, but it’s very encouraging.

The problem I have is this: Legislators keep trying to do a thing that I totally support in the underlying spirit, but that I’m quite certain is doomed to failure. That leaves me with two questions:

How do I tell people that I support them, but that they should try something different?
How do I get the word out to legislators before they introduce a (doomed) bill that there’s a better way?

I really need help on both those points. If you have suggestions, please contact me.

Is the sun setting on Daylight Saving Time clock changing? These Canada Geese think so!

In the meantime, here’s what I’ve seen in terms of bills being introduced for the 2017 legislative session:

Wyoming. From the one story about this bill, it’s clear that the main sponsor, Rep. Dan Laursen, agrees with the overwhelming majority of Americans that the time we are in doesn’t matter as much as it’s important to stop changing the clocks twice per year. He apparently first proposed that Wyoming stay in Standard Time all year long, but ran into a buzz saw of opposition. Where year-round Standard Time might be good for some states (like Nevada), for Wyoming year-round DST seems to be best, and will certainly have the least opposition.
New Jersey. This one is kind of inspired, tragic, and wonderful all at once. The sponsor, Shirley Turner, is proposing a resolution calling for extending Daylight Saving Time by a week or two in the fall, making sure that it comes after the election, and not before. The fact that the time change came just before the last election was hard to miss this year. Her resolution says that in more dignified tones. It’s a wonderful resolution, avoiding the trap of thinking a bill or law that applies only to New Jersey would do any good. But it’s tragic — I think — because it just takes something terrible (the time change) and nudges it forward a small bit rather than just eliminating it. Still, good for Sen. Turner for proposing something, rather than just doing nothing. And good for her for proposing a resolution that can get passed without much opposition.
Missouri. The Show Me state has a track record of trying to do something about DST. This bill modifies the tactic I’ve seen from Rep. Mike Kelley before of saying that Missouri will only go to permanent DST if two adjacent states also pass a law saying that they will also go to permanent DST. Similar bills have failed in the past, but maybe this year? The problem, as always, is that even a group of three states will almost certainly not be allowed to switch by the federal government.
Texas. This bill is like so many other doomed bills that have gone before. It will fail, unfortunately, and even if it did pass, the Feds won’t let one state act alone under the Uniform Time Act. Hey, Sen. Menendez, I’m happy to jump on a call with you to help talk about what can work!
Connecticut. (No bill filed yet, but news here.) This is the first time I’ve seen any action from the Nutmeg state, so welcome to the fight, Kurt Vail! As you’ve already seen, this is a great way to get press and get your constituents talking. If one report is true, even you don’t think you’ll be able to get your bill out of committee. You are probably right. But there is a DST resolution you can get passed that will help a great deal. If California can pass it, you can, too! If I can help, just contact me.

A few other states have some early indication of action, including a reprise of past failed efforts in New Mexico and Massachusetts.

In Utah, where bills have failed for years, one state representative is proposing an official statewide vote that would allow people in Utah to voice an opinion. Sounds great! Go, Norm Thurston, go!

Good News on DST

Overall, this may seem like a lot of bad news, but really just the fact that there’s so much news is good news. There’s also been more research that I’ll be updating soon, and a LOT more press coverage, some good and some stinky, but all interesting. I’ll be covering it all.

In short, the momentum is swinging in the direction of fixing the killing aspects of the time change. With a bit more effort, I know we’ll get there.

Fixing DST Just Took A Huge Step, Even If The Media Missed It

August 28, 2016

Look, I was a reporter for a long time, I get it. It’s hard to do a story substantially different than what everyone else is doing.

So let me make it really easy for everyone:

The cause of fixing Daylight Saving Time clock changing just took a ginormous step forward with the passage of a resolution in California calling for an end to changing the clocks twice per year. The California resolution is based on the model DST resolution I first published in February of 2015.

If you look at the coverage of the work of the state legislature, the resolution passing may seem like something of a footnote to the news that a bill failed.

But the bill, as readers of this site know, was doomed long, long ago. That it died last week is not news. It was dead before it was introduced, it’s just that the people who saw the body moving around thought that it had a chance at life. It never did.

The big news is that the resolution passed when the bill failed.

