Sometime during that nebulous post-SNL zone between 1 and 2 a.m. this Sunday morning (that's March 10th in case you're wondering), it'll be time to ceremonially turn the clocks forward one hour for daylight saving time (as always: it's saving, not savings), the biggest chronological scam in history. More enlightened states such as Hawaii and (most of) Arizona have cast off the chains of DST, but New York is still pointlessly tethered to it.
In previous years, we've compiled incredibly persuasive lists of reasons why DST should end forever—don't believe me? Just go read it and weep tears of persuasion. But this year, before that terrible hour emerges from the mists of the morning, we want to highlight our proposed solution to fixing the antiquated DST system: MAKE DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME REGULAR TIME YEAR-ROUND.
Matt Lubchansky/Gothamist
The reasons for the birth and implementation of DST were, to put it mildly, confusing and many-headed. A lot of people have staked claims to having either invented or popularized it for a myriad of reasons: Benjamin Franklin wanted to conserve candles, William Willett wanted to defy the limitations of "standard time," President Woodrow Wilson wanted to get more hours to play golf, New Zealand entomologist George Vernon Hudson wanted more time to study insects, and various governments wanted to conserve coal during the wars of the first half of the 20th century. There's no doubt that there were lots of compelling reasons why creating the system was especially efficient and effective in a pre-digital age.
DST was also designed to give people more time in sunlight, and ostensibly to conserve energy, and we certainly agree that it's great to leave work and still have an hour or two of sunlight. But research and evidence has stacked up in recent decades that suggests the DST system as it stands is not actually providing many, if any, benefits.
A U.S. Department of Transportation study in the 1970s concluded that total electricity savings associated with daylight saving time amounted to about 1 percent in the spring and fall months—and that was offset by the increase in air-conditioner use. A more recent study in 2006 found similar results, which was noted by two academics who wrote a NYT Op-Ed piece in 2008. They argued that not only is there little scientific proof that this reduces energy consumption—it's actually more wasteful than not. And super annoying, which we already knew.
Chronobiologists argue that the time shift has negative effects on human's bodies and brains, and other experts say that traffic accidents tend to spike the first Monday after the shift. (The Department Of Transportation, who is clearly in the pocket of the pro-time shift French Fry industry, disputes some of these findings.) As Michael Downing wrote in his authoritative book on the subject, Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time, this is "a perennially boiling cauldron of unsubstantiated science, profiteering masked as piety, and mysteriously shifting time-zone boundaries."
So the solution: what if, after the clocks change on Sunday, we never change them back? What if we adopted what we call DST as regular time? We're already using this time shift for eight months of the year, and in this post-climate change world with unpredictable weather patterns and random heat waves, it's no longer a sure bet that people won't want to be outside and active after work in December and January anymore. It would mean you would sometimes wake up with it slightly darker outside, but you'd get so much more sunlight and "daytime" after 5 p.m. Ask yourself if you are you more likely to be outside in the world at 7:30 a.m. or at 5:30 p.m., and then you'll know where you really fall on this issue.
As Vox wrote in 2015 proposing a similar change, "an act of Congress — just like the act that extended DST in 2005 — could instantly fix this problem, saving us the annoyance of switching our clocks and giving us more sunlight to enjoy during our leisure hours." Much of the rest of the world is in fact already living life on permanent DST time.
If that all hasn't convinced you, maybe John Oliver can:
