You Can’t Actually Save Daylight
Indiana’s House of Representatives in 1897 unanimously passed a bill known as the “Pi Bill,” because in proposing to construct a square equal in area to a circle, it deigned to legislate certain mathematical “truths” that would require changing pi from the irrational number slightly greater than 3.14159 into the much neater 3.2.
Even a unanimous bipartisan supermajority cannot square a circle or make pi rational. And in much the same way, even five contiguous state legislatures and a city council cannot make there be more hours in the day.
But they’re trying.
Under the rallying cry “Lock the Clock,” Maryland’s House of Delegates in February passed a bill stating that “the standard time in the state shall be Eastern Daylight Time Year Round.”
The change wouldn’t go into effect unless all surrounding states and the District of Columbia also make the same change. Delaware has passed a bill to the same effect, and one has been introduced in Pennsylvania. That would leave it to Virginia, West Virginia, and Washington, D.C., to follow suit.
Why do this?
People don’t like changing their clocks twice a year when daylight saving time begins in the spring and ends in the fall. Those few days of adjustment are “a public health issue, and the adjustments of the clock have real negative impacts on people,” says Maryland Del. Brian Crosby.
That logic requires choosing one time and sticking to it. Crosby prefers DST and says most Marylanders agree with him.
All things in life, though, come with trade-offs. Going to daylight saving time all the time means buying later sunsets at the price of later sunrises. That’s great in
the summer (which is why we have daylight saving time in the first place), but not so great in the winter.
In Cumberland, Maryland, on the state’s skinny arm between Pennsylvania and West Virginia, the sun would rise after 8 a.m. every day from Thanksgiving to Presidents’ Day under permanent DST. When children return to school from Christmas break, the sun wouldn’t come up until 8:36 a.m. and more like 8:45 a.m. in Erie, Pennsylvania, and Huntington, West Virginia.
There’s a case to be made that later sunsets are worth the price. Traffic data suggest that dark commutes home are more lethal than dark commutes to work. There can be something exhilarating about being up and out before the sun.
But making everyone get up two hours before sunrise and having children walk to school in pitch black seems suboptimal. If only the House of Delegates would ban trade-offs.