A lot of people hate changing their clocks twice a year. That’s understandable, but it’s a necessary evil in any nontropical country.
The further you are from the equator, the more your daylight hours vary throughout the year. Most of America's population lives north of 38 degrees latitude (that’s about the latitude of Kansas City, the San Francisco Bay, and Ocean City, Maryland). That means most of the population of the United States has well over five hours of difference between the day with the most sunlight and the day with the least sunlight. As a result, most people have more than 2.5 hours of difference between the earliest sunrise and the latest sunrise.
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The idea of daylight saving time is that we can save energy by not sleeping through a few hours of daylight. The reason not to have DST year-round is that for every hour of daylight you “gain” in the evening, you lose in the morning, and we want to minimize children going off to school in the dark.
That brings us to October and early November.
That time of year where daylite savings time is absolutely crushing parents trying to get their kids to school. Standard time now
— Michael Brendan Dougherty (@michaelbd) October 2, 2023
Michael Brendan Dougherty writes from a bit north of New York City, where already, less than two weeks after the equinox, sunrise is after 6:50 a.m. This year, DST doesn’t end until Nov. 5. Before DST ends, sunrise in that area will be as late as 7:25 a.m., long after many students have got to be on the road to go to school.
In Detroit, sunrise is already after 7:25 a.m., and it will be after 8 a.m. by the time DST ends.
There are plenty of fixes to this, including starting school days later year-round and moving Michigan into the Central time zone. But the general fix is to shorten daylight saving time.
Congress has lengthened DST repeatedly, most recently in the 2005 energy bill (even though DST provides very little energy savings). It should shorten it now. At the very least, move the closing date of DST back to late October — back to where it was before President George W. Bush changed it. Arguably, it should move to mid-October.
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What would make the most sense is starting DST in mid-April and ending it in mid-October so that half the year is DST and half the year is standard time.
Just because changing our clocks is a pain doesn’t mean we can’t do it better.