Sun may be setting on Daylight Savings Time in California
Assembly Bill 807 is moving forward, which will allow Californians a vote on retiring annual time change fiasco.
The sun may be setting on Daylight Savings Time in the state of California.
California voters may get a chance to weigh in on Daylight Saving Time.
The state Senate Thursday passed a bill asking voters to repeal the current system and give lawmakers the power to adjust the time with a two-thirds vote.
Supporters say daylight saving time is outdated. Opponents call the effort an expensive waste of taxpayer money.The bill now goes to Governor Brown.
If Brown signs Assembly Bill 807, the measure would be on November’s ballot. Personally, Daylight Savings Monday is my least favorite day of the year, so I will be even more motivated to vote….and I already have a Kilauea-sized fire in my belly to head to the polls this November.
The bill’s author is Assemblyman Kansen Chu of San Jose. He notes that the practice is no longer sensible because California’s energy consumption pattern has changed.
“We got so many electronic gadgets and the air conditioning and you name it. Back in the ’40s when they go home, they pretty much retired, but nowadays, the energy consumption in the evenings is actually higher than the day time,” Chu said.
He said eliminating Daylight Saving Time would help people save on their electricity bills. He added that data shows health risks such as heart attacks and strokes go up during the time changes.
“Studies show that work-related accidents and traffic accidents actually increase the week after we change the clock,” Chu said.
Like the vote to split the state into 3 new ones, a “yes” on this measure would initiate a complex chain of actions required to retire the time change.
AB 807 allows the Legislature to amend daylight saving time with a two-thirds vote in the future. If voters approve the ballot measure, Chu, or another lawmaker, would need to introduce a new bill to establish a permanent daylight saving time.
The new proposal would have to clear the Senate and the Assembly and receive the governor’s signature. Then Congress would have to take action to sanction the law and allow states to adopt a year-round daylight saving time.
I can hardly wait!
California would not be the first state to eliminate Daylight Saving Time. A similar measure passed Florida’s state house and senate. Additionally, Arizona and Hawaii have no time change.
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Comments
The hubris of government to believe they can alter time or ‘save’ it in any way is stunning.
I know the history of DST, but believe it has outlived it’s usefulness. If there is that much concern over when it is dark outside matching up with the time, change it one half hour across the country, splitting the difference, and never change it again.
I am not a fan over changing the hour back and forth, it seems to bother me more as I age. I would support getting rid of it. If it’s dark turn on a light. Seems pretty simple to me.
Your a big boy now, you can go ahead and get up an hour earlier or an hour later or whatever to fit your own lifestyle. We don’t need .gov telling us how to set our clocks, we never have.
I don’t even care which way they set it – just pick one or the other and stick with it, we can deal with it.
You might note that we have been moving that way of late. After decades of no change in the Roosevelt administrations tinkering, the Spring (forward) “savings” period has been increased and the Autumn “fall back” made shorter. Inching toward one single period, it seems.
I don’t much care. I get up at the same time all year long (with a few aberrant days) and go to bed at the same time. In neither effort is the sun observable. IF I’m going to be late due to the time change in Spring, or early in Fall, it will be late or early for church on Sunday. I was never late for work on Monday due to an inability to reset the clocks in the house. And now the cell phone makes it even easier to reset an alarm.
We’re gonna clean the government’s Clock!
Are time zones next for obsolescence?
After all, they are also based on when the sun rises and sets.
Pilots use Zulu time.
Also, just for the record, I’m by average, indifferent. I love the extra hour of freedom in the fall but hate the lost hour in the spring.
I don’t really care what happens. I just see the logical fallacy of basing an argument against on not followingthe behavior of the sun since we do that with time zones.
/S But, But, But, its for the children……. so my precious doesn’t have to go to school in the dark.. /S
Except my 12 year old is on the buss long before it gets light most of the school year……..
and give lawmakers the power to adjust the time with a two-thirds vote.
It’s not clear why they should be able to screw around with it at whim.
Set it to GMT minus 8 hours and leave it there.
