Down with Daylight Saving Time

Today, much of our country and the larger Western world is a more dangerous, less productive, sadder and generally more unpleasant place than it was just over a week ago. Cars are crashing, risk of illness spiking, workplaces grinding to a halt. It’s that time of year again, when for a few days every spring, the switch to Daylight Saving Time (DST), which serves no discernible purpose, wreaks havoc with our mood, our economy and our health – and it has to stop.

You will likely have heard at least one of two stories about why Daylight Saving Time is necessary. Both of them are bogus.

The first is a myth of unknown origin: namely, that the extra spring sunlight is somehow necessary for the work of farmers. In fact, the opposite is true. Farmers actually formed an organized lobby against the policy when it was first adopted in the United States during the dying days of the First World War. They argued that it left them insufficient daylight in which to get their crops to market.

The second reason is more sensible, but still wrong: specifically, that more sunlight means less energy use. That’s why Canada, the United States and other Western countries, beginning with Germany, adopted daylight saving in the early part of the 20th century. It’s also why the spring-forward date was moved up by a month in 2005. But study after study has shown that the energy savings are negligible at best. It seems that whatever we save in electricity is negated, or worse, by additional heating and cooling costs.

The case for DST, then, is essentially nonexistent. Not so, unfortunately, for the costs, which are significant, various and well-documented.

For one thing, daylight saving is demonstrably hazardous to our health. Many studies have shown that, by messing with our sleep patterns, time changes significantly increase the risk of heart attack, stroke, depression and sleep disorders in the days following the switch to and from DST.

Time changes are also associated with a steep rise in various kinds of fatigue-fuelled accidents. Fatal car crashes, for instance, consistently rise in the days following the spring shift; so do serious workplace injuries.

Then there’s the economic impact. We lose, on average, 40 minutes of sleep on the night after we move our clocks forward, creating in the words of one German study, “non-negligible losses of utility.” In the fog following the time shift, we are far more likely to waste hours on the Internet and less likely to work effectively. One study from 2013 put the annual cost of time changes to the U.S. economy at $434 million.

It’s no wonder, then, that the vast majority of the world shuns Daylight Saving Time. Only about 1.6 billion people live in places where DST applies, which means about 79 per cent of the global population is mercifully exempt. Many countries, such as India, China and South Africa tried out daylight saving before ultimately rejecting it as the bad idea it is. Even Saskatchewan and parts of British Columbia have abandoned it.

It’s past time that we left time alone.