Daylight Savings Solution

Forget what the clock is set at. Open and close schools and businesses at whatever time works for them. There's nothing sacred about starting and ending a  workday at a specific time. We've been heading toward differing schedules for a long time now.

Members of the House who oppose the bill worry that under year-round daylight saving time, children would be going to school in the dark. But while they disagree with Rubio and his allies on how to set the clock, they seem to buy into the same unspoken assumption, which is that whatever Congress decides about the clock will govern how Americans live their lives.

Why, though, should Congress get to decide? The setting of the clock is less important than it’s made out to be. It’s really just a number. Let’s say the bill becomes law and everyone in, say, Vermont decides that it’s not safe for children to be going to school in the dark. There’s a simple fix: Start the school day in Vermont an hour later. That would instantly undo the damage.

Likewise for companies, local government offices, churches, restaurants, clubs — really, everyone. If the federal or state government sets the clock in a way that doesn’t suit you, adjust your opening and closing times to right the wrong. Simple!

While we’re at it, why stick to the same hours year-round? A school board might want to start classes later in the winter than in the spring and fall, effectively creating its own customized clock change. Or not. Whatever suits.

To be sure, such adjustments would create some coordination problems, which is probably why they weren’t made in the past. For years, governments and employers have stuck with ill-fitting opening and closing times, winter and summer, to keep their people in sync with one another and with people in other places.

But uniformity has never been all Americans cared about.

And now two new forces, Covid-19 and information technology, have made coordination problems less of a concern than ever before.

The surprising success of working from home during the pandemic has demonstrated that it’s the work, not the face time, that matters. For example, if school starts later in the winter, that would prevent working parents from getting to the office at the usual hour. In the past that would have been a career killer. Now, for many, it’s business as usual.

But if we’re going to standardize on one clock, I’d prefer that it be standard time. Springing ahead permanently, and not returning that borrowed hour in the fall, would rob us of an hour forever, which seems regrettable.

Technology and work arrangements have evolved to the point where we can rewind the clock to the preindustrial era in which people’s bodies were in sync with the rising and setting of the sun. There are still vestiges of that era: Parks and beaches are open from dawn to dusk. Muslims fast during daytime hours during Ramadan. In Judaism, there are 12 “seasonal hours” of daytime that are longer in the summer than in the winter.