Daylight saving time is ending soon. Every year we do this, flipping the clocks back and forth each spring and fall, and for most of our lives, it’s just been accepted as part of the calendar. But over the past few years there’s been much debate about getting rid of it altogether or at least making it permanent.
This year, the end of daylight saving time and the return to standard time takes place Halloween night, or rather at 2 a.m., Nov. 1. It’s best to turn your manual clocks back an hour before going to bed Halloween night.
The practice of changing the clocks actually goes back further than most people realize. Port Arthur, Ontario, now part of Thunder Bay, became the first city in the world to turn its clocks forward an hour, doing so in the summer of 1908. That was a full decade before the United States adopted daylight saving time nationally in 1918 as a way to conserve fuel during World War I. The U.S. version was repealed just a year later, then came back during World War II as “war time,” and after a patchwork period where states did their own thing, Congress passed the Uniform Time Act in 1966, which standardized when the clocks change.
The one real break from that consistency came during the 1973 oil embargo, when Congress tried a trial run of year-round daylight saving time to save energy, only to reverse course once people started waking up to dark winter mornings. So apart from that brief experiment, we’ve been flipping the clocks twice a year for roughly six decades.
Helping our internal rhythm
Here in New England, we sit at the eastern edge of the Eastern Time Zone, which means our sunrises and sunsets both come earlier than they would out in Detroit or up in Toronto. That makes for a sunset around 4:11 p.m. in early December, with sunrise not arriving until just after 7 a.m. Light matters here for more than just being able to do things outdoors, it helps set our internal rhythms. If the sun came up at 4 in the morning, most people would sleep right through that low-angle morning light, which turns out to be really important. And if the sun set before 7:30 p.m. in the summer, we’d lose the use of daylight at exactly the hours most people are still up and active.
So the argument that keeps getting made is that we should pick a lane, stick with daylight saving time all year, or stick with standard time all year, rather than switching twice a year. It’s worth remembering that all of this is a human invention anyway. The use of precise, synchronized clocks is a relatively recent development. Before the late 1800s, time was local, noon was whenever the sun reached its highest point in the sky, which meant noon in Boston was genuinely different from noon in Springfield, and different again from noon in Peoria. Once we adopted time zones, the relationship between the clock and the actual position of the sun became something we had to negotiate, rather than something that simply was what it was.
The reality is that at minimum we get about nine hours of daylight here, and at maximum just over 15. We have to belong to a time zone because of trains, planes, work schedules, and everything else that comes with an industrialized society. So the only real choice is which hour to shift, daylight saving, standard, or the back-and-forth we do now.
Arguments on both sides
If we stayed on standard time year-round, we’d lose evening daylight in the summer, with the sun setting at 7:30 in early July, though we’d gain it back in the morning, with sunrise around 4 a.m. and the first light around 3:30 a.m.
If we stayed on daylight saving time year-round, which is personally what I’d prefer, the earliest sunset would be 5:11 p.m., but sunrise wouldn’t arrive until after 8 a.m. from the second week of December through the final days of January. The argument people usually raise here is that kids would be waiting for the bus in the dark. It’s worth remembering that millions of people around the world already get up, get to school, and get to work in the dark every day. It’s not something that’s unmanageable, it’s just something we’re not currently used to.
Right now, this isn’t just a hypothetical. The House passed the Sunshine Protection Act, which would make daylight saving time permanent nationwide, by a 308-117 vote in July. It’s been sitting in the Senate ever since, where it hasn’t been brought up for a vote, despite public support from the White House to take it up.
Some senators have raised the same concern I mentioned above, that permanent daylight saving time would mean very late winter sunrises in parts of the country. Bismarck, North Dakota, for example, would see sunrises after 9 a.m. from late November until early February. Others argue Americans are ready to stop changing their clocks regardless. Where it goes from here in the Senate is genuinely uncertain.
We have less than a month of daylight saving time left, and the most likely scenario is that we fall back to standard time once we hit November, unless the Senate acts before then. At least you’ll get an extra hour of sleep on what is technically a 25-hour day, as we shift the light back one hour once again.