In California, daylight savings actually makes sense, it's a noticeable boost of daylight for your office commute in the winter.
In northern Europe, it makes absolutely no sense, because the darkness consumes everything anyway. It takes about a week or two for sunrise to be at the same time it was before the clock adjustment each fall. It's pretty useless.
We could end up with two horizontal time zones. UTC+1 in the north and UTC+2 in the south.
By the way, the few people from my country that voted in that poll were keen about keeping daylight savings.
Those countries would probably benefit from using standard time and moving everything thirty minutes earlier (effectively a 30 minute off time zone), but it's hard to implement such a sweeping change.
Spain uses the wrong timezone. It should use UTC instead of UTC+1. The map in the article shows that pretty clearly. That's at least partially the reason people have dinner so late in Spain. It's not them that are wrong it's the clock!
Sounds like it would pay for a lot of developers careers... And a nightmare.
I grew up at 59 degrees north latitude. Daylight savings was pointless. Wintertime I'd go school in the dark (8am) and go home in the twilight (2pm). Lunch time was bright though...
My parents grew up at 70 degrees north, where daylight saving is totally useless as there is no daylight in the middle of winter.
I now live at 51 degrees latitude and my kids go to school in daylight as school start an hour later here. For a few weeks in the winter daylight saving does make a tiny difference for their morning but not afternoon.
But as an adult daylight saving always went the wrong way as it means evenings get darker sooner. I don't care if I commute in the dark in the morning, but I do prefer to do things after school/work in some daylight/twilight.
So the plan is that instead of people working hours which suit and know about it we agree on a weird collective lie and get everyone to perform the clock-adjusting ritual
But the question "when should we go to work?" doesn't have a single authoritative source, it all depends, it's all culture, it's all customs, everyone is free to do their own thing, but protestant work ethic bla bla bla, and here we are with most people starting work at 9, and if you don't, you're a weird slacker.
Yes, agreeing to start work at 10 in the winter is completely functionally equivalent with moving the clock forward an hour during winter, but it's just mentally impossible to implement because humans are weird like that.
Well yeah. Much simpler to make the adjustment once, at an agreed upon time of year, than to have a hodgepodge of different companies, schools, retailers, bagel shops, etc. all move their hours independently. In that case you have a first-mover problem and nobody adjusts.
It's not a lie anymore than time zones themselves are lies. (i.e. Time zones don't follow strict longitudinal lines, they follow political boundaries instead, and are often wider or narrower than the 15° they "should" be)
I'm not sure it is simpler to be honest. It's normal for companies to have different starting hours. I'm just about to move to a job where my official start is half an hour later. That increases to an hour with the actual time time I currently get into work.
Even without that, daylight savings is hodgepodge with different countries starting at different times. Ironically anti-daylight-savings people would be welcoming the current news as good when it will likely just mean more countries having daylight savings but not being consistent.
>It's not a lie anymore than time zones themselves are lies
I can't really disagree.
You need to go to the post office, when does it open, 9, or 10? Did the lunch break change as well?
Was it the bank that changes hours on the first Monday of October or the school?
BrandX have announced they're changing their switch over date to the 3rd Wednesday of September, better add that to the diary.
Oh no I'm supposed to be starting work an hour earlier, but schools don't change till next week, what do I do with the kids.
Or
I get the first bus of the morning into work, but the bus timetable changes after the work timetable so I can't get into work on time for a week.
I can deal with different opening times, I can't easily deal with the inconsistency of all the opening times changing at different points for a month, twice a year.
Winter time is standard time, and DST is in effect during the summer months to better make use of the extra light available during summer by winding clocks an hour forward. The idea being that you get an extra hour of sun in the afternoon.
Both clock adjustments provide different benefits, which is why we do both, to get both benefits. Abolishing DST means you pick one of the two.
On a meta note: It is always super interesting to me how fundamental people think that day length is, if they've never experienced living at different latitudes. The variations are absolutely enormous, and create very different mindsets. That said, seasonal mood disorders are very common in northern Europe for a reason.
