Should Utah abandon daylight saving time? There are significant pros — and significant cons.

For my money, there are no better hours than the hours around sunset during the summer.

These are the hours worth living for. As a kid, they were for playing neighborhood games with friends — building bike ramps, playing street basketball, wallball. By high school, I was using those hours for near-daily tennis practice, or matches, traveling around Utah taking on all of the small-school opponents we could find.

Fast forward to adulthood, and those hours have found new uses. They’re for soccer games, Bees games, golf, and the old classic: hanging out with my friends or family on a patio somewhere.

Those hours are at risk. The Utah House of Representatives just passed a bill, HB120, that would end the practice of daylight saving time in Utah, keeping the clocks on standard time all year round. It passed by a 52-23 margin, and now is on to the Senate.

I hate this.

They might be right about it, though.

There’s an abundance of research about daylight saving time out there, some of it conflicting. For this article, I looked into the deal with daylight saving time.

As the Senate debates this bill, what’s best for Utahns?

Maximum waking daylight hours

Here’s the most scientific argument for keeping daylight saving time: It does legitimately work to maximize the overlap between the hours people are awake and the hours the sun is shining.

Here is when sunrise and sunset occur in Salt Lake City across our current daylight saving time setup, permanent standard time, and permanent DST:

We can get an idea of when people are awake with the American Time Use Survey. That data shows that the median American wakes up at 6:42 a.m., and goes to bed at 10:06 p.m.

You can see how time switching to daylight saving time helps. Without it, a summer sunrise comes before 5 a.m., when only 15% of people are awake. And if we stayed on permanent DST, the sun wouldn’t rise until almost 9 AM in the winter — 86% of people are waking up while it’s still dark.

Meanwhile, sunsets come really early if you go away from DST. The latest sunset comes at 8 p.m. But get used to sunsets in the 7 p.m. hour for the majority of summer, and in the 6 p.m. hour in April and September. It would, to be sure, be very rough on recreational sports activities.

Nate Silver has done the math over on his Substack: At the summer solstice, the average person gets roughly 40 minutes of extra sunlight during the day as a result of daylight saving time. And actually, if we switched to permanent DST, they’d get an average of an extra 15 minutes of sunlight then, too.

That increase in waking daylight does have a number of positive effects. For example, crimes go down in daylight hours — robberies decrease by about 7%.

The negative impacts of switching

It’s pretty clear, though, that switching times twice a year has a significantly negative effect on people’s health. It seems people sleep an average of 40 minutes less on the day in which clocks jump ahead an hour in the spring, while they don’t end up sleeping more in the autumn.

And the list of impacts on society noted by the research as a result is surprisingly long. Ready for this?

• Besides sleep length, it appears sleep quality is hurt in the nights surrounding both time changes.

• Emergency room visits increase. We’ll take care of this in one bullet point: There’s an increase in general accidents, heart attacks, stroke (especially in women), and even pregnancy loss among those undergoing in vitro fertilization.

• There are more workplace injuries. A study of miners from 1983-2006 found that more injuries and more severe injuries happened on the Monday after the switch to DST, without a compensating drop in the autumn time change.

• Adolescents studied showed increased sleepiness through three weeks after the spring time change.

• An increase in the number of scheduled medical appointments that are missed for the two weeks after the spring DST switch, though this is mitigated to some degree by an increase of appointments attended after the autumn switch.

• The stock market tends to go down, and be more volatile, on the day after the spring DST switch.

• Traffic accidents probably go up. This may be the most studied item, interestingly enough — some studies find an increase in car accidents only after the spring change, some find increases in both, and a limited number of studies have found no change. One estimate put the impact of the change at roughly 30 deaths per year in the United States, though another study estimated that number would be mitigated by fewer pedestrian accidents in the daylight.

I was generally surprised at how long some of these impacts lasted. I think of the daylight saving time switch being a bummer in the day or two afterward, but it’s clear that it makes a difference for a couple of weeks in areas of life. The sleep disruption is genuinely impactful.

If we don’t switch, which time should we choose?

You, a smart human reader of these last two sections, have undoubtedly thought of a solution: Why doesn’t Utah just make daylight saving time permanent?

For one, it’s illegal. Congress, in 1974, voted that states could not choose to move to permanent daylight saving time. They could either stay in DST switching or move to permanent standard time.

Why did they pass that law? Well, the whole country switched to permanent DST as part of a two-year trial in 1973. The Nixon administration wanted to try it out, in part to save energy in a fuel crisis — the thinking was that with more daylight, you’d need to spend less on electricity to power those lights. (It’s now relatively clear that any decrease in energy spent on lights is overridden by an increase in energy used on heating and cooling.)

More importantly, it was unpopular. Parents complained about the darkness in the morning hours as kids went on their commute, and a couple of high-profile accidents helped sharpen the argument that it was dangerous.

Perhaps you could convince Congress to change their minds on the ban — a bi-partisan effort from Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ed Markey and Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio does exactly that.

But the sleep scientists aren’t generally big fans of the permanent DST idea, either. Essentially, they argue that more sunlight in the evening hours actually isn’t a good thing for health. Studying communities that span two time zones, researchers found that those on the side with the later sunset time slept 19 minutes less on average. They found higher rates of obesity, heart diabetes, and breast cancer as a result.

From an economic point of view, those on the late sunlight side of the time zone line made 3% less in wages. They found no difference in population density, rents, home values, or commuting times, but found this wage disparity.

Another way to study the issue: compare people on the western edge of a time zone to its eastern edge. Who is healthier? It appears that those on the western front, where sunset lasts longer into the night, were more likely to have cancer, to die from cancer, and had shorter life expectancies on the aggregate, explaining about 2-7% of the variability there.

One study bucked the trend, though, in saying daylight saving time is actually good for you: later sunset times were correlated with a lower incidence of depression in a 2006 study of Americans.

What should we do?

I don’t want to read too much into that last study — it doesn’t outweigh on its own the other, much more significant research against daylight saving time.

But it does basically sum up how I, personally, feel about the subject. Under permanent standard time, I might likely sleep more, live longer, and make more money. But I will miss — desperately miss — the way a June evening after work feels like it can stretch out forever, holding unbridled potential. And yes, to this sports fan, the way the evening perfectly encompasses a summer’s game.

Authors in the research journal Frontiers in Physiology acknowledge this loss, but suggest a solution: “Anyone who wants to spend more time at home in daylight after work should convince his/her company and co-workers to advance their start time during certain months of the year.” In response, I mock Frontiers in Physiology, and suggest that “Anyone who thinks typical workers can simply convince each other (let alone their bosses) to change their schedules isn’t living in reality.”

If HB120 is passed, I suspect that the complaints about the changes to the sun’s schedule overall from what people are used to would register more loudly. You’d hear from the sports fans, sure — but also the people who enjoy evening walks, the people who enjoy visiting a friend or neighbor in the evening, those irked to see the sunrise at 4 a.m.

I suspect we’d see a repeat of 1974, 51 years later — a quick legislative reversal back to the status quo. I suspect it would take just one vocal summer, just as it did back then.

Changing clocks twice per year is hard. Changing perceptions of how people should think of their time is even harder.

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