Now typically a resolution has no power, it’s just an honorary thing. That’s what makes it powerful! We now have proof of what I’ve been advocating for a long time on this blog: Legislators are going to have a tough time passing a bill that will probably violate Federal Law, but they’ll have no problem voting for a resolution because they think it will have no power.

But this resolution is special. It has a hidden superpower. This resolution is The Little Train That Could.

Just look at the votes this resolution got from the very handy Bill Track 50.

It was essentially unanimous in every single vote. Here is an issue that nearly everyone agrees on, regardless of party. Any legislator who has ever asked constituents about it will tell you that it is a huge issue that brings up great passions.

There was only one vote against the resolution in the California Senate from a guy named Jim Nielsen, who is the senator from the agricultural community of Gerber, in the north-central part of the state. Lots of agriculture there, and good for Nielsen for standing up for the farmers, even if he may be a bit off on the facts.

“Our crops have gotten accustomed to that. They’ve in fact been bred to deal with that longer harvest season,” Nielsen said while arguing against the bill. “Don’t fix something that’s not broken.”

He said that in his arguments against the bill, and his side won the day and they did kill that doomed bill.

Crops, meanwhile, may have been bred for a longer season, but DST doesn’t have anything to do with seasons, only with the hours in a given day.

But, while Nielsen’s arguments against the bill may have worked on the bill, they didn’t carry over to the resolution. There were 17 “no” votes on the bill, but only one “no” vote on the resolution, from Nielsen.

(Sen. Nielsen, if you are reading this… Most people think that DST was put in place to help the farmers, but that’s never been true. In the excellent book, Seize The Daylight, the author, David Prerau, dug up the history that farmers were against the change when DST was first proposed, but the big business interests in Boston claimed that the farmers liked it. I see here that you come from agriculture, so you know better than others that real farmers work from before sunrise until after sunset, no matter what the clock says. I understand your desire to represent agriculture, but you’ll do it best by helping the sons and daughters of farmers to have more daylight after school to be able to help out on the family farm while there’s still some daylight.)

(Oh, one other thing, Sen. Nielsen… DST is — in fact — “broken.” It was started by the Germans during WWI and it’s bad for kids, victims of crime, people with bad hearts, productivity, the environment… the list goes on and on. DST is broken, indeed.)

What’s Next for the DST Resolution?

So, now that this historic resolution has passed in California, what happens next?

Well, the only official thing that happens is that this resolution will get sent to Congress and the President.

Unfortunately, getting Congress to do anything right now is pretty much impossible.

So, I will personally make sure that the other state legislatures are aware of this.

But to win this fight, I may need some help.

If you are a citizen concerned about this, contact your local legislators and let them know that if they want to pass a resolution that can really help fix things — a resolution that already passed in California with huge bipartisan support — they can do that.
If you are a teacher, consider doing a unit on DST, and deliver the results of your students’ research and this model resolution to your legislature if you visit the state capitol, or if you have a legislator visit your class.
If you are a journalist, consider doing a story about this movement. Your readers care about this issue, and are interested in real solutions.

The legislators can write the resolution however they want, but they are certainly welcome to copy the model DST resolution from this site, or the California resolution, or they can start from scratch. As long as the intent of the resolution is that the legislature and the state express a desire to end DST clock-changing, it will do the trick. If you think the people of your state for one reason or another want standard time year-round, you are welcome to advocate for that, but for nearly every state you’ll find that year round Daylight Saving Time will always be the most popular. Looking at the maps as much as I have, I really think only Michigan could potentially make the case that they’d be better off staying in Standard Time, which would essentially mean they’d join the same time zone as Wisconsin when the country switches to permanent Daylight Saving Time.

The only thing that I think is off about the California proposal is that it lacks an instruction to send the approved copy to the other states who have yet to pass such a resolution. Right now that’s all of them, except for Arizona and Hawaii, which are grandfathered in to staying on the same time year-round. But as I said, I’ll be doing all I can to make sure the other states all know about this resolution.

Change is hard. It takes a time and work, but thanks to Representative Jay Obernolte, the Assembly and Senate of California, it will be just a bit easier to push for change that can make a difference for the entire country.

The Clock is Ticking on the Clock Changing

November 22, 2015

The fall change has come and gone. Because this is the easy change — the one where you get an extra hour — typically the press dies off pretty quickly.

