The Indy Star is carrying an AP article entitled “Knox County reconsiders Eastern Time.” The article says that Knox County commissioners are considering whether to ask for a reversal of the county’s time zone switch. An area resident apparently provided the commissioners with a petition with 2,400 signatures requesting the switch from Central to Eastern. It also mentioned that one of the commissioners asserted that other counties might ask the federal government to switch along with them. The article does not indicate whether this is a solid possibility or merely wishful thinking on the part of Knox County to get themselves away from the time line and put it in someone else’s back yard. There is a bit more information in this article in the Vincennes Sun-Commercial, but no reporting on what neighboring Daviess, Martin, Dubois, Pike, and Perry counties actually think.

Just a reminder, the current map:

David Schaengold, a Cincinnati native writing for the Daily Princetonian, has a column on Indiana’s time zone.

He starts with:

For those of you from Massachusetts, the adoption of daylight-saving time by a single vote in the Indiana state legislature may seem as trivial as the state itself. And yet from Chicago to Cincinnati, Indiana’s horological peculiarities have endeared the otherwise uninspiring, and frankly, unpleasant state to generations of Midwesterners.

This guy goes to school in New Jersey. Does he really want to get into whose state is unpleasant?

But mainly, I’m confused about what route this guy is taking:

You set out heading west from Cincinnati and shortly pass through the state line into casino country: Ohio and Dearborn counties. Sensibly enough for a region economically dependent on Cincinnati, the two counties follow daylight-saving time and are in the Eastern time zone. These are small counties, and leaving them to the Northwest, the clock moves back an hour. Not content with only one idiosyncrasy, the Eastern time zone makes a large square foray into Central time zone territory in the middle of the state. After setting your clock another hour back in Central (you are now two hours behind Cincinnati, an hour’s drive away), you almost immediately have to set it forward again as you drive into Indianapolis, in Eastern. Northwest of the capital, the adventure continues, as you set your clock back once more to Central. Not free yet, as you enter the counties that pay tribute to Chicago and daylight-saving time, you must set your clock forward once more, despite traveling west. Drawing a line along this highly plausible route, the time in each zone when it is noon in Cincinnati is as follows: 12 p.m., 11 a.m., 10 a.m., 11 a.m., 10 a.m. and 11 a.m.. That’s five timezone changes in as many hours as it takes to drive the route.

There are no Central Time Zone counties between Cincinnati and Indianapolis and there are no Central Time Zone areas that do not observe Daylight Saving Time. Under the route described by this ignoramus, if you depart Cincinnati at noon (and travel the route instantaneously) you’d have 12 p.m. in Cincinnati and 11 a.m. from the Indiana border (or the border of Ohio or Dearborn County depending on the route) to Chicago. Alternatively, if it was during the 5 months of the year when DST was not in effect, it would be 12 p.m. in Cincinnati into Indiana through Indianapolis and up until you hit the Jasper County line. At that point it would be 11 a.m. until you hit Chicago.

The author goes on to say that Indiana was entirely in the Eastern Time Zone in 1966 which is false. (Here is the map from 1961 to 1967)

Despite being riddled with factual inaccuracies, this article is still informative. Governor Daniels was obviously anxious to minimize the razzing he took from his Princeton buddies who are probably about as well informed as this guy.

Yikes.

Jane Licthenberg has a blog entry over at the Indy Star that insinuates Hoosiers opposing adoption of Eastern Daylight Time did so because they were too stupid to work a clock. Thanks Jane.

Matthew Yglesias has a post on Daylight Saving Time.

John J. Miller observes that “The person who invented the abomination that is Daylight Saving Time obviously was not responsible for getting children out of bed and off to school.” Indeed, DST is a huge pain in the ass for everyone.

. . .

For one thing, as far as energy conservation measures go, altering the structure of time is a little extreme. More to the point, there’s no evidence that this actually works. Even if it did work, the amount of possible savings is minimal since all it targets is electric lights which are a very minor component of overall energy usage.

The National Geographic article linked above is from July 2005 and is entitled “More Daylight Savings (sic): Energy Boon or Scheduling Snafu.” It notes that the energy saving data is sketchy and old. The federal government passed an expansion of DST which is to go into effect in March 2007 (3 weeks earlier than it began this year) based on studies conducted in 1974 and 1975. New studies are to be completed before the 2007 effective date. The federal government’s cut first, measure later approach to legislation reminds me of the Daniels administration.

Here is my Daylight Saving Time tale of woe. I use my cell phone as an alarm clock. It gets its time from the cell tower. As of last night, it had not yet switched over to Eastern Daylight Time. So, I left alone alarm #1 — a recurring alarm set for 5:10 a.m. and set alarm #2 for 4:10 a.m. (which is the equivalent of 5:10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time). Sure enough, the cell tower caught up over night and so my 4:10 alarm went off an hour earlier than I wanted to get up. I was cognizant of the possibility, so when that alarm went off, I checked another clock, verified that it was only 4:10, and went back to sleep.

But, it took me awhile to get back to sleep, so when my 5:10 alarm went off, I was too tired to get up and decided to skip the gym. This is surely what my pro-DST nemesis — a shadowy, lurking figure with no fixed address — had in mind. Having messed with my workout routine, when our climatic battle comes in the final scene, I will be weak as a kitten. Crafty bastard.