Perhaps they have in mind the example of that great Atheist/Leftist achievement – the French Republican Calendar (AKA the French Revolutionary Calendar). The Republic’s government, fresh off their adventure which resulted in making “guillotine” a household word, decided on the need for a new calendar which eliminated the influence of the Church and nobility. So the Gregorian calendar was replaced, from 1793 until Napoleon recognized the foolishness and reverted to the Gregorian calendar in 1805.
Maybe the Atheist/Leftists in CA plan on restoring the Revolutionary calendar, which would involve re-starting the year numbering at One as of the year of adoption and changing the method of accounting for time (each day was to be divided into ten hours, each hour into 100 decimal minutes, and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds. Thus an hour was 144 conventional minutes (more than twice as long as a conventional hour), a minute was 86.4 conventional seconds (44% longer than a conventional minute), and a second was 0.864 conventional seconds (13.6% shorter than a conventional second). The clocks manufactured for this new time system didn’t catch on, nor did the system and it was officially dropped in 1795 – though some cities decided to be sanctuary cities for the new system and kept using it as late as 1801.
See what dedicated Leftist politicians can do.
My only concern is it will make all my “atomic” clocks obsolete.
Windows and Apple anticipated this by allowing you to turn DST off and select your time zone.
I lived in Indiana for a while, and the state was split on DST.
I’m from north central Indiana about 5 miles from the time zone.
Knew a fella whose milk barn was in a different time zone than his house, 75 feet away
That’s one of the nice things about living in AZ. Since the rest of the country does DST, though, I’ve long advocated that we do something similar – DLT (daylight losing time). I can’t imagine anyone in AZ wants a summer day to be any longer than it is. It would be great to get one less hour of inferno.
During the afternoon monsoons you get more than an hour of respite, and some pretty sunsets.
California has a zillion and one urgent problems that need resolution and yet they worry about daylight savings time. Just scrape everything above ant level off into the Pacific and start again. And my coffee is cold.
I’m really going to care a lot more about California after the “Big One”, when everything left of the San Andreas fault line slides into the sea and all that desert land I purchased out there becomes beachfront property.
Sorry, the San Andreas is a right displacement fault. All that is happening is that Los Angeles and San Francisco are getting closer together.
Most of our California deserts are on the same tectonic plate as San Francisco. You might hope that the Salton Sea floods again, though, I suppose.
I’ll note that it didn’t work out for Lex Luthor, either.
DST is a great example of just how difficult it is to retire bad ideas once they are in place.
To Petrushka: every atomic clock I have or have had, all have on / off for DST. You’ll be fine.
Florida has passed this legislation and is leading the way on this issue. Time to do away with it,
But can Florida Man tell time, anyway?
“Supporters say daylight saving time is outdated. Opponents call the effort an expensive waste of taxpayer money.”
Well, the opponents lose that round. We all know wasting taxpayer money is a non-issue in California.
For once I agree with Cal. The only people who really care about how much sunlight there is is the golf courses. To farmers, construction workers, landscapers, people who work inside it makes no difference other than the lost hour of sleep. Electric lights have negated the use of expensive whale oil lamps.
Sun comes up
Sun goes down
I work and play in between
Why not just repeal it everywhere? If it’s a federal thing, get rid of it.
It seems to be a State issue, as there are some states who do not do it. Arizona and Hawaii, I believe do not observe it, as well as a number of territories.
My only annoyance is: I like my clocks and watches on the correct time. My atomic clocks take care of themselves, and the first in-coming call after the switch changes the time on my landline. But it’s the stove, watches, and bedside clocks that I like to set to the second. Yeah. I know. Anal. Annoying to do twice a year.
Before railroads and their requirement for keeping schedules, many towns had a town clock keeper, whose job was to maintain the town clock, usually in a public square or building. Periodically, perhaps daily or weekly, he would sight the sun at noon (when the shadow of a vertical stick or a building) was the shortest), then adjust the clock to 1200.
But, back then precise timekeeping was much less a concern for most people.
The whole concept of having an “extra” hour of daylight makes about as much sense as claiming your blanket will have an “extra” foot in length if you cut a foot off the bottom and sew it back on at the top. You haven’t altered the length of the day at all; the only thing that’s been accomplished is waste everyone’s time.
