The insidious spread of Daylight Saving

I used to be totally opposed to daylight saving. I told people I was boycotting it. I refused to set my clock forward an hour in April and back in October. I always showed up for work or appointments as expected, but I tried to do the conversion from daylight savings to standard time and remind myself what time it really was.

Why? I guess it just seemed right to me that noon should be the time at which the sun reaches its highest altitude and stands due south (in the northern hemisphere, outside the tropics), and that there should be equal amounts of daylight before and after noon. Yes, I knew that solar time only matches up with clock time for one particular longitude in any given time zone. (Now I also know that solar noon can be up to a quarter of an hour earlier or later than noon on the clock, even at that specific longitude.)

You can even figure out compass directions (subject to the aforementioned approximations) if you have a watch (with hands! not digital, duh) and can see the sun. How? Point the hour hand at the sun. Halfway between the hour hand and 12 will be south. How cool is that? It struck me as horribly wrong to throw out such a useful tool, and such a harmonious and symmetrical relationship between earthly conventions and the the motions of celestial bodies, by arbitrarily offsetting our clocks. If we find it pleasant or useful to have more daylight after work and less before we rise in the morning, surely the logical change would be simply to rise and go to work earlier. Far more sensible to do so than to mess with our clocks, right?

So why did I stop boycotting daylight saving? I found that I was doing the conversion the wrong way, from true righteous proper time to debased conventional time. If I looked at my watch and it said 7:15, without hesitation I read it as 8:15. Also, I came to realize that I enjoy the conventions of daylight saving as much as anyone.

However! I still have an enormous problem with the insidious extension of daylight saving time beyond half a year. For most of my life, daylight saving in the United States started the last Sunday in April and ended the last Sunday in October. In other words, it lasted almost exactly six months. Some years ago the start of daylight savings was advanced to the first Sunday in April. Now, as we’ve just experienced, it starts the second Sunday in March, for crying out loud. And it won’t end until the first Sunday in November. In other words, henceforth we will spend 34 weeks of the year on daylight saving time – almost twice as much time as we spend on standard time.

Now I get to my point. This is totally out of whack! I don’t object to altering the agreed-upon time of day away from a neutral, average value based on the sun’s motion – for up to half the year. But if the benefits (in terms of energy conservation, quality of life, or whatever) are seen to increase even more if the alteration is maintained more than half the year, I argue that our behavior is at fault. Rationally, we should alter our behavior relative to sun time rather than arbitrarily agreeing that the time of day is something other than it really is.

I acknowledge that a more universal change in behavior is accomplished by a mandated change in clock time. But imagine the benefits that would accrue if we changed the timing of our daily activities in open recognition that we are changing them relative to astronomical events.

All we have to do is get up earlier, go to work earlier, leave work earlier, and go to bed earlier. Sure, many persons are required to be at work at a certain hour. But increasingly, many of us can set our own hours. And among employers that need rigid hours, some could change those hours while others might not. This non-uniformity would spread out commute hours, reducing traffic congestion.

The extension of daylight saving has been criticized for reducing the daylight hours available for farmers to get their crops to market, and for forcing children to travel to school in darkness. If we left the clocks on standard time early in spring and late in fall, those groups would be unaffected, and only those who benefit from changing their schedules would do so.

What it boils down to is: let’s acknowledge that we change our schedule every summer, and not pretend that the universe has changed to accommodate us.