The Waste of Daylight – William Willett's Original Daylight Saving Time Proposal
webexhibits.org
webexhibits.org
This sounds a bit closer to the ideal of just working with respect to sun rise. It eliminates the abrupt transition twice a year and allows the adjustment to be greater or less than an hour which is good because the useful adjustment changes with latitude.
These days we could just skip the discrete changes all together and just use solar time directly.
We want time zones to coordinate across large areas. A similar issue exists because the day has different length the further you are from the north pole. With southern summers and northern winters occurring at the same time.
Clocks would display both a "World Time" and a "Zone Time".
The World Time would probably simply be UTC.
For coordinating across significant longitude differences World Time would be used.
The Zone Time applies to a region similar to a current time zone, and is an idealized solar time, adjusted so that sunrise each day is around 6:00 AM LZT (Local Zone Time).
Schools, stores, most offices, mass transit routes that are mostly in the zone, theaters, meals, and similar things would base their schedules on LZT. So office hours, for example, would typically be 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM LZT, year around.
This would let most people work on a schedule that syncs well to the Sun, which should have tangible benefits for many people. There would be no going to work or school in the dark, and in summer the longer daylight time would automatically come after work/school.
This needs to assume people have decent access to interactive computing power because it would complicate planning things that involve interactions between LZT and World Time, especially when planning events weeks or months ahead.
(And yes, under this system 6:00 AM LZT from one day to 6:00 AM LZT the next day would not be exactly 24 hours. So? Things for which that matters would be scheduled on World Time, not on LZT).
It is people in the temperate latitudes that tend to care.
Under the sunrise scheme, Chicago, for example, would have sunset at 3:08 PM LZT on the winter solstice and 9:14 PM LZT on the summer solstice.
Our circadian rhythms sync to the day/night cycle, which is sensed by changes in light levels. Sunrise is a major driver of that, and so syncing our schedule to sunrise works out well biologically for us.
If the day is synced to solar noon, so that the time we need to wake up relative to sunrise changes throughout the year, then we may need to work to keep circadian rhythms synced to our schedule. For parts of the year where our wake up time is significantly after sunrise, we may need to block sunlight from our sleeping rooms. For parts of the year where we need to well before sunrise, we may need to have bright lights with the appropriate spectrum go off when it is time to wake up.
I didn't know the original proposal was to do it in multiple small shifts, nor that it included an energy savings argument.
Most of my life I thought I didn't like daylight saving time. Then recently I looked at the daylight chart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#/media/Fi...) and really imagined what it would be like without daylight saving time, and I changed my mind.
If I stayed on summer time all year, then in the winter sunrise would be around 9am, and I'd have to commute in the dark. If I stayed on winter time, then in the summer the sun would be up at 5am and down at 8pm. On a normal work schedule, I'd miss the morning time and wish for more sun in the evening.
On mainland Europe it's even worse, the sun rises 1.5 hours later in the west of Spain compared to the east of Poland, yet they all share the same timezone.
I suddenly started to wonder, if we care about daylight, whether work schedules might make more sense if they started at 8 am rather than 9, just to be more symmetric around noon. Or even 7am, if we're preserving evening daylight. But I dunno, that sounds too early. ;)
Besides, summer isn't the time when sunlight is lacking. Winter is when people get vitamin D depressed, and no time change is going to fix that for northern countries.
DST is pointless and antiquated.
If we just change so we do all of these things an hour earlier in summer we either have to change a whole bunch of signs and other printed material twice a year, or we just have to remember that we need to mentally take an hour off the printed time during that time of year.
The former would be a major hassle and possibly an expensive one, and the later would confuse a lot of people for days or weeks after the switches.
Clocks, on the other hand, are designed to be changed.
If we want things to start an hour earlier in summer, and we want that to apply to everything, than implementing that by moving the clocks an hour forward is easier, cheaper, and less confusing.
The main hassle with changing the clocks is that there are so many of the damn things, although I think we may be getting past that.
(I say this is the main hassle, rather than the hassle of dealing with biological rhythms getting messed up for a while around the time changes because this post is about how, if we are going to have DST, it should be implemented--change schedules or change clocks. The biology thing is the same under both, so is not relevant in this comment)
At one time, say before the 1970s, it wasn't much of an issue because we didn't actually have all that many clocks. A typical family might have wall clocks in the kitchen and living room, table top alarm clocks in the bedrooms, and watches.
It was in the '70s and '80s that clocks started appearing everywhere, and worse, no two seemed to have the same mechanism for setting them and the mechanisms were usually almost impossible to figure out without the instructions. DST changing could be a frustrating evening of alternating trying to guess how to set a clock and searching through every place you might have left the manual.
