|
| FILE - In this Jan. 8, 2015, file photo, commuters leave the Casco Bay Ferry terminal after arriving during a frigid winter early morning commute in Portland, Maine. As most Americans brace themselves for losing an hour of sleep, some corners of the country are proposing bold alternatives to daylight saving time. Lawmakers in a dozen states, from Alaska to Florida, want to abolish the practice of changing clocks twice a year. |
PROVIDENCE,
R.I. (AP) -- As most Americans brace themselves for losing an
hour of sleep this weekend, some corners of the country are considering
bold alternatives to daylight saving time.
California
has a bill that would ask voters to abolish the practice of changing
clocks twice a year. Lawmakers in Alaska and nearly a dozen other states
are debating similar measures. Some lawmakers in New England want to go
even further, seceding from the populous Eastern Time Zone and throwing
their lot in with Nova Scotia and Puerto Rico.
"Once
we spring forward, I don't want to fall back," said Rhode Island state
Rep. Blake Filippi, who hopes the whole region will shift one hour
eastward, into the Atlantic Time Zone. "Pretty much everyone I speak to
would rather have it light in the evening than light first thing in the
morning," he said.
Opponents of daylight
saving time argue that traffic accidents, heart attacks and strokes
increase when we change time, and that contrary to popular belief, it
does not save electricity.
Shifting to
Atlantic Time and never changing back would effectively make summertime
daylight saving hours permanent, said Filippi, who made a public health
case for his bill at a Rhode Island State House hearing this week.
Evening commutes would be safer with more sunlight. Wintertime lifestyles and mental health could improve.
The
biggest downside, Filippi said: Rhode Island children going to school
in early January wouldn't see the sun rise until 8:13 a.m. under
Atlantic Time. But he argues that could propel school districts to start
classes later, more in line with the wiring of adolescent brains.
Inspired
by long-shot legislation in Massachusetts, Filippi's bill would have
Rhode Island follow the neighboring state's lead if it ever defects. He
hopes New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine would then see the light. He
figures there's little chance Connecticut would join in, since so many
of its residents commute to New York City.
States
can exempt themselves from daylight savings under the federal Uniform
Time Act, but moving to a different time zone requires approval from
Congress or the U.S. Department of Transportation, which must consider
the effect on commerce.
And that raises
perhaps the biggest challenge to this temporal secession movement in
tradition-bound New England: Do its people really want to stand more
with eastern Canada and the distant Caribbean than the rest of the
eastern United States? The effect on transit alone - forcing Amtrak and
airlines to recalibrate schedules and commuters to change time zones
whenever they cross the New York state line - could involve many
unwelcome costs.
"For commerce and
transportation, it's a terrible idea," said Michael Downing, an English
professor at Tufts University who wrote "Spring Forward: The Annual
Madness of Daylight Saving Time," a history of the phenomenon.
Downing
doubts residents of Boston, Providence and Hartford would choose to
synchronize watches with Canada over New York and Washington. After all,
syncing up with New York's banks has been so important that cities as
far away as Detroit successfully petitioned to join the Eastern time
zone decades ago, he said.
Nearly half the
U.S. population now lives on Eastern Time, but New England juts much
farther east than anywhere else, giving it some of the country's
earliest winter sunsets. During standard time, the December sun
currently sets as early as 4:15 p.m. in Providence, 4:11 p.m. in Boston
and 3:45 p.m. in Frenchville, Maine. That's nearly as bad as Anchorage,
Alaska, where during the short Arctic winter, the sun sets as early as
3:40 p.m.
But those who would abandon daylight
savings are fooling themselves if they think we can reward ourselves
with more time, said Downing, who grew up in the Berkshires region of
Massachusetts.
"Even the heartiest of New
Englanders have a hibernating instinct for three or four months a year"
and won't likely use the extra evening light to hang out outside, he
said. "Most people in New England feel the stab of pain in the fall when
we return to standard time. There's no question. But I don't think that
will translate into willingness in December, January and February of
not seeing the sunlight until 8 or 9 in the morning."
Health
advocate Tom Emswiler helped plant the Atlantic Time Zone idea in the
popular imagination with his widely-shared opinion column for the Boston
Globe in the fall. "All of New England should adopt Atlantic Standard
Time, but we don't have a New England legislature so we have to start
somewhere," Emswiler said.
Massachusetts state Sen. John Keenan, a Quincy Democrat, introduced a bill to form a state commission to study the idea.
Emswiler
thinks "it's almost certain it'll go nowhere" in the short term, but he
hopes people now understand that "we do have an ability to change
this."
