More daylight-saving time a wake-up call for some

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Morning people beware. Darker days lie ahead.

Aiming to save energy, Congress looks poised to expand daylight-saving time by two months.

For night owls — scientists say they're the majority — that means the light will last longer into their active evenings. For the morning minority, it promises more weeks of gloom.

"It's hard for morning types," said physician Ann Romaker, the medical director of the sleep disorders center at St. Luke's Hospital. For a few, she said, spending more time in the dark can breed depression.

Yet Romaker said most people prefer to stay up later, and for them a longer daylight period means more activity before the sun slips below the horizon.

As for sleeping, she said, the toughest problem comes not from having to wake up when it's dark or having to go to sleep sooner after sunset, but in making the shift when clocks are changed.

"The hard part for most people is making the switch," Romaker said. "Extending daylight-saving doesn't change that."

In a 1,000-plus-page energy bill devoted to gas-mileage standards and Arctic oil drilling, the House calls for adding two months to daylight-saving time — springing forward in early March instead of April and falling back in late November rather than October. The measure needs Senate approval, where the time change is not expected to see opposition.

It's enough to make an early riser pine for anti-daylight-saving-time Indiana, which this week quashed the most recent effort for the entire state to conform to the rest of the nation.

The aim of the national shift to more daylight time primarily is to cut the country's light bill.

Yes, people would flick on the switch more often to cut through the gloom of darker mornings. Yet when they come home from work and school, all that daylight they'd saved by getting up earlier (earlier as measured by Earth's rotation, not by the clock) would keep lights off longer and cut utility bills.

The country moved to 15 consecutive months of daylight-saving time during the oil crisis of 1974 and 1975. A Department of Transportation official testified to Congress in 2001 that the experience hints at a 1 percent savings in electricity costs and a less-than-certain assumption that Americans saved slightly on home-heating costs.

Then and now, daylight-saving time has angered people, fearful that schoolchildren waiting for buses and walking to school on dark mornings would be in peril. A study by the National Bureau of Standards found that pupils were in more fatal accidents in January and February 1974 than one year earlier, but that increase did not apply to March and April.

One study suggested that more lighted evening hours might have reduced crime in Washington, D.C., but there was no detectable difference in Los Angeles.

Ben Franklin first suggested daylight time, thinking people could burn fewer candles. It wasn't until World War I in Europe that the idea took hold. The United States set standard time zones and adopted daylight-saving time in 1918. The law wasn't popular at first, so the country dumped the practice after the Great War and picked it up again during World War II. That war was followed by a period of state-by-state clock confusion until the adoption of the Uniform Time Act in 1966 set a national timetable.

Still, there have been holdouts. Arizona does not spring forward or fall back with the rest of the country, but the Navajo Indian Reservation, which stretches over parts of three other states, does follow daylight time. Remote and close to the equator, Hawaii doesn't bother saving daylight.