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Washington moves closer to permanent Daylight Saving Time

By Alec Regimbal, SeattlePI

With a new proposal, Washington is closer to permanent Daylight Saving Time.

With a new proposal, Washington is closer to permanent Daylight Saving Time.

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A bill that would keep the United States on permanent Daylight Saving Time passed the Senate on Tuesday, a monumental step in the growing nationwide push to do away with the need to adjust our clocks twice a year.

Here in Washington, state lawmakers have spent years advocating for that change. The state Legislature, after several previous attempts, passed a bill in 2019 that would put Washington on permanent Daylight Saving Time. We’re now one of 19 states that have made such attempts.

So, what’s the hold up? It’s Congress.

The Uniform Time Act of 1966 prevents states from adopting permanent Daylight Saving Time on their own. But the bill that passed out of the U.S. Senate on Tuesday — the so-called Sunshine Protection Act — would essentially nullify the 1966 act and put the entire country on permanent Daylight Saving Time.

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U.S. Senator Patty Murray, D-Wash., has been a longtime proponent of permanent Daylight Saving Time, and was one of several co-sponsors on the Sunshine Protection Act.

“Today the Senate has finally delivered on something Americans all over the country want: to never have to change their clocks again,” she said Tuesday in a speech on the Senate floor. “No more dark afternoons in the winter. No more losing an hour of sleep every spring. We want more sunshine during our most productive waking hours.”

Most of the U.S. currently uses Daylight Saving Time, which requires us to set our clocks one hour forward in the spring and one hour back in the fall. The purpose is to make better use of daylight in summer months. Our days are naturally longer in the summer because the Northern Hemisphere is tilted directly at the sun. So the idea is that, by turning our clocks one hour ahead, the sun sets one hour later than it normally would. That gives us an additional hour of daylight to take advantage of.

Once the summer is over and our days naturally become shorter, we set our clocks back an hour to return to standard time. This is what we use until it’s time to move our clocks forward again in the spring.

Proponents of permanent Daylight Saving Time say the biannual clock switch negatively impacts the public. An uptick in the number of heart attacks, strokes and fatal traffic accidents are often seen in the days immediately after we set our clocks forward, and kids have also been known to perform more poorly in school in the days after the switch.

After passing the Senate, the Sunshine Protection Act is now on its way to the U.S. House of Representatives. If it’s passed there, it won’t go into effect until late 2023. Lawmakers say that want to allow ample time for airlines and other industries to adjust their schedules.

The bill was originally authored in 2019, but it hadn’t been brought to the floor for a vote until this year. It passed the Senate unanimously.

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The recent push to put the U.S. on permanent Daylight Saving Time might seem strange to those who were alive in the mid-1970s. President Richard Nixon put the U.S. on permanent Daylight Saving Time in 1974 to help the country get through an energy crisis, and it was widely popular upon implementation. But it was scrapped just 16 months later after public opinion on the switch did a 180.

The problem was that, with the absence of standard time, mornings seemed darker and colder during the winter. Those with morning commutes loathed their trips to work, and many were hesitant to leave their young kids at school bus stops.

That seems understandable. If the U.S. were on permanent Daylight Saving Time right now, the sun would not rise until 8:55 a.m. on Dec. 21 — the shortest day of this year. Under our current time schedule, the sun is scheduled to rise at 7:55 a.m. on that day.

Alec Regimbal is a politics reporter at SFGATE. He graduated from Western Washington University with a bachelor's degree in journalism. A Washington State native, Alec previously wrote for the Yakima Herald-Republic and Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He also spent two years as a political aide in the Washington State Legislature.