Going to school or going to work hours before sunrise in the winter is just the way of things in northern Europe. You don't have a choice in the matter. The flipside is that having full daylight at 10 in the evening during summer is also just the way of things, and the almost non-existant night is a complete mindfuck for people used to less variations in day length.
https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/norway/narvik
For a month of winter, there is no daylight at all. It is literally impossible to wake up after sunrise, because sunrise doesn't happen for an entire month.
People generally wake up, and go to work the first thing in the morning. They would like to travel to work after sunrise. They would also like to maximize the amount of daylight they get to enjoy outside of work.
This means that in the summer, all the daylight before waking up is "wasted" so you want to move solar noon forward. But if you move it too far, it'll be pitch black when people get to work in the winter, which is why you then have daylight savings to move solar noon back a bit.
If you live further south, like Hawaii, the difference in length of day between winter and summer is very small, so you can't shift solar noon around. Therefore, Hawaii doesn't do daylight savings.
If you live further north, like Sweden, the difference in length of day between winter and summer is enormous, and in the summer the sun rises at like 3 in the morning with daylight savings, and in the winter the sun rises at 10 with standard time, and the rate of daylight change around the equinoxes is huge, so the effect only lasts a week or two. It makes absolutely no sense to have daylight savings there, and the EU parliament making it not mandatory for countries is a step in the right direction, i.e. abolish the useless thing in Sweden.
Spain and the other Mediterranean countries could maybe keep it for all I care, but Spain has a weirdly skewed solar noon anyway...
> They would like to travel to work after sunrise. They would also like to maximize the amount of daylight they get to enjoy outside of work.
In the winter, you can't have both, so you pick #1. In the summer, you have "extra" sunlight that's being wasted on the sleeping, so you shift it to after work and get #1 and #2.
https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/san-francisco
DST ensure that sunrise is kept at around 6 in the morning, this removes the "waste" of daylight from before most people wake up, and moves it to after work hours in the summer.
Here's the same graph for Stockholm:
https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/sweden/stockholm
There's not enough daylight in the winter to cover an entire working day and more, and there's too much daylight in the summer so everyone will "waste" it by sleeping, which makes DST pretty much useless.
Edit: Here's Honolulu for reference: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/honolulu
The band of daylight is almost the same width over the year, so moving it up and down doesn't do anything for people.
I think the big screw up from EU was that after the poll (to which pretty much only Germans answered) they just said they would remove DST altogether instead of recognizing that different geographical regions have different needs.
They just wanted a no-cost change to say "see? we listen to people"; but pretty much everyone in southern Europe heard "see? Germans decide for everyone!", and nationalists party marched on it.
From the article it looks like they backtracked on it and they'll allow countries to choose to keep changing time twice a year; I sure hope so.
That's because they're mostly in the wrong timezone, they should be on Western European time like the UK and Portugal. Interestingly enough the reason for that is Hitler :)
Personally, I'd be fine with shifting a time zone or two east and eliminating DST but I understand why a lot of people wouldn't.
This is exactly what many countries are proposing. Rather than abolish summer time, just make it permanent.
Except that "noon" ceases to mean the time when the sun is highest in the sky equidistant between sunrise and sunset and "midnight" ceases to be the middle of the night.
In this respect, standard time makes more sense. In no respect does "daylight time" make more sense.
Still, anything that makes us stop changing the clocks twice a year is fine with me.
http://blog.poormansmath.net/images/SolarTimeVsStandardTimeV...
Only the thin stripes of white have it, for every other place solar noon is off by minutes, if not hours.
Winter is in standard time, so DST has no effect on it. (Also, the standard time evening commute in CA is in darkness, and wouldn't be if it was in DST, so even if you are comparing the status quo against permanent DST rather than permanent standard time, that's still wrong.)
DST—“Summer Time”—maximizes post-9-5-working-hours daylight time (to promote shopping and other commercial and recreational activity) in summer, not commute-convenient daylight time in winter.