Every six months most of Europe and North America, as well as a selection of countries elsewhere in the world, change their clocks: forward in the spring, back in the autumn. Nearly 1.3 billion people who live in the 55+ countries do this, to ‘benefit’ from Daylight Saving Time (DST). As ‘DST-natives’ we learn to see it as part of the natural order of things. But it is nothing of the sort, and it is starting to wear thin.
We have two prominent inventors to thank for DST, the New Zealander George Hudson and the Briton William Willett, who both independently came up with the idea in 1895 and 1905 respectively. Hudson was an amateur entomologist who valued the potential of extra hours of sunlight after work to collect insects. Willett famously noticed that his fellow Londoners were still asleep well into a warm summer day during a cycle early one morning. His first idea was to move the clocks forward by 20 minutes every week in April (for a total shift of 80 minutes) before reversing the process in September. A needlessly complicated system if ever there was one.
In any case, neither gentleman gained much traction for the best part of two decades, before the onset of the First World War. Suddenly, the benefits of an extra hour of evening light meant less coal used to generate power for domestic consumption in the evenings and more for the war. The German Empire was first to adopt DST nationally, followed by its ally AustriaHungary and then most of the rest of Europe. North America followed suit by 1918.
Following the First World War, most countries reverted away from DST back to their ‘natural’ time-zones, although there were notable exceptions, including the US, Canada and many western European countries. However, it was not long before DST was back, again due to war, in the 1940s. Britain even went to double DST during the Second World War, to make even greater use of the evening light. It was safer to move about (before the blackout) and easier to spot incoming air-raids.
Indeed, extra evening light remains the strongest argument for DST, wherever you are in the world. Longer evenings are more appealing to anyone who wants to participate in their favourite sport. Frequenting bars, restaurants, shows, and so on is also safer and warmer, bringing more revenue into late-night businesses and the economy as a whole.
As well as this, DST is also credited with reducing road accidents in the evening, particularly in the first couple of weeks of longer evenings. A UK study found that accidents fell by 1.5% in the two weeks of lighter evenings. There are also fewer burglaries, as these tend to happen in the evenings after dark.
However, the change back in the autumn is a bit of a shock. It becomes clear that the term ‘Daylight Saving’ is a complete misnomer. It doesn’t create any more daylight, it just shifts it around the clock a bit. On the car accident side, the picture is not good. The same UK study found that, in the first two weeks after the end of DST in the autumn, car accidents rose by 5.1%. This more than offsets the decrease in the spring. There is, on average, a greater than 2% rise in road traffic collisions in the two weeks after a clock change, regardless of the direction of that change.
On top of this, the clock changes simply ‘mess with’ your circadian rhythm, i.e.: your body clock. Any parent of young children will know the pain of trying to force them into bed when it is still light but the clock says it’s time for sleep. But this is just a minor inconvenience compared to a 2019 US study that found a rise in heart attacks and strokes in the weeks following both clock changes. Meanwhile, a study of suicide rates in Australian states that observe DST found a rise associated with the earlier dark evenings in the autumn.
Findings such as these, as well as the increasingly 24/7 nature of the global economy (even more so since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic) have led to a rethink on the benefits of DST in recent years. The past century has eroded most of the benefits. The EU had planned to move to permanent DST (i.e. permanent lighter evenings) in 2021, but progress has stalled while a full assessment is carried out. Meanwhile the US has recently voted through the Sunshine Protection Act, which, if passed by the House of Representatives, would put the US on permanent DST from March 2023. In doing so, it would join more than 50 countries that have done away with their own biannual switches.
If the US and EU change to permanent DST, then the rest of North America would have to follow suit, as well as the UK. Keeping the longer evenings would be no bad thing, for everyone’s sanity. Countries far closer to the poles that have already ditched clock changes, including Iceland, Argentina and parts of northern Canada. They show us the way
