Copy of MY SEMI-ANNUAL DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME (DST) RANT

(And yes, it is SAVING, not SAVINGS.)

At 2:00AM on November 2nd of this year we set our clocks back one hour. Deal with it.

“Spring forward, fall back” time has arrived once again. Twice a year we hear otherwise sensible people raging about it; I think we need to keep it just as it is. Here’s why–

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A few springtimes ago, an old friend got online and complained about losing an hour of sleep for no useful reason when we set our clocks forward, and I felt that he might benefit from a little Grumpy Old Mansplaining. As an overnight trucker, I can attest through firsthand observation that in June— our sunniest month here in the northern hemisphere— the northeastern sky begins to pinken at 3:00AM as I make my way into Boston. By 4:00AM it is darn near light enough for golf, definitely so by 4:20AM. The June sun rises in Boston right after 5:00AM and sets about 8:20PM. I asked my friend whether he would rather that hour of golf-enabling light between 7:30 and 8:30PM, or— as would be the case WITHOUT Daylight Saving Time— between 3:00AM and 4:00AM. He immediately saw my reasoning. But what about the flip side?

On January 1st of each year, the sun rises in Boston at 7:13AM on Standard Time. If and/or when we make Daylight Saving Time permanent, that would put the January sunrise out to 8:13AM. And because the sun takes such a low track through our winter sky, we have less pre-dawn illumination than in summer. The upshot of this is that our children will head off to school in blackness, as will most folks head off to work. While it is true that the late sunrise would be in exchange for an extra hour of sunlight in the evening, that would hardly be as useful in the dead of winter as it would be in warmer months.

But here’s where it gets truly problematic— Boston is on the far eastern edge of a time zone that extends nearly a thousand miles to the west... and because the earth is round, the sun cannot be everywhere at once in a given time zone. The city of Indianapolis, for instance, sits about 900 miles west of Boston and is therefore over a full hour behind in sunrise and sunset times… and so if DST were to be made year-round, most of Indiana would not see a January sunrise until after 9:00AM. One could rightly say that DST in the warm half of the year prevents Boston from having a largely useless 4:00AM June sunrise, while NOT having DST in the winter prevents Indianapolis from having a 9:00AM January sunrise that would be utterly undesirable for most people and downright dangerous for school-bound kids in the morning. I call that a win-win.

So there we have it. This isn’t complicated. We benefit from having DST in the summer, and we benefit from NOT having it in the winter. All it costs, really, is the inconvenience of losing one hour every spring, as we don’t really suffer from gaining that hour back in the fall. As inconveniences go, I find it rather minor… hell, most of our clocks even manage to change themselves nowadays.

We humans have it pretty good here on earth— we are just the right distance from the sun, and we also have the perfect atmospheric composition to support both plant and animal life. If our axis of rotation weren’t slightly cockeyed relative to our orbital path, we wouldn’t be discussing DST at all because we wouldn’t have any seasons, and the hours of daylight we experience in a given location would be exactly the same every day of the year. I think that would be pretty boring.

But alas, instead of appreciating the variety of the four seasons, people dig into the semi-annual Daylight Saving debate as if it gives them something they need as much as sunshine itself— something to gripe about.