Does anybody really know what time it is?

 

Having just endured the semi-annual changing of the clocks, remembering to "spring forward in the spring," I am detecting a disturbance in our collective mood, if we can take any indication from the fact that both our state legislature and the U.S. Congress are working on legislation to abolish this ritual. Iowa's House passed a bill this week to enact year-round daylight savings time. If they can find a way to make this measure hurt transgendered people and/or public school teachers, which seem to be the paramount policy goals of the legislature this year, it's as good as done.

I've gotten used over the years to springing forward and falling back, and it doesn't bother me that much. I also will say that decades of life in the upper Midwest has given me a sense of when the sun rises and sets, and if we mess with that I don't know where I'll be. Here's the thing: my town is at 42 degrees north latitude, which means summer daylight lasts about 15 hours, and winter daylight about half that. Optimizing the distribution of that daylight over the twenty-four hour day is tricky.

Consider this. Most AM radio stations either power down at sunset or go off the air altogether. These times change every month, so tracking them is an easy way to smooth out fluctuations in sunrise and sunset times. If we stayed on daylight savings time all the time, this is how our year would look:

EASTERN IOWA AM RADIO POWER UP AND DOWN TIMES, ASSUMING YEAR ROUND DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME

January	8:45 a.m.	6:00 p.m.	July	5:30 a.m.	8:30 p.m.
February	8:15 a.m.	6:45 p.m.	August	6:15 a.m.	8:15 p.m.
March	7:30 a.m.	7:15 p.m.	September	6:45 a.m.	7:30 p.m.
April	6:30 a.m.	8:00 p.m.	October	7:20 a.m.	6:25 p.m.
May	5:30 a.m.	8:15 p.m.	November	8:00 a.m.	5:40 p.m.
June	5:15 a.m.	8:30 p.m.	December	8:30 a.m.	5:45 p.m.

You'll notice the sun rises awfully late in the morning in the winter months, though we'd get an extra hour of daylight at the end of the day. I was in high school (in Illinois) during the 1970s energy crisis, when the nation went on daylight savings time in January 1974. It didn't get light until second period, which was strange. My history teacher, Mr. Lindvall, a great teacher whom I completely failed to appreciate, was essentially teaching a night class, for which he deserves even more credit. 

Illinois is to our east, while most of Nebraska, to our west, is also on Central Time. That would mean some late mornings in, say, North Platte in mid-winter.

Back to Iowa: If we go on standard time year-round, this is how our year would look:

EASTERN IOWA AM RADIO POWER UP AND DOWN TIMES, ASSUMING YEAR ROUND STANDARD TIME

January	7:45 a.m.	5:00 p.m.	July	4:30 a.m.	7:30 p.m.
February	7:15 a.m.	5:45 p.m.	August	5:15 a.m.	7:15 p.m.
March	6:30 a.m.	6:15 p.m.	September	5:45 a.m.	6:30 p.m.
April	5:30 a.m.	7:00 p.m.	October	6:20 a.m.	5:25 p.m.
May	4:30 a.m.	7:15 p.m.	November	7:00 a.m.	4:40 p.m.
June	4:15 a.m.	7:30 p.m.	December	7:30 a.m.	4:45 p.m.

Where now we have twilight past 9 in the summer, under this scheme we'd lose it at 8. We could start fireworks shows earlier, but maybe other kinds of outdoor activity would suffer? 

But this blog is here to ask: Which arrangement would be best for the community? Maybe having the daylight last longer throughout the year would encourage more outdoor activity in the winter, while the later sunrises would make coffeehouses cozier. It would be interesting to study the effect of either change on worker productivity. I'm definitely a morning person, but would that change if the sun rose later?

It's really hard to think of a public purpose to moving summer daylight from the evening to the 4:00 hour of the morning. The city and homes and businesses would all be using electric lights when awake, and sleeping when the sun is out. So I'll just leave it at that.