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DOT 100-06
Contact: Bill Mosley, Tel.: (202) 366-4570
Monday, October 23, 2006
Daylight Saving Time to End Oct. 29, Expand by Four Weeks in 2007
The U.S. Department of Transportation issued a reminder today that daylight
saving time will end at 2:00 a.m. on Sunday, Oct. 29, and that next year the
daylight saving time period will begin earlier and end later for most of the
United States.
Daylight saving time is currently observed from the first Sunday in April to the
last Sunday in October. As a result of legislation enacted by Congress in 2005,
beginning next year daylight saving time will begin the second Sunday of March
and end the first Sunday of November. As a result, in 2007, daylight saving time
will run from March 11 to Nov. 4.
When daylight saving time ends, clocks will be set back one hour, providing an
additional hour of daylight in the morning.
Federal law does not require any area to observe daylight saving time. But if a
state chooses to observe daylight time, it must follow the starting and ending
dates set by the law. In those parts of the country that do not observe daylight
time, no resetting of clocks is required. Those states and territories include
Arizona, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam and the
Northern Marianas.
Daylight saving time is a change in the standard time of each time zone. Time
zones were first used in the United States in 1883 by the railroads to
standardize their schedules. In 1918, Congress made the railroad zones official
under federal law and assigned the responsibility for any changes that might be
needed to the Interstate Commerce Commission. In the Uniform Time Act of 1966,
Congress established uniform dates for daylight saving time and transferred
responsibility for the time laws to the U.S. Department of Transportation.
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