Oh, wait. That’s not real life. Hmmm, lack of sleep must be getting to me. Did I mention that, were we still under Eastern Standard Time, I could have been in bed an extra hour? Grumble.

The newspapers are littered with “Gee Whiz, We’re Going to be on Daylight Saving Time” coverage. When I read those articles, for some reason they remind me of a Special Olympics pep talk. “Come on champ, you can do it! Move that clock ahead one hour. You can do it the night before, or the morning after! Isn’t that wild? Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it. There you go, that’s super!”

It’s as if the writers believe that the reason Hoosiers remained on Hoosier Standard Time (HST) for more than a generation was because we considered ourselves too stupid to work a clock.

That sort of cloying enthusiasm notwithstanding, the time switch happens tomorrow. 5 a.m. will become 6 a.m. and we will have an “extra” hour of darkness in the morning as we jump off the DST bridge with the rest of the country.

I don’t expect we’ll change back any time soon, and I expect I’ll get used to getting up in the dark mornings pretty much year round and to putting my kids to bed in the full glare of daylight. I do hope the lemmings in the General Assembly who helped their leader Mitch pass the legislation pay the price when voters head to the polls this November.

In anticipation of the beginning of Daylight Saving Time this weekend, the Indianapolis Star has numerous articles this morning on the subject. (Thanks to Jim for compiling the links.):

DST may challenge drivers – Suggests that DST will cause more morning accidents but fewer night time accidents because, go figure, traffic accidents are more likely in the dark. I’m not inclined to do the math at the moment, but it seems to me that from April through October, there wasn’t a real shortage of evening, drive-time light, so the extra hour won’t assist a lot of commuters in the evening. During those same months, under EDT there is a shortage of morning, drive-time light but not under EST. Not that I think it’s a momentous issue in any case, but I disagree with the Star’s assertion that the gain on one end is equivalent to the loss on the other end.

DST: Take a look back in time to examine its origins – a column in the opinion section by David Prerau. He recounts the stories of Benjamin Franklin and William Willett, both of whom found it wasteful for people to not begin their days until several hours of daylight had passed. They thought it best for people to start their day in conjunction with the rising of the sun, thereby reducing the need for artificial light. First of all, I’m not sure how relevant that is in our 24 hour world. But, that aside, even assuming Franklin and Willett’s goals are good policy, we’re probably starting DST to early and ending it too late. To keep sunrise at roughly a 6:00 a.m. wake up time, we should probably start DST at about May 15 when sunrise takes place at about 6:30 a.m. EDT and end it at about July 15 when sunrise takes place, again, at about 6:30 a.m. As it is, sunrise won’t take place until about 7:30 a.m. on April 2. For me (I know I get up earlier than most), it will be about 2.5 hours of darkness after I wake up. )

Pulaski County, under pressure, switches to Central –

Pulaski County commissioners on Monday abandoned plans to stay on Eastern time, saying concerns over a possible federal lawsuit outweighed their unhappiness over the U.S. Department of Transportation’s decision to move the county to the Central time zone.

“We caved,” said Mike Tiede, president of the Pulaski County Board of Commissioners. “We don’t want to spend a bunch of taxpayers’ money trying to defend this. The Department of Transportation threatened to hand us over to the Justice Department, and our county can’t afford that kind of stuff.”

There is also an interesting quote from a USDOT official who said “We don’t have the authority to look the other way. In the ’60s the department did so, was sued and lost.” Unfortunately, there was no follow up about what the heck was going on in southeastern Indiana where those counties were illegally observing DST. In any case, Pulaski county officials should never have been placed in this situation. The Governor and the General Assembly passed the buck and the US Dept. of Transportation’s ad hoc approach to this situation left Pulaski in a different position than its similarly situated neighbors.

Sleep deprived teens – While not mentioning DST directly, this article reports that teens are not getting enough sleep. School age teenagers should get about 9 hours of sleep per day. Most 12th graders are getting about 6.9 hours. Education suffers with less sleep as does driving. The article cites televisions, computers, and phones in the rooms of teens as some of the culprits.

I feel compelled to mention that I see this article as just another “kids these days” article, hyperventilating about the sorry state of the youth of today. I’m not an old codger, but I am 34 years old. And ever since I can remember, I’ve been hearing or reading stories bemoaning the sorry state of kids these days. I suspect people have been complaining about “kids these days” for centuries, if not millenia.

But, putting that aside and taking the premise of the story as correct and worrisome, DST can only exacerbate the problem, such as it is. By May 31 when school lets out (more or less), it won’t get dark until 9:45 p.m. EDT. That won’t encourage kids, or anyone else, to get to sleep any earlier. Wake up times, on the other hand, will tend to remain fixed due to scheduling, regardless of when people get to sleep.

Apparently the folks in Pulaski County won’t be defying the federal government by observing Eastern Time. WSBT is reporting that county officials are backing down from their decision to invoke “home rule” to stay on Eastern Time despite the recent decision of the U.S. Dept. of Transportation to move them to Central Time. So, for now, starting April 2, Central Time it is for Pulaski County. The Board of Commissioners backed down after the Department of Transportation threatened a lawsuit.

Pulaski County Board of Commissioners president Mike Tiede says they didn’t want to spend taxpayer money defending their decision. Tiede said the only reason Pulaski County sought to be in Central time in the first place was because all of the counties surrounding it were asking to be on Central time.