Daylight Savings Time (DST) 2014 in Florida and Elsewhere: A Brief History | FlaglerLive

Click title for link to article about Daylight Saving Time (note there is no "s"). After reading the article, you will likely agree that there has been little savings, but a little more consumer consumption and miles driven. I have heard that the Florida state legislature may be getting ride of the practice statewide this year during their session currently underway. From the article, this brought back some memories:

[…]Richard Nixon infamously mandated year-round daylight saving in 1974 and 1975. This decision did not soften the blow of the OPEC oil embargo, but it did put school children on pitch-black streets every morning until the plan was scaled back. A Department of Transportation study concluded that Nixon’s experiment yielded no definitive fuel saving. It optimistically speculated, however, that daylight saving might one day help us conserve as many as 100,000 barrels of oil a day. Based on that projection and the hope of reducing street crime, in 1986 and again this year Congress extended daylight saving by a month. But there has been no corresponding reduction in oil consumption or crime.”

I was one of those kids in the mid 1970s, during the first oil crisis, that stood at the bus stop in total darkness. The plan was initiated in winter and there were many frigid mornings with which we would have never experienced without the change. The thought was that people would use less energy with it being lighter, later, but they probably used more in the morning in exchange. This was also the era of the 55 mile per hour speed limit.