As most Americans brace themselves for losing an hour of sleep this weekend, some corners of the country are considering bold alternatives to daylight saving time.
California has a bill that would ask voters to abolish the practice of changing clocks twice a year. Lawmakers in Alaska and nearly a dozen other states are debating similar measures. Some lawmakers in New England want to go even further, seceding from the populous Eastern Time Zone and throwing their lot in with Nova Scotia and Puerto Rico.
“Once we spring forward, I don’t want to fall back,” said Rhode Island state Rep. Blake Filippi, who hopes the whole region will shift one hour eastward, into the Atlantic Time Zone. “Pretty much everyone I speak to would rather have it light in the evening than light first thing in the morning,” he said.
Opponents of daylight saving time argue that traffic accidents, heart attacks and strokes increase when we change time, and that contrary to popular belief, it does not save electricity.
Shifting to Atlantic Time and never changing back would effectively make summertime daylight saving hours permanent, said Filippi, who made a public health case for his bill at a Rhode Island State House hearing this week.
Evening commutes would be safer with more sunlight. Wintertime lifestyles and mental health could improve. The biggest downside, Filippi said, would be children leaving for school more often in the dark, but he argues that shifting zones could propel school districts to start classes later, more in line with the wiring of adolescent brains.
Inspired by long-shot legislation in Massachusetts, Filippi’s bill would have Rhode Island follow the neighboring state’s lead if it ever defects. He hopes New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine would then see the light. He figures there’s little chance Connecticut would join in, since so many of its residents commute to New York City.
States can exempt themselves from daylight savings under the federal Uniform Time Act, but moving to a different time zone requires approval from Congress or the U.S. Department of Transportation, which must consider the effect on commerce.
And that raises perhaps the biggest challenge to this temporal secession movement in tradition-bound New England: Do its people really want to stand more with eastern Canada and the distant Caribbean than the rest of the eastern United States? The effect on transit alone — forcing Amtrak and airlines to recalibrate schedules and commuters to change time zones whenever they cross the New York state line — could involve many unwelcome costs.
“For commerce and transportation, it’s a terrible idea,” said Michael Downing, an English professor at Tufts University who wrote “Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time,” a history of the phenomenon.
Downing doubts residents of Boston, Providence and Hartford would choose to synchronize watches with Canada over New York and Washington. After all, syncing up with New York’s banks has been so important that cities as far away as Detroit successfully petitioned to join the Eastern time zone decades ago, he said.
Nearly half the U.S. population now lives on Eastern Time, but New England juts much farther east than anywhere else, giving it some of the country’s earliest winter sunsets. During standard time, the December sun currently sets as early as 4:15 p.m. in Providence, 4:11 p.m. in Boston and 3:45 p.m. in Frenchville, Maine. That’s nearly as bad as Anchorage, Alaska, where during the short Arctic winter, the sun sets as early as 3:40 p.m.
But those who would abandon daylight savings are fooling themselves if they think we can reward ourselves with more time, said Downing, who grew up in the Berkshires region of Massachusetts.
“Even the heartiest of New Englanders have a hibernating instinct for three or four months a year” and won’t likely use the extra evening light to hang out outside, he said. “Most people in New England feel the stab of pain in the fall when we return to standard time. There’s no question. But I don’t think that will translate into willingness in December, January and February of not seeing the sunlight until 8 or 9 in the morning.”
Health advocate Tom Emswiler helped plant the Atlantic Time Zone idea in the popular imagination with his widely-shared opinion column for the Boston Globe in the fall. “All of New England should adopt Atlantic Standard Time, but we don’t have a New England legislature so we have to start somewhere,” Emswiler said.
Massachusetts state Sen. John Keenan, a Quincy Democrat, introduced a bill to form a state commission to study the idea.
Emswiler thinks “it’s almost certain it’ll go nowhere” in the short term, but he hopes people now understand that “we do have an ability to change this.”
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
The majority of the people don’t have to lose an hour of sleep. They can shut down the TV an hour earlier; but many of those have been brainwashed by the media into believing that they must be entertained. Those who do not have responsibilities on Sunday morning can sleep later.
The TV does not set people’s schedules. Especially when you can watch anything, anytime, with the internet, and on-demand cable providers.
I really hope this happens in Minnesota God we all hate daylight savings time!
I think we should stay on daylight saving time all the time…………….
You must be on the eastern side of your time zone. I don’t much care if the sun sets at 8pm or 9pm in summer, but I hate getting up before the sun. Winter’s cold enough without taking your morning sun away. And the closer the time change is to winter, the more I hate it.
Personally I don’t like the switching around. The idea of daylight saving just has a hollow ring to it since the amount of daylight is not based on the clock. Also tractors now have lights so plowing can be done when it is dark unlike days of old when teams of mules were used. I think the mules were elected to political office years ago? And have never left?
DST had some justification when we mainly used energy (be it electricity or candles) for lighting. But with today’s air conditioning and cities that never sleep, we’re actually using MORE energy on DST. (Indiana found that out recently, and that’s why Arizona doesn’t use DST) And not only do we get more crashes and other fatigue-induced accidents when we go on to DST, we lose more people from strokes spring AND fall form the stress of switching.
I hate this weekend and love the fall back weekend. This is so ridiculous. They are doing to add daylight at the end of the day but taking it away from the morning. So instead of going to work in the daylight and coming home in daylight they want us in the dark in the morning? How about just leaving it alone and stop trying to play God!!!!!!
Hello Just Me, I feel confident that I can truly say , “You hit the hammer directly on the head!!” But, those in power feel they have to keep in practice “their little god strut” and keep something going that was put in place because of WWII to let the farmers have more time to harvest or plant crops for the war effort. Enough said.
Daylight Savings Time has outlived any usefulness.
BINGO!!!!!
God has arranged for the earth to revolve and bring us into sunlight when He wants it to happen. It’s not possible for men to change God’s timing. I feel it would be better to zone smaller areas and quit changing from normal to Daylight Saving time and then back.
simple solution is trash DST. We were doing just fine before it came along, just like the FED and the IRS. Trash all three and go back to pre-1913 times.
If the people in Rhode Island really want to be unique they should go on the same time zone as Newfoundland and be 1 1/2 hour ahead of others.
The time change can be blamed for Obama, Climate Change, Hillary, Carter, AIDS, Bernie, Pelosi, Obama(none)care, Jerry Brown, Harry Reid, Eric Holder, EPA, IRS.
Be like China, just have on time zone and get used to it.
Time Zones by Regions IE SW, West US, Midwest, East Coast, NE Coast.
4 Time Zones set by 1 hour.
HI can be neutral??
Make functional for Time Zones.
Revamp Time Zones.
Outdoor work cant work in Summer since dark by 6A.
Change System by Survey, polling.