Hallelujah! Say goodbye to that depressing time in winter where the time goes back. This proposition makes it feel like a presidential election year!
Well, here’s something from California I can agree with.
The entire systematic ruination of our sleep cylces every 6 mo or so has always been ridiculous and of zero use.
And it doesn’t save TIME. It saves DAYLIGHT but that’s only if everyone has a 7 to 5 job like when the law was first passed.
Few do it that way anymore and those that do don’t need the extra sunlight.
Someone somewhere made out with the change and like all things government its been impossible to get rid of it.
Perhaps now we can.
It’s fascinating and illuminating that the elected officials won’t undertake this logical and way past due action on their own. They have to be prodded by the voters. And even then there are all the politicians who can find ignorant reasons to resist a logical reduction in pain for our populace.
Why won’t the federal government do something this logical? And why won’t they get rid of pennies and nickels, speaking of rational governance? In the 19’th Century, they eliminated the half-penny as inflation rendered it essentially worthless. The nickel is now worth less in purchasing power than the ha’penny was back then. But pols can’t be honest. It is antithetical to their instincts.
Indeed, back when DST was instituted, there were good reasons for it. Apparently, politicians used to arise from a more functional segment of the population back then.
I would like to get this straight. If this passes, is this a return to year-round standard time? There are some proposals that refer to year-round daylight saving time.
I have read of proposals which would compound the folly of the twice-a-year movement of the clocks by leaving the time alone when DST is supposed to end. Try keeping up with the time when some areas are on DST and others on standard time. (At least for the four-and-a-half months when standard time is in effect.)
I hate DST as it is, and there is really no justification for it at all. If California is truly trying to go back to year-round standard time, I hope that this starts a trend toward year-round standard time everywhere–return the clocks there and leave them alone.
So, why should it be an even hour forward or back?
The utility of Daylight Savings Time varies with one’s distance from the equator, as this affects the annual variation in daylight.
So, how about changing the time by 1.5 minutes for each degree of latitude?
And then bring back local (apparent solar) time for good measure.
After all, we’re no longer dependent on crude mechanical devices to keep track of time, now we have GPS-equipped electronic processors.
Keep it simple, stupid? Why, when there’s so much app-ortunity in making time-of-day insanely complex?
I did read about “solar time” recently. And I think that going to local time as you mention would be insane. (I hope you were being tongue-in-cheek.)
As it is, this would be a pain to have one time at the place you began a trip and a radically different time at your destination. And can you imagine each place setting their time as they felt like it?
I don’t even want to think about variations in latitude.
Some of us, believe it or not, don’t depend on “GPS-equipped electronic processors.” We use something much simpler called a watch. And we like it that way.
At least the time zones make sense. Yes, most of us are “stupid” and we need to keep it simple.
One or two corrections to your comment: I think that the solar time changes 4 minutes for each degree of longitude (not latitude): 360 degrees/24 zones = 15 degrees/zone; 15 degrees/zone * 4 minutes/degree = 60 minutes/zone. Adjusting for latitude means that there are 90 degrees between the equator (maximum distance around earth) and the poles (minimum distance around earth). I think you might be thinking 2/3 minute for each degree of latitude: 60 minutes/90 degrees = 2/3 minutes/degree. Leave well enough alone.
I prefer DST year round. Light til after 2100 is great in the summer. Dark at 1700 in the winter is ridiculous. See what else I did there? No AM or PM either.
Frankly, I don’t see a difference between sunset at 7:15 PM and sunset at 8:15 PM. (And yes, I saw what you did there.)
Before 1966, we had “dark at [5:00 PM]” in the winter, and we had no problem with it. I think that the problem with DST year-round is that that winter sunset may be at 6:00 PM, but sunrise would also be shifted from 7:00 AM to 8:00 AM. That’s pretty dangerous for those who have to be up early.
There are going to be trade-offs whichever way we go. DST is artificial, so let’s do away with it and adjust to whenever the sun is out.