Story at a glance
- Daylight saving time begins this Sunday, March 12.
- Congress is still considering legislation that would make daylight saving time permanent.
- Under such a law, Americans would get extra daylight in the evening, but some cities would experience very late sunrises.
This weekend most Americans will again push their clocks forward an hour once daylight saving time begins at 2:00 a.m. on Sunday.
The ritual is intended to take advantage of natural light in the Northern Hemisphere as the days grow longer in the spring, but it comes with some downsides: stealing an hour of sleep on the day of the shift, for one, and leaving mornings darker for months.
Every state except for Arizona and Hawaii observes daylight saving time, under which Americans “spring forward” an hour in March and then “fall back” in November.
There has been a years-long push to make daylight saving time permanent in order to stop the widely maligned clock changes and preserve some sunlight later in the day. Last year, the Senate unanimously approved a bill, dubbed the Sunshine Protection Act, that would keep daylight saving time year-round by pushing the clocks forward an hour as usual but never winding them back in the fall.
The result would be later sunrises but brighter evenings as the colder months come along. But while the bill would halt clock changes across the U.S., making daylight saving time permanent would impact some parts of the country more than others.
The change would mean people living along the western-most edges of U.S. time zones wouldn’t see the sun rise until well past 8:30 a.m. in the fall and winter months.
In the city of Marquette on Michigan’s upper peninsula, the sun wouldn’t come up until 9:34 a.m. in January. The same would be true for the residents of Williston, a city in the northwestern tip of North Dakota, who wouldn’t see the sun rise until 9:40 a.m. come December, according to the group Save Standard Time.
And in Kalispell, Mont., the sun wouldn’t come out until 9:29 a.m. for part of January.
While some members of Congress push for permanent daylight saving time, others — including the American Medical Association — actually want standard time to be made permanent.
Health experts in favor of adopting permanent standard time argue that it aligns better with humans’ circadian biology and would result in fewer heart attacks, car crashes and bouts of depression.
But permanent standard time is not perfect either. Some cities would see the sun rise at unreasonably early hours in the morning if it’s put in place.
Most of those cities are located along the East Coast, where the sun rises earlier, or along the eastern edges of time zones, like Chicago, Ill., and Las Vegas, Nev.
Boston, Mass., Chicago and Las Vegas would all see the sun rise between 4 and 4:30 a.m. in the late spring and summer if standard time were to be made permanent, according to an interactive feature created by Save Standard Time.
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