Massachusetts lawmakers have their hands full dealing with half billion dollars of government overspending, but a handful are finding the time to study whether the state should pursue the ambitious idea of changing time zones.
A panel of legislators have been considering the pros and cons of scrapping how we set our clocks twice a year, the biennial bounce from Eastern Standard Time to Eastern Daylight Time and back again.
Spring forward, fall back, if anyone still has a manual clock.
Lowell Sen. Eileen Donoghue chairs the Legislature’s time zone commission and says studying the potential shift has been worthwhile.
“What we have discovered is that there are multiple layers of considerations and investigation and the other thing we’ve certainly discovered is everybody has an opinion on what the time zone means, whether we should or should not be flipping clocks twice a year,” Donaghue said Wednesday.
Those considerations include everything from the state borders, to travel, to impacts on businesses.
Proponents of the switch say that more daylight throughout the year would improve public health, help kids at school, reduce crime rates and even lead to fewer auto accidents. Plus, the sun wouldn’t go down at 3:30 on those frigid February afternoons.
The biggest obstacle to saying goodbye to the daylight saving switch isn’t something anyone here in Massachusetts controls. It’s the fact that if we’re out of sync with New York and the rest of our coast, TV shows, news and national sports will all start an hour later than normal for six months out of the year, including most of football season. No one’s going to stop a 9:15 p.m. Monday Night Football kickoff because Massachusetts is ready for bed.
Donaghue and the commission are realistic about that.
“If Massachusetts were to act it wouldn’t seem practical to do it as a stand-alone. ... I think what’s happening is that we’re seeing other New England states following suit in terms of looking at this and perhaps changing the way we do business,” Donaghue said.
That impracticality means New England, New York and the rest of the eastern states would have to all agree to ditch daylight saving in favor of Atlantic time, if this proposal has any shot of becoming reality.
Rep. Paul Frost from Auburn has been the most vocal skeptic on the panel. He says he thinks this will work only if the entire eastern seaboard is in on it.
“Chances are if New York goes, most of the East Coast would do it as well,” Frost said.
“New York is going to do things differently, whether it’s the stock market, whether it’s the national media, whether it’s the network television, whatever it is. ... If everything’s going to be based on New York East Coast Time, then I would imagine you would get other states to go along,” Frost said.
While you are holding your breath waiting for a critical mass of eastern states to take the plunge, let’s consider some complications if Massachusetts were to ditch daylight saving time:
Kickoff for Monday Night Football would be 9 p.m. – as opposed to 8. Your 8 p.m. flight from Miami would land you at Logan at 12:30 a.m., one hour later than it does now. And you might as well cut the cable cord entirely and rely on streaming, because local TV schedules would be chaos.
Donaghue says the commission will report their findings to the Legislature in the near future. From there, the Legislature could pursue a formal bill to alter the clocks, or politely ignore the report’s recommendations.
