Readers: Daylight Saving Time Is No Longer Necessary; Patterson Says Keep Clocks Ahead One Hour All Year
Sunday’s poll was a chance to compare to the nearly identical poll last March. This 2nd time a greater percentage are willing to do away with Daylight Saving Time.
Q: Is Daylight Saving Time Still Necessary?
- No 32 [71.11%]
- Yes 9 [20%]
- Neutral 3 [6.67%]
- Unsure/No Opinion 1 [2.22%]
While we’re early risers, and I go to bed early, I don’t like the idea of a Summer sunrise 4:36am and the latest sunset at 7:29pm. On the other hand, July 4th fireworks could start earlier!
Others suggest we switch to Daylight Saving Time (ahead one hour) and don’t go back to standard time.
Making daylight saving time permanent — by never “falling back” again — could save the country billions a year in social costs by reducing rapes and robberies that take place in the evening hours, according to a forthcoming paper by researchers at the Brookings Institution and Cornell University.
In 2007, Congress increased the period of daylight saving time (DST henceforth) by four weeks, adding three weeks in the spring and one in the fall. “This produced a useful natural experiment for our paper,” authors Jennifer Doleac and Nicholas Sanders write at Brookings, “which helped us isolate the effect of daylight from other seasonal factors that might affect crime.” They found that “when DST begins in the spring, robbery rates for the entire day fall an average of 7 percent, with a much larger 27 percent drop during the evening hour that gained some extra sunlight.”
Today, November 4, 2015, our sunrise is at 6:31am and our sunset will be at 4:58pm. If we stayed on DST they’d be 7:31am & 5:58pm, respectively. I like the idea of not changing clocks twice a year, I’d just prefer to keep them ahead one hour.
— Steve Patterson