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Comment by matthewmacleod | Hacker News Reader

I was casually in favour of this; I recently mentioned it to my mother in passing, and she pointed out that the UK had trialled this in 1968-1971. She was (surprisingly to me) immediately opposed to it - living in Scotland, she recalled that it was basically dark until 10am, and resulted in a bunch of upheaval as children were no longer able to travel safely to school by themselves, among other things.

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They could push the school start time back. It would be better for kids everywhere, not just Scotland.

I figure it will not be easy to change the school start time, since parents are also need to change behavior with the school start time change.

In the end maybe this will be easier to just have a consistent schedule to change the school start time. In the end we invent DST again.

It really would not be difficult to move school later - school hours are already out of sync with 9-5 of 9-6 or the other hours parents work, if anything it’d be welcome.

Of course it would. School starts at roughly the same time as normal work hours. Most schools start a little before here to allow parents get to work after dropping off their kids.

You couldn't just change school hours in isolation without causing a lot of disruption.

School hours are 9-3:20 where I live, so they are nowhere near in line with working hours as you need time to get to work and not many jobs finish that early. Most schools run breakfast clubs and after school clubs as a result.

School began at 7:50 am for us. So that time worked well for parents and 9-5 sort of times. It gave enough room for 8-4 or 8-5 parents and long commute parents. Or parents who want to drop off and come back home first. If you make the school start time 9 am as well, if a parent helps their kid get ready and/or has to be around until the kid leaves for the bus and/or has to drop them off, they wouldn’t be able to unless their commute is short.

I don’t think school times can be pushed much. Maybe 30 min max without seriously disrupting parent’s schedules if that’s a concern.

> In the end we invent DST again.

But without many of its cons :)

Having a patchwork of moving schedules across society, from schools to businesses to recreational activities is far worse than the inconvenience of simply changing your clocks twice a year.

Disagree. Not disrupting my already fragile sleep schedule twice a year is worth it.

I mean, if your work hours shift to deal with school time changes your sleep schedule is going to be disrupted anyway…

Why is your sleep disrupted by DST? Why not start and end sleep at hours that fit both summer and winter time?

It's your choice if you want to adjust your sleep hours to DST, you don't have to.

Interestingly enough, this is exactly the case in many parts of China; schools and organizations have a summer timetable and a winter timetable. I have never found this to be inconvenient, it's kind of comparable to shops having different open times on different weekdays.

It could go hand in hand with more flexible working hours for parents. Admittedly not possible for all jobs, but something to strive for in most

Alright, in order to not have to change the clocks we'll need to usher in massive societal changes that will be annoying to everyone for some hard to quantify greater good.

Changing the clocks twice yearly is disruptive but keeping it only in the northern reaches of Europe so that children can walk to school in the winter light is even more disruptive.

You can’t have everything but at least you can use the changes to move towards a society where kids get up later and parents can work more flexibly. You need to start somewhere. Or are you disputing the benefits of more sleep for children and flexible working for adults?

Annoying for everyone? Talk for yourself, I'd love some flexibility when it comes to job hours, and I'd love my kids to start school later in the mornings.

Jobs should accommodate to people's lives, and not the other way around.

You must mean push the school time forward? pushing it back would just mean they spend more time in darkness.

I'm being needlessly pedantic (sorry) but "back" and "forward" in time is a confusing concept best thought of in terms to "traveling back in time" (decrement your clock, move to an earlier time) "traveling forward in time" (increment your clock, move to a later time).

Saying "push back" is a very confusing phrase to me because I don't actually know what you mean and need to pick it up from context clues which are not always right.

It seems correct to me. I found a good analogy on a StackExchange answer[1]: pushing 'back' means pushing something away from the current point in time. Bringing 'forward' means bringing it closer to the current point.

So 'pushing back' school start times would mean that school started later in the morning, when it was lighter.

[1] https://english.stackexchange.com/a/157003

Isn’t it confusing either way? Pushing school forward sounds right to you, but to me that sounds like making the school times earlier. It’s a bit uncomfortable for me to imagine it meaning the opposite. Obviously I’m saying that light heartedly but pushing back is what sounds natural to me. Like “push back a meeting”.

"spring back fall forward" isn't much help either since you can fall back as well as forward

Changing the school time would wreck havoc on a host of other things.

And changing everything time doesn't?

So kids can go to school one hour later, so they'll stay in bed one hour longer. But this means that they can go to bed one hour later?

This means we'll do the DST switch anyways, but without changing the clocks. Nothing gained...

According to a quick internet search, Scotland has about 8 hours of sunlight in the winter and about 18 hours in the summer. You'd have to shift by about 4 hours to keep sunrise at the same time in both mid winter and mid summer. I'm guessing that's not what they were doing and that right around December 21st the kids are going to school in the dark no matter what, or else the sun was coming up at 3 am in the summer. Either way, a one hour shift wasn't making that big of a difference.

An hour can make a big difference! Inverness gets about 6:30 daylight during the winter, with sunrise at about 9:00 and sunset around 3:30. Shifting to year-round summer time would move sunrise to 10:00; an hour can be the difference between "I can see things" twilight and "It's basically night".

I'm not really that bothered myself, having worked weird hours for a long time. But I can definitely see problems it could cause.

I feel the same way, the further north you are the bigger a factor it becomes. I can see issues with icy roads on winter mornings too. Daylight savings makes sense, just not everywhere. The change is happening now though.

Even though it would lead to darker mornings I'd still support adopting summer time here in Ireland. Dark evenings when you get home from work are just too depressing.

> I feel the same way, the further north you are the bigger a factor it becomes.

On the other hand, the further north you go, the more they already deal with this. DST or not, kids in Alaska go to school in the dark for a good part of winter. Somehow they survive.

Seems like they picked summer time, not winter time as the default

> living in Scotland, she recalled that it was basically dark until 10am, and resulted in a bunch of upheaval as children were no longer able to travel safely to school by themselves

Meanwhile, in Scandinavia, this is the reality of November, December and January for everyone. Entire countries manage to go to school and work when it's dark outside...

That makes no sense. The clocks change in the summer, not the winter, and in summer Scotland sees about 20 hours of sunlight.

Clocks change twice a year, not once a year.

Huh? How could they change once a year? The point is winter time is GMT and summer time is the change. The UK did remain on BST once, but that was during the war (interestingly it also went to double summer time in the summer).

He means the clocks are offset in the summer and not the winter. If we stop changing the clocks and just stick on GMT all year it won't affect anything in winter.

Technically correct. But it's more like "clocks change once a year and then that change is reverted"

We had 4 hours of night in the highlands and that was hard to sleep through.

Sure, but in the case I was talking about the UK switched to BST (i.e. GMT+1) year-round. This has the effect of making it darker on winter mornings.

Just open schools later in winter then. Also that's really just due to the choice of time zone, not how clocks are changed in the summer.

So if everything will switch to a later time in winter, it's the same effect as moving clocks forward in the summer?

It's not so easy to start school later, because the parents might have fixed entry/exit times at work. DST sucks but it has the advantage that everything synchronizes on when to switch.

Don't change the clocks, just do everything an hour later!

Seems like the worst of both worlds.

Why? If you want to do some particular thing during sunlight, schedule it that way yourself, don't force everyone else to change our clocks and lose an hour of sleep for your convenience

The idea of a trial was again brought up in 2010 - 2012, it was rejected due to the same reasons, I think Scotland weren’t happy about it. https://services.parliament.uk/bills/2010-12/daylightsaving....

It depends. If they keep wintertime, that won’t happen

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