Daylight Savings Time

Donald Prerau recommends bringing the start of Daylight Savings Time forward from the first Sunday of April to the middle of March, and moving the end from the last Sunday of October to the first Sunday in November.

I largely agree in the springtime, if only that the beginning of Daylight Savings time, when the sun suddenly stays up until 7:30pm, always seems to me to herald the arrival of spring and always lightens my spirits after the dark winter. Every year, I'm surprised how much an hour of extra light in the evening cheers me up.

However, he provides an odd reason for the extension in the fall:

Daylight time now always ends just before Halloween - sometimes, as last year, on Halloween morning. Alarmingly, children's pedestrian deaths are four times higher on Halloween than on any other night of the year, and daylight time would provide another hour of light for young trick-or-treaters.

But trick-or-treating is no fun unless it's dark out. I remember one year when I was a kid, my parents made plans for our family to go out for dinner on Halloween, and I was really disappointed that I would have to go trick-or-treating around 5:30pm, thinking that it would still be light. Luckily for me, the end of daylight savings time meant that it was already pitch black by then. So, really, daylight savings time on Halloween would just make kids want to go trick-or-treating an hour later. (In any case, in northern cities the sun sets on Oct. 31 by 5:30pm even with daylight savings time, and trick-or-treating usually happens after dinner, so it's not clear how the extra hour of daylight would help.)