Chicagoans are once again debating whether an hour of daylight belongs in the morning or the evening as legislation to end the twice-yearly clock change stalls in the Senate. From doctors and dog walkers to drive-in operators, the dividing lines defy simple explanation.
Some see the ritual as a financial windfall, others as a cruel extinguishing of summer’s last light. The only thing everyone seems to agree on, said Chris Prentice, an actor from Edgewater, is that they’re right.
“People argue that standard time is a made-up thing,” Prentice, 48, said. “And it is, but it’s less made up than daylight savings.”
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Clocks will fall back an hour to standard time on Sunday, part of the biannual adjustment designed to conserve energy and make better use of sunlight. They’ll spring forward to daylight saving time in March, costing people an hour of sleep.
The fall shift gives that hour back, but at the expense of evening light. Standard time remains in effect for just a third of the year, much to the dismay of medical experts who say it better aligns the body’s internal clock with the natural cycle of the sun. Springing forward in March is associated with poorer sleep and increased risk of heart disease, said Dr. Sabra Abbott, a Northwestern neurologist who specializes in circadian rhythm disorders.
“The entire time that you’re on daylight saving time, your body is still trying to follow solar time,” Abbott said. “You never fully catch up.”
On the other hand, eight months of daylight saving time isn’t enough for business owners, who see decreases in foot traffic as evenings get darker. They’d rather stick to daylight saving time year-round, joining a slew of legislative sponsors and tourism advocates who agree that later sunsets encourage consumers to stay out and spend.
President Donald Trump, a longtime champion of permanent daylight saving time, has argued that evening sunlight would benefit golfers and hunters. More recently, he has supported a federal solution through the Sunshine Protection Act, which passed the House in July but has since stalled in the Senate.
It’s divided even his own party, with the President posting Republican Sen. Tom Cotton’s personal phone number on social media earlier this month in an attempt to pressure the Arkansas lawmaker to drop his opposition to permanent daylight saving time. Cotton, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, has stood firm, arguing that the Sunshine Protection Act would force children to walk to school in dangerously dark conditions.
That leaves Prentice, a left-leaning Shakespearean actor, in begrudging agreement with the prominent conservative senator. Somehow, he says, the question of changing the clocks has managed to cross the usual political divides.
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“When Tom Cotton says something and I agree with him, that has to mean something is really weird,” said Prentice. “But he’s rightly, for once, saying ‘year-round daylight savings is a ridiculous idea.’”
Like many Chicagoans with daylight savings opinions, Prentice is advocating for the time change that best suits his lifestyle. To him, it’s reasonable to prioritize personal preference over what he sees as an absence of clear consensus among lawmakers or medical professionals.
Prentice reasons that because winter performances draw much bigger crowds after dark, extending evening light through permanent daylight saving time could hurt ticket sales. People who argue against that reasoning, he says, range from those convinced later sunrises would deter criminals who strike under the cover of darkness to locals who simply want more time to exercise after work.
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“It’s selfish,” he admits. “But if it’s at all still light, it’s harder to decide to go sit in the dark for three hours and watch a play.”
Simply describing oneself as a “night person” may be enough to tip the scales, according to a 2025 AP-NORC poll that found a majority of people who identify that way favor permanent daylight saving time. That tracks with Prentice’s view that people tend to decide when they want their daylight first and come up with arguments to back it up later.
And there’s no shortage of options to debate, with federal lawmakers in July introducing a competing House measure that would make standard time permanent. That leaves three solutions on the table — keeping clocks permanently forward, permanently back or continuing to switch them twice a year.
The national pandemonium has not spared Springfield, where Democrats and Republicans alike have proposed competing legislation favoring their preferred solution. The resulting political deadlock is not surprising for lawmakers familiar with the issue’s history, said state Sen. Rachel Ventura, a Democrat who represents the 43rd District.
Ventura said disagreements over who stands to benefit from an extra hour of daylight long predate her tenure in the Senate. Though the dividing lines now extend well beyond concerned parents and eager restaurateurs, Chicagoans remain no closer to settling on a solution that satisfies everyone, Ventura said.
“Like many things, someone just needs to take the lead,” said Ventura. “One or the other is better than not doing anything.”
For Ventura, that meant co-sponsoring legislation earlier this year to make daylight saving time permanent in Illinois. The bill’s original sponsor, Republican Sen. Jil Tracy, has since introduced a competing proposal to keep the state on standard time year-round.
Ventura figures permanent daylight saving time won’t actually make much of a difference for children traveling to school, since those catching buses as early as 6 a.m. are already heading out in the dark. But pushing winter sunsets an hour later, she said, would give commuters more light on their way home from work.
“In the morning, a lot of us get up and then go right into a building,” she said. “So once we’re home, having that extra hour of daylight provides a little bit of extra time for us.”
That extra evening sunlight would be welcome at Novelty Golf & Games, said manager Richard Klatzco, who sees permanent daylight saving time as the best option for business. While extended afternoon light wouldn’t necessarily bring more customers to the Lincolnwood mini-golf course and batting cages, it would give employees additional time to tackle maintenance tasks like touching up paint.
“We’ve got colorful lights everywhere, so we’re still rocking and rolling at night,” said Klatzco, 40, who lives in Old Irving Park. “But one hour less of daylight means one hour less that we can be working.”
