Dominate Your Local Market!

This Sunday (March 9, 2008) at 2 AM marks the start of Daylight Saving Time (DST) here in the U.S., but it hasn’t alwys been so. There have been times when DST was observed locally, creating consusion and chaos.

I remember as a child in the 1960s driving with my parents from our home in New Jersey to visit my grandfather in Knoxville, TN. We would pass through towns (especially along U.S. 11 in Virginia) that didn’t observe DST. This confusion ended in 1966 with the passage of the first Federal law regulating DST.

Chaos of Non-Uniform DST
Widespread confusion was created during the 1950s and 1960s when each U.S. locality could start and end Daylight Saving Time as it desired. One year, 23 different pairs of DST start and end dates were used in Iowa alone. For exactly five weeks each year, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were not on the same time as Washington D.C., Cleveland, or Baltimore – but Chicago was. And, on one Ohio to West Virginia bus route, passengers had to change their watches seven times in 35 miles! The situation led to millions of dollars in costs to several industries, especially those involving transportation and communications. Extra railroad timetables alone cost the today’s equivalent of over $12 million per year.

Amtrak
To keep to their published timetables, trains cannot leave a station before the scheduled time. So, when the clocks fall back one hour in October, all Amtrak trains in the U.S. that are running on time stop at 2:00 a.m. and wait one hour before resuming. Overnight passengers are often surprised to find their train at a dead stop and their travel time an hour longer than expected. At the spring Daylight Saving Time change, trains instantaneously become an hour behind schedule at 2:00 a.m., but they just keep going and do their best to make up the time.

Manslaughter
In California, a Chevrolet Blazer packed with teenagers struck the median of a street and flipped over, tragically killing one teen and injuring several others. The teen driver, fighting charges of felony vehicular manslaughter, claimed that the street was dangerously wet and unsafe due a lawn sprinkler system. The landscaper responsible for the computerized sprinklers testified that the sprinklers were set to come on more than fifteen minutes after the fatal accident. The outcome hinged on whether the sprinklers’ timer had been adjusted for a recent Daylight Saving Time change, for without the DST adjustment, the sprinklers had close to 45 minutes to make the road slick.

For more stories and information on Daylight Saving Time, see the source for this post at: http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/index.html