Daylight Saving Time: Should We Kill It?

When Benjamin Franklin was in his senior years as an American delegate in Paris, he concocted the idea of Daylight Saving Time (DST) as a way to compensate for his belief that Parisians burned more candles due to their "sleep all day" and "play all night" lifestyles. "183 nights between 20 March and 20 September times 7 hours per night of candle usage equals 1,281 hours for a half year of candle usage. Multiplying by 100,000 families gives 128,100,000 hours by candlelight. Each candle requires half a pound of tallow and wax, thus a total of 64,050,000 pounds. At a price of thirty sols per pounds of tallow and wax (two hundred sols make one livre tournois), the total sum comes to 96,075,000 livre tournois." "An immense sum," the astonished Franklin concluded, "that the city of Paris might save every year."

The United States did not implement Daylight Saving Time until World War I when our government decided that we needed to conserve energy to help the war effort. Congress repealed DST immediately following the war (people hated it) but Franklin D. Roosevelt brought back "War Time" during World War II. It wasn't until Nixon's administration and the peak of the 1970s energy crisis that Daylight Saving Time became a uniform change across the United States (except for Arizona, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and a number of U.S. territories).

Today, many of us ask if it is worth the confusion to change clocks forward and backwards. When we switch back to Daylight Standard Time this Sunday at 2 a.m., many wish we could just stay with this time. Some facts indicate that:

Daylight Saving Time increases energy production as much as 4 percent due primarily to afternoon use of air conditioners during the summer and morning use heating systems in the cooler months. The anxiety of facing a cold, hard winter has the bizarre effect of decreasing, by 5 percent, deaths and hospitalizations from heart attacks (reports the Los Angeles Times).

But not all news is dire regarding Daylight Saving Time. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities increase during Daylight Standard Time — of the 67 pedestrian fatalities reported between Feb. 1, 2007 and Jan. 30, 2008, the Washington Transportation Department says 33 occurred between October and January.

So what's most important — reducing the risk of heart attack or increasing the risk of getting hit by a bus?  Maybe the energy production issue swings towards killing Daylight Saving Time for good. What do you think?