Yesterday, the Senate unanimously passed legislation calling for DST, which began on Sunday, March 13, to continue indefinitely, ending the practice of “falling back,” or turning the clocks back one hour to standard time in the fall. Compounding the seeming failure of the experiment was the fact that the change, according to the Department of Transportation, saved little energy and may have actually caused an uptick in gasoline consumption.Īlmost 50 years later, daylight saving time is making headlines once again. As a Senate committee report stated, the “majority of the public” had expressed “distaste” for DST in the wintertime. Though approval of the initiative had increased during the long summer days, the prospect of another long, dark-and potentially deadly-winter led lawmakers to end the planned two-year experiment early. In October 1974, President Gerald Ford signed legislation reversing permanent daylight saving time. Writing for Washingtonian, Andrew Beaujon notes that eight students in Florida died in traffic accidents in the weeks following the change in the nation’s capital and its surrounding suburbs, similar incidents led some schools to delay classes until the sun came up. The main drawback to pushing the clock forward permanently was the prolonged early-morning darkness in the winter, which left children heading to school when it was “jet black” outside, as a parent told the Washington Post’s Barbara Bright-Sagnier at the time. ![]() But while the experiment initially proved popular, with 79 percent of Americans expressing support for the change in December 1973, approval quickly plummeted, dropping to 42 percent by February 1974, reported the New York Times’ Anthony Ripley in October of that year.Ī 1918 ad celebrating Congress' enactment of daylight saving time Year-round daylight saving time (DST), signed into law by President Richard Nixon in January 1974, sought to maximize evening sunlight and, in doing so, help mitigate an ongoing national gas crisis. ![]() For ten months in the mid-1970s, America’s clocks sprang forward and never fell back.
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