Daylight saving time: What’s the point?

Before going to bed Saturday night, millions of households will engage in what many believe is a pointless ritual: setting clocks back one hour to end daylight saving time (officially 2 a.m. Sunday). And, no, the point isn’t to get an extra hour of sleep. The real goal is to save energy, but does it even accomplish that?

The European Commission recently proposed to end daylight saving time, possibly as soon as next year, believing the practice is outdated. It conducted a public survey that received 4.6 million replies and found 84 percent of European citizens were in favor of doing away with it. There is no similar movement in the U.S., but there are still plenty of people who question the point.

It wasn’t until the establishment

of a uniform system under the Uniform Time Act of 1966 that daylight saving time became standard. It gained traction under the belief that electricity use inside homes would drop.

The federal government also believed daylight saving time, which begins in spring and ends in fall, would prevent traffic crashes and would reduce crime.

But no one really knew, so Congress asked for a study of daylight saving time’s impact on energy consump tion. In a 2008 report, panelists concluded that the total electricity saved in the extended daylight saving time amounted to about 0.03 percent of the year.

The study did not examine whether daylight saving time impacted children traveling to school, or whether traffic accidents rose or if it reduced crime.

Rebecca Umbach wrote a study published in the Journal of Experimental Criminology that examined the impact of crime the day after the start of daylight saving time, and the day after the end of daylight saving time. From 2001 to 2014, there were actually almost 3 percent fewer assaults on the day after daylight saving time began. Counterintuitively, she found a near 3 percent rise in assaults the day after the return to standard time.

In the end, Umbach said, “I think people just get very annoyed by the inconvenience of it.”