More States Want to Skip Daylight Saving Time

As Americans across the country prepare to set their clocks forward early on Sunday, losing an hour of sleep to the annual ritual of daylight saving, a handful of states have advanced legislation seeking to either outlaw daylight saving time outright or make it permanent throughout the year.

Either solution would effectively stop the practice of "springing forward" and "falling back," as residents of certain states would no longer need to set their clocks forward an hour in the spring, only to rewind them in the fall.

Utah is the latest to see meaningful movement in its Legislature. Its House of Representatives voted by a 70-1 margin on Feb. 26 to advance a bill that would make daylight saving time permanent statewide. The proposal had already cleared Utah's Senate, so its next stop is the desk of Republican Gov. Gary Herbert.

Several states, including Alabama, Idaho, Iowa and Maryland, have considered similar legislation.

"It doesn't appear to be a partisan issue, and it doesn't appear to be a red state or blue state issue, either," says Jim Reed, group director for environment, energy and transportation at the National Conference of State Legislatures. "It's not a rural-urban or conservative-liberal split. It kind of varies by the state."

Eight other states since 2018 have approved or enacted legislation that would make daylight saving time permanent – effectively moving them into another time zone – including South Carolina, Arkansas, Delaware, Maine, Oregon, Tennessee, Washington and Florida. California residents in 2018 voted to adopt year-round daylight saving time, but progress has stalled in the state Capitol.

But it has been decades since a state has circumvented national daylight saving standards.

"I think over the past five or six years, there's been a trend that every year, more states are considering bills," Reed says, though he notes that "nothing has really happened on this" since Arizona and Hawaii moved away from daylight saving in the 1960s.

Congressional approval is needed before states can enact permanent daylight saving legislation. And, at least in the case of Utah's bill, at least four other Western states would need to adopt similar year-round daylight time policies before permanent daylight saving time would take effect.

"The real risk with individual states or regions of the country being allowed to create their own time zones or change their own time zones in this uncoordinated way is precisely to recreate the situation that the country was in in 1965, which is why we got the Uniform Time Act in 1966," says Michael Downing, a professor at Tufts University and author of "Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time."

Downing notes that, prior to the Uniform Time Act, states, cities and even counties had freedom to choose their daylight saving standards. Back in 1883, American and Canadian railroads helped establish the four most well-known time zones in the U.S.: Eastern, Central, Mountain and Pacific, according to the Library of Congress. But during World War I, Germany implemented a daylight saving concept hoping to conserve energy and grant citizens more daylight hours at the end of the day.

The U.S. eventually followed suit, despite a considerable amount of political opposition and an eventual repeal of the first federal daylight saving legislation in 1919. States and localities were then left to make their own decisions about daylight saving.

"As early as 1930, when there was the first attempt to pass a statewide law in California for daylight saving, the principal backers of that legislation was the petroleum industry," Downing says. "They understood, if you give Americans more daylight at the end of the day, they will go out to the ballpark or the mall. And we don't walk there. We drive. It's been a reliable boon to gasoline consumption."

New York City adopted its own metropolitan daylight saving policy, and dozens of other major cities across the country followed suit. What emerged was a complicated patchwork of daylight saving policies that varied in length and by city, state and municipality.

"It's sort of remarkable. It's not the 19th century we're talking about," Downing says, noting that by 1965, there were 18 states that observed daylight saving for six months each year, 18 states that didn't have formal policies but held cities or towns with their own daylight saving standards and another 12 states that didn't implement daylight saving at all. Portions of North Dakota and Texas, meanwhile, observed a sort of "reverse" daylight saving time, essentially setting their clocks back an hour rather than moving them forward.

The time zone confusion ultimately led Congress to pass the Uniform Time Act of 1966, which promoted, according to its text, the "adoption and observance of uniform time within the standard time zones." It also established a uniform system of daylight saving that was most recently extended beginning in 2007 under former President George W. Bush. Hawaii and Arizona opted out of adhering to daylight saving decades ago, though the Navajo Nation in northeastern Arizona still implements it.

"It's funny to talk to people in Arizona. They're constantly confused about what time it is in other states. The other states are always changing back and forth," Reed says. "There's just a lot of confusion with just that one state's issue. If this (permanent extension or abolition of daylight saving) is going to happen, it probably needs to be on a more regional basis so that it's not so confusing."

The regional framework advanced in Utah's bill seems to address that concern, though it is not the only worry among opponents to permanent daylight saving. The National Parent Teacher Association has previously spoken out against implementing permanent daylight saving, particularly during winter months, on the grounds that the darkness in which school children would commute in the mornings would present a safety hazard.

The U.S. Department of Transportation, meanwhile, has argued that daylight saving as it is currently constructed cuts down on crime and saves energy. The department cites a reduced need for electricity use thanks to daylight saving, though Downing points to a 2008 study circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research that determined daylight saving practices actually increased residential electricity demand.

"Daylight saving has never proved to reduce consumption of energy in any meaningful way," Downing says, also suggesting Americans taking advantage of the extra hour of daylight in the evenings consume more gasoline as they travel to parks and recreation areas.

Still, proponents of permanent daylight saving initiatives appear to have a friend in the White House. President Donald Trump tweeted last year that making the practice permanent would be "O.K. with me!"

"I don't doubt there will be some initiative or maybe even some success getting some year-round daylight saving. But I don't think that will be the end of it," Downing says. "Because I think, once you give people the puzzling – or possibly philosophical – proposition that you could gain or lose an hour of time, what's to stop the further manipulation of those clocks?"