Not this year.

I’ve been paying close attention to this issue for years, and this year I really think the tide is turning.

Just take a look at some of the press, in no particular order:

Interactive Guide

Where to hate Daylight Saving Time. This is good data, no doubt, but I actually find it to be a distraction. It makes the assumption that things are better or worse for people depending on when the sun comes up and goes down relative to the clock. The problem there is that there’s never a perfect answer there, especially for people who live north of the equator.

Those flat maps give you a hint of the problem.

The problem is easiest to see with the map on the right. See how the zones of darkness are kind of like cones, getting bigger as you go north? The lines would look straight if you looked at them on a globe, but because they are flat they look like that because there’s just not enough daylight to go around the further you get away from the equator.

The tool that this guy (Andy Woodruff) has created is awesome, no doubt about it, and you should check it out. But read the whole post, and you’ll see that he comes to the same conclusion that all people who spend any time studying the issue come to: Permanent DST is the biggest win for the most people.

Because there’s just no way to avoid a late sunrise in the mornings for everyone in the winter, the best thing we can do is give everyone a sunset after 5 p.m.

This is the only map that has all winners, and no losers, except for those in Alaska (of course), and a few hearty souls in the northern reaches of Idaho and Maine.

(And if those two states want to take advantage of the elimination of DST clock changing and move one time zone to the east, well, this would be a good time to do that.)

Legislative Action

A guy who I’ve followed for a while now, Sen. Cliff Pirtle of New Mexico, recently announced that he’s going to be back with a resolution to get rid of the clock changing.

Good for him!

He’s realized that states simply won’t be allowed by the feds to change time zones on their own, so he’s going the route of a resolution. He’s close, but not quite there with the legislation that I’m recommending.

His resolution calls for New Mexico changing, and only New Mexico. The problem is that the federal Department of Transportation has as one of its conditions for allowing change the notion of “uniformity.” The law that it is enforcing is called the Uniform Time Act of 1966 (15 U.S.C. §§ 260-64). They want nice, even lines.

So I’ll be contacting Sen. Pirtle and asking him to consider changing his proposal just a bit to make it so that New Mexico won’t try to go it alone, but instead will be a leader in getting all states to fix this mess. (If you see this, Sen. Pirtle, and haven’t gotten my email, contact me!)

Nevada efforts stuck

A similar resolution passed in Nevada, but hasn’t done a lick of good, according to an excellent column from Patrick Everson. Here again, if Nevada next year can pass a resolution that joins Nevada to a national effort, maybe it will make a difference. It certainly can’t hurt, and it will only add to the effort in other states so that the whole country can get out of this mess.

Sick of the clock changing, eh?

Canadians have had it with changing the clocks in and out of DST, too, it appears from some news coverage.

They are frustrated, so they wanted to take action, but unfortunately the action they took is to create a petition. It always seems like such a good idea, until you do a search and realize that there’ve been at least 30 different petitions on change.org related to Daylight Saving Time. All of them have made an identical amount of difference: Zero.

Oh, Canada! If you want to make a real change, contact me and I’ll make a special version of the legislative resolution to fix DST that will work in the provinces.

Someone’s got a smelly bottom, and it isn’t the baby!

It’s fun to joke and laugh about DST. I certainly have, and there’s lots of mirth to go around.

But it is a life-and-death issue. Car accidents. Heart attacks. Deadly crime. The research is all there that the clock changing, especially in the spring, is deadly.

So it makes me a bit cynical that the PR team at diapers.com would create a petition, a hashtag, a graphic and the works to try to “End Daylight Saving Time.” Sure, parents do get whacked twice a year trying to get good sleep for their family, and ending the clock changing is a great goal. (They screwed up on what they are asking for, which is common, but you’d think they would have researched it. What they want is NOT to “End Daylight Saving Time” but to end changing into and out of DST.)

But it’s clear from the campaign that it’s all about raising the profile of the diaper seller, and not actually fixing the problem.

If they wanted to fix it, they could help me with my legislative proposal. Instead, they just made a petition (see above for the futility of that) and they even insult our intelligence by making the petition out to “Leaders of the free world.” Whatevs.

Hey, diapers.com… If you really want to make a difference, contact me and I’ll show you how we can get something done. Until then, consumers know when they are being hustled, and this is one big stunt.