But now, although everything still has a clock whether it needs it or not, those clocks are more and more likely to be self-setting. I think I have 15 clocks in my house and garage right now, and only 3 of them did not handle this morning's return to PST from PDT automatically. (And all three are or are in old things that if bought today probably would automatically handle the time change).
I have certainly seen hours of operation signs with separate summer and other hours -- they generally also indicate when they think summer begins and ends. Even if you did change the hours twice a year, that allows you to adjust for changing demand as well -- you don't always need to keep doing what has always been done.
I personally don't think parking and lane restriction hours are that sensitive, just set them to cover the full range of high traffic times.
Most of your self setting equipment is likely not to adjust to changing dst dates when next we add more days to DST.
Because that's the easier method for society en masse to change 2 times per year. E.g. Some businesses have their opening hours painted on glass windows[1] so repainting them to say 8am-4pm instead of 9am-5pm is more complicated.
That's just a single example. I mentioned some others in a previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11277093
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=store+opening+closing+times+...
8am-4pm (2nd Sunday in March - 1st Sunday in November)
9am-5pm (1st Sunday in November - 2nd Sunday in March)
In fact, many business already use this technique successfully to display different opening hours for different days of the week.
Adding calendar qualifications like that to the times makes it even more complicated. To use another commenter's example about "valid hours of parking" printed on narrow street signs, there's no space to append long conditional text (like your suggested verbiage) to the times.
Also, the DST change date isn't stable. Over the years, the DST date boundaries have changed: from the last week in April -- then to first week in April -- then to March. The DST rules may further be refined to be always or never.
Did you look at my link to my previous message? The business hours on the window was only one example of complexity.
So today daylight in Warsaw was 6:36-16:01, and in Madrid it's 7:47-18:08.
If people really cared about daylight saving - they should use the correct timezone in the first place and then worry about changing time.
Personally, here in the UK I'd like to see daylight saving time abolished, but we should stay permanently in summer time. In winter the sun is usually up well before I am, but in the evening it gets dark far too early.
We tried that for a couple of years at the start of the 1970's... Clearly it didn't last.
Flexible schedule of programmers is more of an exception then norm.
Well not in todays connected world.
> For Continental trains only will special time tables be required, one for April, a second for May, June, July and August, and a third for September
Yep, more like it.
I think DST today is less relevant. Light is cheap. I dont actually need candles. Cities and towns also have lights. Today most power is being used by manufacuring, be it at day or at night. I dont think savings is relevant here.
Dont get me wrong - I love daylight. But I enjoy that we @ europe will get rid of DST. I just hope we get to stay in summer time :)
The clock face is not arbitrary. Midday is the middle of the day. Midnight is the middle of the night. (To the nearest hour.) If we abandon these conventions, anything left is entirely arbitrary, and having time zones at all seems like a huge complication vs a single global time zone.
We can all get more light in the “evening” by shifting the conventional hours for work and life backwards a bit.
Abandoning timekeeping conventions instead just so that we can start work at some arbitrary number on the clock seems crazy.
That is, I like the idea in principle, but I know it'll never happen.
If you're going to argue that Google can solve the problem of "what time is it over there" in our current system, then Google can solve the problem of "what times are office hours over there" too.
I do have to admit, it did not occur to me that the work week would still effectively enforce an "ordering" on longitudes which somehow takes the beauty out of it.
You know what's beautiful? The fact that the vast majority of humanity is awake, engaged in their major activities (school, work or leisure) at 12:00, no matter where they are in the world, and that this is a shared point of reference.
It's not an exaggeration to say that timekeeping is at base, about the daily cycle of day and night. Every development we have created in the past four millenia is an iteration on that same idea. There is day, and night, and our clocks are just more precise ways of marking that cycle. You want to abolish that, for what? A nicer API?
If not, I'm willing to live with midday and midnight being conceptually misaligned, as they have been for the half of my life I've spent on daylight savings time so far.
We could shift the hours for work and life, such that it'd be normal to wake up at 4:30, to have lunch at 10, the sun to reach its peak at 12, the middle of the day etc... But that would be a global, massive effort, requiring a rewrite of conventions that go back centuries. Or we could change the clock instead, making the connection between the number on the clock and the sun a little more arbitrary and giving us a few more hours sunlight at convenient times
The clock face is not arbitrary. Midday is the middle of the day. Midnight is the middle of the night. (To the nearest hour.) If we abandon these conventions, anything left is entirely arbitrary, and having time zones at all seems like a huge complication vs a single global time zone.
We can all get more light in the “evening” by shifting the conventional hours for work and life backwards a bit. Abandoning timekeeping conventions instead just so that we can start work at some arbitrary number on the clock seems crazy.