Analysis: Why permanent daylight saving time may not be that great

The only time Americans really care about the daylight saving time change is when we’re anticipating having to change our clocks.

That’s not just my opinion; I can prove it. Each fall and late each winter, searches for “daylight saving time” spike as people start to wonder when they need to either spring forward or fall back.

You’ll notice that there’s been a big spike in interest this particular late winter. That’s in part because the Google search data for this week isn’t yet complete, but it’s mostly because the Senate just unanimously passed legislation that would make the daylight saving time change permanent. In other words, if this bill is signed into law, you won’t have to fall back next November, or ever again.

Well, until the law is almost inevitably rescinded.

We tend to think about daylight saving time as giving us more sunlight in the evening hours, which we think because it does. But we don’t think about the converse of that very much: that when there’s no daylight saving time, we have more sunlight in the morning. On Sunday, daylight saving went into effect, meaning that last week and for a few months before that, we were operating in standard time. When you would get up for work or school in early January right after the sun had come up – that was standard time.

And without standard time, you would have been waking up in darkness.

Washingtonian magazine wrote about the time the country experimented with permanent daylight saving time in the 1970s. As it turns out, consistently sending kids to school in the dark led to a number of accidents and injuries. When the period in which the change was made permanent ended, it wasn’t renewed.

What’s more, the change itself has become far easier since the 1970s. Nowadays, many of the clocks you refer to most often – on your computer or phone or even a smartwatch – make the time adjustment automatically. There’s still a 48-hour period in which things are a little wonky, particularly if you have little kids. But you’re reading this no less than three days since the most recent change: Do you still find that it’s disrupting your life?

Congress will do what it does and one should certainly not assume that its decisions will uniformly be to the public’s benefit. But if our brief, seasonal interest in the vagaries of daylight maintenance actually carries into a permanent change to how we manage time, expect that the response to the change this winter might be somewhat less enthusiastic.

Keep an eye on Google searches for “end daylight saving time.” Or “kid’s flashlight.” Or “recall campaign against Congress.”