A bill proposed by a couple of Ohio Republican state senators would end the annual flip flop of springing ahead and falling back by leaving Ohio permanently on Daylight Savings Time, thus ridding the Buckeye state of a weird temporal vestige whose origins date back to a New Zealand entomologist and postal worker named George Hudson, who proposed the idea so he could spend more daylight hours hunting insects, and which found domestic implementation through the World Wars and then uniformity with the Universal Time Act of 1966 and the energy crisis of the 1970s.
Does the bill, introduced by state senators Kristina Roegner and Bob Peterson, have any chance of passing? Probably not but it’s possible.
About a dozen states have considered bills to create a year-round clock, with some proposing they stay on standard time and some proposing staying on Daylight Savings Time. None have passed, though momentum to scuttle the infuriating, pointless and dumb ritual has grown. Arizona and Hawaii have never observed DST and Indiana didn’t until 2006.
Arguments regarding health, traffic accidents, crime and energy savings come down on both sides, and both sides don’t have much evidence to go on. Some studies say there’s slight energy use reduction with DST, and some studies say there’s actually a slight energy use increase.
Of the two options, sticking with permanent Daylight Savings Time, essentially making it the new standard time, is the far superior option and no one can make a cogent argument otherwise. Who cares about sunshine in the morning? Who wants to walk out of work to a dark world that further enforces the lingering sense of dread and depression you’ve cultivated through the day?
So send some good sunshine mojo toward Senate Bill 119 — the Ohio Sunshine Protection Act — and hope that Ohio can lead the charge on a sweeping campaign to do the right thing.
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This article appears in Mar 27 – Apr 2, 2019.
Wait, what?!? Of course we should care about sunshine in the morning. Staying on Daylight Saving Time all year is a bad idea. Vince Grzegorek writes that no one can make a cogent argument otherwise. I can. Here are three:
– We care about sleepy commuters driving in the dark
– We care about kids going to school in the dark
– The US tried winter Daylight Saving Time in 1974 and 1975. We didn’t like it and we went back.
“no one can make a cogent argument otherwise”
I can. Standard time is based upon geography. Noon in a given time zone is when that part of the planet is closest to the sun; midnight is when it’s farthest from the sun.
Noon is NOT when it’s closest to the sun…only when the sun is DIRECTLY OVERHEAD…or at it’s highest point in it’s arc, in a certain spot in that time zone. For the Eastern time zone, that spot is Philadelphia. Don’t ask me why…it just is. Might be Chicago for the central zone…I don’t know. The sun reaches it’s highest point there about 25 minutes after it does here.
When the sun is finally directly overhead (NOT the closest…that’s what determines the seasons, not the local time) in Cleveland, the clock will read 12:25…and it’s 1:25 PM during DST…go outside and look if you want proof.
Yes, year-round DST was tried in order to save energy under Nixon…it ended up not saving anything, just pissing people off. Yeah, it meant sundown at 7:30 when I was living in Florida, but no daylight until 8:30 AM, and people hated that, and bitched about kids going to school in darkness, and people getting run over, and commuting in the dark.
Which is what people have done forever WAY up North, like in Minnesota, where I never heard anyone complain. They just accepted it. Of course, it also gets dark by 4 PM up there in the winter, which stinks. Payback is in summer…you can still read outside at 10 PM.
They have more extremes of dayligh tbetween seasons than we do, and Florida has a lot less…and almost no twilight time. So it would all depend on how far north or south you were. Standard time in summer would mean sundown at eight only during the longest days (late spring and early summer), and far earlier the rest of the summer. Ohioans would bitch about that.I know i would!
But whether it’s daylight or dark, you’ll still need to be carrying to take out the garbage in some neighborhoods. That won’t change.
The first paragraph is one sentence. Painful.
Yes, it IS one sentence, isn’t it? Been smoking a little something, Vince?
SCENE needs more copy editors and proofreaders. At least one of each…
There is only 1 S in Daylight Saving TIme ….
Omg it must be a plot! Please tell me what I need to know. I was just going to move the clock an hour and leave it there. Tell me what Im doing wrong?