Thoughts??? Personally, I'm not a fan. I'd rather spring forward and fall back.
No clock changes next year! Sounds great now, but wait for winter
Mark Lane
The Daytona Beach News-Journal
1918 poster celebrating passage of the daylight saving time bill.
The U.S. Senate, a body known in recent years for decisive inaction and kneejerk partisan division, somehow managed a unanimous vote this week on a measure making daylight saving time year-round.
The Sunshine Protection Act, if enacted into law, would mean that the semiannual chore of changing clock hour hands would be called off in 2023.
Legislation doing away with the clock-changes has been a regular feature in the Florida Legislature going back some 14 years. Always popular at session time when the days are growing longer. And it's been something of a seasonal hobbyhorse for U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio who sponsored the bill.
Wait, we've been here before:Didn't Florida agree to do away with the whole clock-changing thing?
Daylight saving time: A century of clock changing could soon run out.
And why not? April's clock change can be painful. It was especially hard on me back when my kids were teenagers and Seabreeze High School's late bell rang at 7:20 a.m., a time that we used to call "6:20" only the week before the time change.
I organize my life around being a slow riser. This is not a moral failing; I was born that way. I don't attend breakfast meetings or post sunrises on Instagram. I'll pay quite a bit extra for later flights out of town. I eat at places that stick with their breakfast menu well after noontime while withholding judgment on customers. I am not to be trusted operating heavy machinery or motor vehicles on busy streets in single-digit morning hours, so working from home has lately suited me fine.
So I, of all people, should be applauding this action, right? No harsh transitioning with the time shift. More after-dinner walks on the beach. And yet, sad to say, sometimes excellent springtime ideas don't always feel the same come wintertime.
The last time Congress voted to put the nation on year-round daylight saving time came in 1973, the start of the '70s energy crisis. Ancient history from the days of the Old Ones. The idea was that this would save energy. If the regular daylight saving time season saved energy, it seemed to follow that permanent daylight saving time would save even more.
But the result was long, dark morning hours come wintertime. "Daylight saving time all year would be intolerable" was the headline in a Daytona Beach Evening News editorial as the measure breezed through Congress.
But after eight Florida schoolchildren died in predawn car crashes, Gov. Reubin Askew called a short-notice special session in January 1974 to take peninsular Florida off daylight saving time altogether. (The Panhandle is in the Central time zone, which complicated things.) The Legislature refused with a quick vote, and members turned around and went home, no doubt grumbling all the way.
Still, there was a lot of public unhappiness, which was what Askew was reacting to. Year-round daylight saving time was popular when it took effect, but the public turned on it within a year. Dark mornings at the bus stop soured a lot of parents on year-round daylight saving time. Predawn commutes were no fun either.
Gas savings? Negligible, according to a Department of Transportation study at the time. Longer daylight in the afternoons encouraged more people to be on the road in the early evening. Energy savings? When President Woodrow Wilson called for imposing daylight saving time during World War I, it saved energy on lighting. But air conditioning wasn't in use yet and late afternoons in Florida before the sun goes down now is prime time for compressors to be hardest at work compressing.
Bottom line: Marginal at best energy savings. But still, more springtime outdoor time. For Floridians, beach time after work! Yes, depressing winter mornings but safer driving on the way home from work.
So even if the measure is a heartening demonstration that the U.S. Senate is on occasion capable of doing something, anything, the broader effects seem to be kind of a wash.
Talk to me about it after Halloween 2023.
Mark Lane is a News-Journal columnist. His email is mark.lane@news-jrnl.com.
https://www.news-journalonline.com/...-great-but-wait-until-winter/7033441001/
