It's Time to 'Spring Ahead,' Complain About It

Clocks will skip ahead an hour at 2am on Sunday for daylight saving time in most of the US, creating a 23-hour day that throws off sleep schedules, plunges early-morning dog walks into darkness, and inspires lots of whining. Even though polls show most people dislike the system that has most Americans changing clocks twice a year, the political moves necessary to change the system haven't succeeded because opinions on the issue and its potential impacts are sharply divided. Want to make daylight saving time permanent? That would mean the sun rises around 9am in Detroit for a while during the winter. Prefer staying on standard time? That would mean the sun would be up at 4:11am in Seattle in June. "There's no law we can pass to move the sun to our will," said Jay Pea, president of Save Standard Time, which advocates switching to standard time for good. A look, per the AP:

• The US has tinkered with the clock intermittently since railroads standardized the time zones in 1883. So has a lot of the world. About 140 countries have had daylight saving time at some point; about half that many do now.
• About 1 in 10 US adults favor the current system of changing the clocks, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted last year. About half oppose that system, and some 4 in 10 didn't have an opinion. If they had to choose, most Americans say they'd prefer to make daylight saving time permanent, rather than standard time.

• Since 2018, 19 states—including much of the South and a block of states in the northwestern US—have adopted laws calling for permanent daylight saving time. There's a catch: Congress would need to pass a law to allow states to go to full-time daylight saving time, something that was in place nationwide during World War II and for an unpopular brief stint in 1974.
• Rep. Mike Rogers, who introduces a bill calling for permanent daylight saving time every term, said the airline industry, which doesn't want the scheduling complexity a change would bring, has been a factor in persuading lawmakers not to take it up. Rep. Greg Steube, a Florida Republican, is proposing another approach. "Why not just split the baby?" he asked. "Move it 30 minutes so it would be halfway between the two."
• Of all US states, only Arizona—except the Navajo Nation—and Hawaii currently opt out of daylight saving time.

British Columbia is making the leap to permanent daylight saving time this weekend, and it hopes the US will join it.