America’s current daylight saving time system — spring-to-fall daylight saving time followed by winter standard time — is an excellent compromise, providing all of DST’s many benefits for the majority of the year and yet avoiding winter DST’s difficulties during the dark, cold months.
Evaluating daylight saving time is more complex than it might initially seem. Many focus on issues related to the clock changes and do not examine the significant benefits they provide throughout the months after each change. Modifications to our current system would cause fewer benefits to spring and fall, more problems in winter, or both.
One proposed alternative is year-round standard time. This would cut short 240 beautiful, long spring, summer and autumn evenings and would eliminate eight months of DST’s benefits. Numerous studies show that having spring-to-fall DST increases public health and the quality of life by getting people outdoors more, reduces crimes like mugging, reduces energy usage and peaks, and over the 240-day period, reduces traffic accidents and fatalities significantly.
Year-round standard time would make many spring and summer sunrises extremely early, while most people are sleeping: New York and Chicago sunrises before 4:30 a.m., Los Angeles and Washington sunrises before 5 a.m. We would sleep through morning sunshine for many months, while that daylight could have been better utilized later in the day. Our current DST system relocates an hour of otherwise wasted early morning sunshine to a much more useful hour at day’s end.
Under federal law, each state can choose year-round standard time without federal approval. Only two states do so, and for unique reasons: Hawaii, the closest state to the equator, has daylight hours that vary little over the year, making DST’s benefits much smaller. Arizona’s most populous areas have extreme summer heat, and so instead of additional summer daylight, Arizonans await sunset to go outdoors.