Other news

There’s been lots more, including new research showing that we could help decrease crime if we stayed in DST year-round, more research that clock-changing is bad for your health, and more.

David Miles is starting a petition in Oregon. (David, great spirit, but that plan is not gonna work. Contact me, let’s get Oregon into this idea that can work.)

There’s much more I could do, but my word count is already over 1,000 and there’s only so much I can ask anyone to read. Have something you think I should cover? Just let me know!

Thanks for reading.

Fix DST permanently: A step-by-step plan for teachers

October 25, 2015

If you are a teacher, this post is for you.

The prerequisites for this plan of action are:

An understanding of the basic concepts of Daylight Saving Time.
Students who are willing to engage with local elected officials for non-partisan education.

The steps to participation are as follows:

As appropriate for your students’ grade level, lecture about the history of Daylight Saving Time or ask the students to research the history and write a research report. Here’s a good start of research resources about DST.
Once the research is done, gauge interest in trying to make a difference in ending DST clock-changing.
If interest is sufficient, have the students research the plan presented on this site.
If as a class, or as an independent project, students want to be part of the plan to change the law they should find their local state legislators from the state senate as well as the house or whatever the other body is known as. (Or in Nebraska, only the senators.) This tool usually works.
The students should then ask for a meeting, either in the office of the legislator or ask that person or those people to come to the class to discuss the issue. (This is a guide put together by the Humane Society, but is applicable for most issues.)
Introduce them to the concept, and then the model language, and tell them about the progress being made in other states using this language.
Be sure to follow-up and thank the official.
The best time to talk to a legislator is in the fall, before the legislative session begins.
All state capitols have arrangements for tours for students during the legislative session. Be sure students know their legislators to arrange a brief meeting while visiting the statehouse.
If your legislator introduces the model legislation, or some version of it, be sure to contact any and all local media to let them know about your support for the position and your role in sparking the discussion.
Once the resolution is passed be sure to ask the legislator if you can be present for any bill-signing ceremony.

And of course, if you have any success at all, be sure to let us know via the contact info on this page and we’ll be sure to highlight your success on this blog.

It’s real now. Model Resolution now in play in one state. Is your state next?

March 6, 2015

Update in October, 2020: Welcome to this page. For some reason the search engines are sending a lot of traffic to this page, even though it’s more than five years old. For much more up-to-date info, check the Current DST Legislation page. And please be in touch!

A number of states have forward-thinking legislators negotiating the waters in their own states, but there’s now one state who’s taken the model resolution I wrote, and introduced it into the legislative process.

First alphabetically, and now first to introduce, is Alabama. Here’s a link to the resolution from the state site. Here’s a link to the summary on this resolution from a bill-tracking service. (Full disclosure, I’m a shareholder in that service.)

Here’s some coverage of that Resolution.

This is huge news.

Remember, this whole thing started as me just complaining about the difficulty of adjusting twice per year, and now it is officially a legislative initiative that could quickly spread to all of the 48 states that are currently stuck in the clock-changing rut.

Thanks to Sen. Glover for having the courage to go first.

If you, too, hate changing clocks twice per year and want to get involved, just find your representatives to the state legislature, and urge them to pass this resolution. Be sure to tell them it’s a resolution — not a law — which makes it much easier to get approved.

State lawmakers really do enjoy hearing from constituents, and with the time change this weekend and the deadly Monday Morning coming up, this is the perfect time to get involved.

If you happen to be reading this on Friday morning, March 6, tune in to HuffPo Live at about 10:15 a.m. EST, and be sure to join the conversation. The more we can show how much the people are tired of the clock-changing, the easier it will be to convince legislators to take action.

If you can’t tune in, go take this one-question poll from AccuWeather. When I took it public sentiment was more than two-to-one against the clock changing.

See you on HuffPo Live!

Time for a change?

August 16, 2014

This is the first post on this blog, and I’m using this as a placeholder. Soon this will be replaced with a version of a very long piece regarding the plans to switch us to permanent Daylight Saving Time.

Then, this will be where we’ll post other news, research, and approaches to help us in our quest to stop the clock-changing insanity.

Please send any other blog topics via the contact page. Or better yet send whole blog posts and we’ll post them and give you credit.

Thanks!