SB73 – Daylight Savings Time Forever!!

“I don’t know one person who likes moving their clocks forward and back,” Sen. McBride said. “It’s more than an annoyance, frankly. It’s a social experiment that has produced more harm than good and is now on the verge of becoming a public health issue.”

Vox studied the issue recently, and found if the entire country moved into the next time zone (i.e. East becomes Atlantic, Central becomes East, Mountain becomes Central and Pacific becomes Mountain), we all would have better lives because we would always have more sun in the evenings:

To be fair, we would all likely have to go to school and work in twilight or dawn light, as the sunrises would likely be at or after 7 am all year long.

Here are the other maps showing the current situation ….

…and then if we adopted standard time all year long:

In 2015, Joseph Stromberg made the compelling case at Vox that the daylight saving time shift into the evening should be extended year-round because having more light in the evenings benefits us in a number of ways:

• People engage in more leisure activities after work than beforehand, so we’d likely do more physical activity over sedentary leisure activities. Relatedly, studies show that kids get more exercise when the sun is out later in the evening.
• Stromberg also cites some evidence that robberies decrease when there’s more sun in the evening hours.
• There could be economic gains, since people “take short trips, and buy things after work — but not before — so a longer DST slightly increases sales,” Stromberg writes.
• The time shifts related to daylight saving have been linked to spikes in heart attacks and pedestrian fatalities.
• Extending daylight saving time would also resolve another troubling consequences of changing the clock: car crashes. In 1999, researchers at Johns Hopkins and Stanford universities analyzed 21 years of fatal car crash data from the US National Highway Transportation Safety Administration and they found a very small, but significant, increase of road deaths on the Monday after the clock shift in the spring: The number of deadly accidents jumped to an average of 83.5 on the “spring forward” Monday compared with an average of 78.2 on a typical Monday.

So SB73 would request that the U.S. Department of Transportation to move the First State into the next time zone to the east, known as the Atlantic Standard Time Zone, if the neighboring states of Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey enact similar laws to move into the Atlantic Time Zone.

“So many here in the Mid-Atlantic live in one state and work in another,” Sen. McBride said. “No one wants to lose an hour between home and the office. But if we all agree, we’ll never have to change our clocks again.”

WHERE IS THE BILL? Senate Executive Committee as of 4/15/2019

DEMOCRATIC SPONSORS – McBride, Townsend, Bentz, Paradee, Poore, Sokola, Baumbach, Brady, Lynn

REPUBLICAN SPONSORS – Pettyjohn, Wilson, Ramone

YES VOTES – 

NO VOTES –