Why America’s Permanent Daylight Saving Time Experiment Failed

When the U.S. extended daylight saving time through the winter of 1974 at the height of the Arab oil embargo, lawmakers hoped to cut energy use by pushing an extra hour of daylight into late afternoons. President Richard Nixon said the measure would bring “only a minimum of inconvenience.” But because January sunrises came as late as 9 a.m. in parts of the country, dark morning commutes to work and school quickly turned public opinion against the plan.

Daylight saving time had been regularly observed from spring to fall since 1966. The idea to extend it came soon after the oil embargo was announced in October 1973.

“[Congress was] looking for anything they could do to save energy,” says David Prerau, author of Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time.

Changing the clocks had precedent. Daylight saving time was used during both World Wars to conserve energy, and lawmakers believed extending daylight later into the afternoon could reduce electricity use.

With presidential backing, Congress moved quickly, and Nixon signed the Emergency Daylight Saving Time Energy Conservation Act on December 15, 1973. The law took effect on January 6, 1974, launching a 16-month trial period that the administration said would save the equivalent of an estimated 150,000 barrels of oil per day and “involve equal participation by all.”

At first, the public barely reacted. “People generally said, ‘Ah, it’s OK’ and didn’t think too much about it,” Prerau says. But once the clocks changed, reality set in.

In cities such as Detroit, Indianapolis, Minneapolis and Seattle, the sun didn’t rise until around 9 a.m. “Almost everybody [was] getting up in the dark and going to work and to school in the dark,” Prerau says.

Newspapers wrote about the disorientation. “Commuter trains from New Jersey were delayed, many school children missed their free breakfasts, some workers walked to subways and buses with trepidation, and many people felt strange yesterday as the day began an hour earlier for most in an eerie darkness,” The New York Times reported on January 8, 1974.

Safety fears escalated quickly. Prerau notes that a 16‑year‑old Chicago boy was struck and killed on his way to school and that other children died in predawn accidents in Virginia, Ohio, Louisiana, Pennsylvania and California. The worst cluster occurred in Florida, where eight children were killed in the first weeks of winter DST, compared with two during the same period the previous year.

Farm families described children “waiting on dark country roads for buses as cars were whizzing past them,” Prerau says, while in cities, parents worried about kids navigating abandoned streets before sunrise. In response, an insurance company handed out reflective “hot dots” for children’s coats, and according to The New York Times, Dallas schools spent $9,000 on reflector signs. Some schools even delayed their start times.

Public opinion on the clock change flipped within a few months. A University of Chicago survey found support for year‑round DST dropped from 79 percent in December to 42 percent in February. “There seemed to be some indication that there were more deaths and everyone got a little nervous,” a House staffer told The New York Times.

Calls for repeal soon began in Congress, according to the February 3, 1974, Times article. “It’s time to recognize that we may well have made a mistake,” Senator Dick Clark of Iowa said.

By fall 1974, Congress repealed year-round daylight saving time, and President Gerald Ford signed the amendment on October 5, 1974. “It was a big national issue all of a sudden, and it hadn’t really been one when it passed,” Prerau says.

Researchers studied the 10‑month experiment closely. The results were mixed and often inconclusive. An interim report from the Department of Transportation found the effects were “so small that they could not in general be reliably separated from effects of other changes occurring at the time.”

The report also noted that while year-round DST might show “modest” benefits in conserving energy, improving traffic safety and reducing violent crime, according to Congress.gov, “these potential benefits would be minimal and difficult to distinguish from seasonal variations and fluctuations in energy prices.”

The National Bureau of Standards later found “no significant energy savings or differences in traffic fatalities,” according to Congress.gov. The bureau also found that although morning fatalities among school‑age children were higher from January to April 1974 than during the same months in 1973, the increase couldn’t be attributed solely to daylight saving time.