But a visit to ChiTown Drive-In in Pilsen proves how differently Chicagoans feel that hour of light. Owner Bryce Bowman says permanent daylight saving time is the least lucrative option for a theater that can’t operate until it’s dark enough to see the screen.
Business in the dead of summer can be constrained, Bowman said, by sunsets around 8:30 p.m. that leave time for just one movie a night. Once the clocks fall back in November, though, earlier darkness allows the theater to squeeze in as many as three.
The fall shift to standard time already brings dozens more cars to the drive-in through December, and making the change permanent could help accommodate bigger crowds year-round. And beyond the financial benefits, Bowman said, earlier sunsets could make the theater more accessible to moviegoers with strict bedtimes.
“A lot of families with younger kids aren’t able to enjoy a drive-in movie in the summer as much as we’d like,” said Bowman, who lives in Lakeview.
But not all Chicagoans have the luxury of adjusting their schedules to evade the darkness, said Gina Scaletta, who has been walking dogs for more than a decade. The owner of Smart Paws favors permanent standard time, though not for the same reasons as Prentice and Bowman.
Dog walkers are bound to their clients’ routines, she said, showing up each morning whether the sun is up or not. Navigating unfamiliar neighborhoods and trudging down icy sidewalks is already difficult enough in the dim light of winter mornings, and permanent daylight saving time would only prolong those conditions for walkers who start as early as 6 a.m.
“It’s another hour where my young girls are out there in the dark,” said Scaletta, 30, who lives in Wrigleyville. “That’s scary.”
Morning darkness is all too familiar to Dr. James Rowley, who remembers walking to school when the country briefly adopted permanent daylight saving time in 1974. Rowley said he witnessed widespread disapproval as clocks stayed an hour ahead through the winter and pushed sunrise to nearly 9 a.m. in some parts of the country.
Concerns over fatal accidents involving children helped turn public opinion against the infamous experiment, which Congress repealed within the year. And Rowley, now a sleep specialist, said the danger of dark mornings remains the strongest argument against permanent daylight saving time.
“I think the safety message is still what’s going to hit the best, quite frankly,” said Rowley, a physician who directs the sleep medicine fellowship at Rush University Medical Center.
Even with research linking driving in darkness to more crashes, Rowley said traffic safety is hardly his only concern. The spring clock change is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, he said, while prolonged disruptions to the body’s internal clock are linked to weakened immune function and even cancer.
Eliminating the biannual clock change in favor of permanent daylight saving time would bring separate health ramifications, Rowley said. Because morning light plays a greater role than evening light in regulating the body’s internal clock, shifting an hour of sunlight isn’t as simple as it sounds.
“It’s morning sunshine that helps put us to sleep at night,” said Rowley, a former president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. “Having light later into the evening, while we love being able to be outside and doing things, is actually really not good for our sleep health.”
Abbott, also professor of sleep medicine at Northwestern University, said losing an hour of sleep when clocks spring forward can hurt workplace performance. The solution certainly isn’t permanent daylight saving time, she said, pointing to research that finds higher rates of depression in places where the sun rises later.
“Having more darkness in the morning tends to make you more misaligned with everything that you have to do,” she said.
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Unlike jet lag, which the body can eventually adjust to, daylight saving time leaves people out of sync with the sun’s natural cycle for months, Abbott said. Rather than adapting to the new schedule, the body keeps trying to match the timing of natural light.
Amid the competing arguments for one time system over another, Abbott finds glimpses of common ground in the lack of enthusiasm for changing the clocks. Only 12% of Americans favor keeping the current system, according to the AP-NORC poll.
The other 88%, though, aren’t necessarily clamoring for change. In fact, researchers found that nearly as many people are indifferent to the biannual switch as oppose it. Still, legislators say even Chicagoans who steer clear of the debate could soon find their schedules affected.
Several Canadian provinces abandoned the November clock change this year in favor of permanent daylight saving time, pushing the scheduled start of the Blackhawks’ March 6 game against the Edmonton Oilers to 9 p.m. For fans watching from home, that’s two or three hours later than the team typically takes the ice at the United Center.
States are free to adopt permanent standard time, as Arizona and Hawaii did more than half a century ago. Federal law prohibits them from opting into daylight saving time year-round, though that hasn’t stopped 19 states from passing trigger laws to take effect if Congress enacts the necessary legislation.
If such laws take effect, experts warn, the resulting patchwork of time zones could leave Chicagoans who cross state lines for school or work navigating different local times on either side of the border.
“That would just be a disaster from a social point of view,” said Rowley.
But with no vote scheduled on the Sunshine Protection Act and the Senate adjourned for midterm elections, clocks will still fall back from 2 a.m. to 1 a.m. on Nov. 1. Across Illinois, that means another round of resetting manual clocks on kitchen appliances.
That means Prentice, for now, can stop worrying about lawmakers taking away the sunlight that streams through his windows each morning. Even when the debate picks up again, he doubts he’ll have much say over an argument that’s been going on longer than he’s been alive.
After all, he said, Chicagoans still insist on calling their tallest building the Sears Tower, nearly two decades after its name changed. If the city can’t agree on what to call its landmarks, he said, agreeing on what to do with their clocks seems all but impossible.
“We’re very stubborn,” he said. “People who are on one side will never be convinced that they should change their opinion.”