Should daylight saving time be abolished permanently?

Standard time is the honest time. Noon under standard time is when the sun is actually highest; daylight time is the one-hour lie we all agreed to tell. timeanddate.com If we are finally abolishing the switch, the only defensible choice is the time that matches the sky. Permanent daylight time would mean winter sunrises at 8:45 in some cities, sending kids to school in pitch dark for months. The sleep scientists are right about the mechanism even if you dislike their tone: morning light anchors the circadian clock. Keep the real noon. End the fiction.

I cared for my mother through dementia, and I can tell you what the clock changes do to a fragile mind. They detonate the routine. Meals, meds, sunlight, sleep, everything her remaining cognition clung to, shifted by an hour overnight. Caregiver groups warn that disrupted routines and early darkness worsen sundowning, the evening confusion and agitation that already makes nights brutal. Alzheimer's Association She did not understand why it was dark at dinner. She just knew something was wrong, and she was frightened. Multiply that by millions of families. Abolishing the switch is not about convenience. It is about not terrorizing the most vulnerable people in the country twice a year.

I manage a warehouse with overnight shifts, and the clock changes are a genuine operational hazard. Scheduling software glitches, timecards need manual fixes, and tired forklift drivers are a safety risk nobody should accept for tradition. Federal research on shift work documents that chronic sleep deprivation raises the risk of workplace injury, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics has tracked the growth of non-daytime schedules for years: CDC/NIOSH. We voluntarily add a fatigue spike twice a year. Farmers, the group the myth claims this is for, have opposed it for a century because cows do not read clocks. The EU voted back in 2019 to end seasonal clock changes and then never implemented it, which tells you everything about political inertia. One fixed time, year round, and businesses can plan around reality instead of a 100-year-old experiment.

Every November and March, my household spends a week recovering from a government-mandated jet lag. My kids' bedtimes slide, mornings become battles, and teachers report the same fog in every classroom. The original energy-saving argument collapsed years ago: a 2008 Department of Energy study found the extension of daylight time saved about half a percent of electricity, a rounding error. Meanwhile Arizona and Hawaii skip the whole ritual and function perfectly well, as Reuters coverage of the debate regularly notes. Russia tried permanent daylight time in 2011 and abandoned it after public outcry over dark winter mornings, switching to permanent standard time in 2014. The experiment has been run. The switching helps almost nobody and disrupts everybody. End it.

As a cardiac nurse, I dread the Monday after the spring clock change. A 2014 study presented to the American College of Cardiology found a 24 percent spike in heart attacks that day, and a 2020 study in Current Biology found fatal car crashes rise about 6 percent in the week after we spring forward. Our bodies run on circadian rhythm, not legislation, and losing an hour of sleep is a population-level stress test. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine formally supports permanent standard time, noting morning light is what anchors healthy sleep. The Senate unanimously passed the Sunshine Protection Act in 2022 to lock the clock, but sleep scientists say permanent daylight time is the wrong half of the choice. Abolish the switching, keep standard time, and stop the twice-yearly health shock.

We have tried to fix the clock before and made a mess. In 1974 the U.S. tried year-round daylight time during the energy crisis and parents revolted over children waiting for school buses in the dark; it was repealed within a year. Russia's 2011 experiment with permanent daylight time ended the same way, with a switch to permanent standard time in 2014. Every option has a constituency that hates it, which is why the current compromise survives: we muddle through two transitions a year that most people adjust to within days. The Associated Press has covered how the Sunshine Protection Act keeps stalling precisely because nobody agrees on the replacement. Abolishing the switch sounds decisive until you have to pick the time, and then the fight starts over. Sometimes the devil you know is the policy.

Permanent standard time means summer sunsets around 8 instead of 9, and anyone with kids in evening sports knows what that costs. Youth baseball, soccer practice, neighborhood bike rides, all of it runs on after-dinner daylight. The golf industry once estimated an extra month of daylight time was worth hundreds of millions in revenue, and the barbecue and recreation industries say the same. The Senate's Sunshine Protection Act chose permanent daylight time for a reason: people vote with their evenings. YouGov polling has shown Americans dislike the switching but split on which time to keep, with a tilt toward more evening light. Abolishing the change by locking in standard time trades dark winter mornings for dark summer evenings. That is not obviously a win.

Daylight in the evening is a public safety tool. Study after study finds robbery and assault drop when the evening commute happens in daylight rather than darkness. Shifting an hour of light to the morning helps almost nobody: kids are in school and adults are at desks either way. But that same hour in the evening puts joggers, trick-or-treaters, and commuters in visible, safer conditions. Researchers analyzing crime data have estimated permanent daylight time could prevent tens of thousands of robberies a year. The sleep researchers pushing permanent standard time, like the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, are optimizing for one variable while ignoring how people actually live. If we abolish the switch, keep the daylight where it protects people: the evening.