Daylight saving time all year in California makes no sense

You still want daylight saving time year-round? California voters answered an emphatic “yes” last year. Well, look outside these chilly mornings about 7 o’clock.

It’s still dark over much of California. But that’s fine. It’s winter solstice time.

But what if it really was daylight saving time? It would be 8 a.m. and barely light in Southern California and still gloomy in San Francisco.

That’s uncivilized and dangerous.

Kids would wait for buses or walk to school in the dark, shivering. Workers would commute before sunup.

OK, everyone would get an extra hour of sunlight in the evening. It wouldn’t get dark until around 6.

So what? It’s cold outside, maybe rainy. This isn’t a balmy summer evening. The pool doesn’t beckon. There’s little appetite for barbecuing. Golfers might get in an extra three holes — but morning tee times would be harder.

These days, with standard time, in San Francisco, the sun isn’t rising until 7:20 a.m. So under DST, it wouldn’t be up until 8:20.

And what’s with this “saving” nonsense? We’ll get the same amount of daylight no matter what.

The way I see it, it’s fine to extend daylight into the gentle summer evenings. We can savor the outdoors. But when it’s cold and drizzly, provide me more morning light to get the day started.

But I was overwhelmingly outvoted last year.

Proposition 7, which paved the way for eventual year-round daylight saving time, passed by a landslide margin, roughly 60% to 40%.

The bill placing Proposition 7 on the ballot was passed lopsidedly by the Legislature and signed by Gov. Jerry Brown. The measure’s author, Assemblyman Kansen Chu, D-San Jose, said his main goal was to eliminate changing clocks twice a year. He wanted to adopt either daylight saving or standard time permanently but said people preferred daylight saving.

So the ballot measure encouraged the Legislature to adopt daylight saving all year, which requires a two-thirds majority vote — unlikely to be a major problem. But Congress and the president must approve a switch to permanent daylight saving time, although California could move to all-year standard time on its own. Arizona and Hawaii did that long ago.

Washington’s politicians have higher priorities right now. And it’s unlikely the U.S. Senate and President Trump will back anything California desires, even though Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., has introduced a bill to make daylight saving permanent nationally. The bill hasn’t budged.

Four states have enacted laws to adopt daylight saving year-round pending federal approval: Oregon, Washington, Tennessee and Florida

But things are moving rather lethargically in Sacramento.

Chu’s implementation bill, AB 7, breezed through the Assembly with only one “no” vote in a committee. It passed the Assembly 72 to 0, then stalled in the Senate.

But Chu says he’ll ask for a hearing in committee soon after the Legislature reconvenes in January. And he’s confident of passage.

Chu calls changing clocks twice a year “archaic” and “harmful.” When we’re on daylight saving time, he says, there are fewer evening robberies. There’s also a “significant increase” in heart attacks on the day after clock-changing, he asserts. And more people die in car accidents.

But how about those children walking to school in the dark? Aren’t they in danger?

“We can make sure there’s adequate lighting en route to school,” says Chu. “And it’ll only be dark for a few weeks.”

It just seems illogical to have 60 mornings of stumbling around in the dark to avoid changing clocks twice.