Effects of Daylight Saving Time on Traffic Accident Risk
cell.com
cell.com
"2-DST" is permanent daylight savings, except we additionally set the clocks an hour forward for the winter (just like we do now, in March).
More opportunity for sunlight. More outdoor activity in the evenings. Less electricity. Less crime. Better for most businesses and most people.
Must be a US thing, what with all its timezones. China has a single timezone, and doesn't observe DST. Do you think that means people in the extreme west of china have to wake up at the exact same time as people in Beijing?
In fact, according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Time), the Xinjiang region of China has two timezones used concurrently. I guess people just wake up twice: Once at 7am, and again at 7am two hours later :)
Anyway my point is, you could have the US go on a single timezone and stop observing DST. Ok, well, you don't have to open your business at 8am across the country… if your new TZ is based on Austin TX, you just open at 8am in Austin, 7am in NYC and 10am in LA.
Want to give your employees more daylight in winter? Shift business hours by an hour.
And it's a complete mess. If you think daylight savings is complicated, wait until two geographically distant regions are on the same time but a different time.
> Want to give your employees more daylight in winter?
Rarely is it the employers wanting this, it is the employees.
Businesses' open hours more often than not depend on the open hours of their suppliers and their customers. Not really possible to make a local change and expect everyone to follow. Much easier if everyone changes simultaneously.
Okay, it's "1700Z" and you're at work: are the folks at the Singapore office in yet? If New York's business hours are 14-22Z, what are Berlin's? Bangalore's? Tokyo's? Seattle's?
At least with timezones you can do some simple +/- math and see if you end up in the typical '9-5L' range:
But with only-UTC (as much I set my servers to it), you still have to keep a table of business hours.
If everyone has the same frame of reference, you don't get coordinate translation errors.
Going to work on Tuesday and coming home on Wednesday will be the new norm for about a third of the world.
This has been debated before:
The entire reason we have summer/winter time is that changing the time is easier than changing business hours.
When you have research showing that the western edge of a timezone is worse off health- and sleep-wise, it is clear that a policy pushing people to get up earlier is not good.
Others have also attempted to estimate the amount of sleep of people in eastern vs western edges of time zones and they have found it to be some 20 minutes.
UTC would be great if it weren't for how everyone wants to think of E.G. 8AM or 9AM or whatever as a common start time and then uses DST to try and adjust the clocks rather than the times people do things.
The current time isn't particularly useful either, noon isn't even directly tied to the solar apex in most places (due to the timezones and more complex orbit / tilt interactions).
If London was in the same time zone, I'd have to ascertain, somehow, what 0800 actually means in terms of the workday, and multiply that across every time zone I have to confer with (and there are a lot).
No thanks. I like knowing that 5 pm means more-or-less the same thing everywhere except Western China, which happily enough doesn't really come up in my day-to-day life.
You are right that it is nice to now what 5 pm means pretty much everywhere but Western China, but that same sentiment can be expressed by saying early evening everywhere including Western China.
Even in the best case, you don't really manage simplify anything, you apply the same offsets, except now everyone on the west coast wakes up on one weekday and goes to sleep on the next, not just the ones who get to bed after midnight. The change happens right at the end of the business day, rather than outside business hours. Every day.
"Uh do you mean... calendar Tuesday, or uh Tuesday Tuesday?"
Repeated over half of the globe, forever.
I do a lot of remote meetings with people all over the globe, I work for a remote company, and I do. not. want. this.
There could be some confusion if you are talking with people far away, but that already exists. The sort of confusion that would come up would just be slightly different.
I propose overnight on the first Sunday of a month. For example, the week before, in spring (Northern hemisphere) soccer (or whatever activity) practice is at 16:00, the week after at 16:30 or 17:00 or whatever. In fall, the reverse, but the schedules all change on the same day. (Outliers will happen - this is a 90:10 suggestion, not 100:0.)
Think of all the families with 2 or 3 kids who have 2, 3, or 4 different activities each week, all at different times. Do we really want their schedules to potentially change in every week of the month? Yes, super-soccer mom or dad could cope, but why not try to keep it simpler?
You mean people want to think about hours in a way that is useful to them where they live? Doesn't sound crazy.
If everyone moved to UTC you wouldn't solve any real problems. Sure, everyone in New York could get used to their day starting at noon or whatever (to what benefit?) but if you wanted to schedule a meeting with someone in spain (or california) you would still have to figure out the time change to make it a reasonable time for you both.
Any way you slice it, you're just pushing the problem around to different places.
There isn't a problem. There are many problems. Changes in strategy don't have to solve them all. It is entirely reasonable to prioritize which problem(s) get more attention when there are more than one. That's what this is about, prioritization, and an implicit recognition that one size does not fit all.
At least people will be less inclined to use local time for non-local schedule, and will be able to tell time unambiguously.
We did get used to the day starting at a weird time for no particular reason, and whenever you change jobs you'll get used to a slightly different time anyway.
I don't see how it's more useful the way it is now than any other way. This is like trying to justify that moving summer holidays by one day would disrupt everyone's way of thinking.
The article points out that western edges of time zones are hit harder by clock changes. Other research also shows that they are in general sleeping less on western edges because the sun goes down later and they still have to get up at the same time as eastern edges.
Because of this, while all-year DST would be better than what we have, it is still worse for public health than all-year standard time which is maybe worse than UTC (as people will start thinking more about the sun and maybe in 30 minute chunks instead of hours).
Non-binding resolutions are non-binding... but they also represent the will of the people and politicians that gleefully ignore non-binding resolutions do so with a risk of failing to be re-elected.
Or that there's a translation problem -- that they're insisting that it 'creates' an hour of sunlight during the part of the day that's most useful for them? (Implicitly acknowledging they lose that at the other end.)
If it's not these, then I weep. People's view of how the world (and moon) fits within the solar system must be severely broken.
That being said, I also know plenty of people who understand the concept perfectly, but also insist they will "gain" an hour of sunlight in their day if we use DST year-round. Why? Because they're right! Where I live, in the winter, the sun rises before many people wake up, but sets in the early afternoon. Keep DST year-round, and you experience an extra hour of sunlight--even if you're not technically gaining it.
One could argue that we should simply be waking up earlier and going to bed earlier, but that's a hard pattern to follow when nothing is open early in the morning.
I really like it. There is actually an Android app on Fdroid: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.aragaer.jtt/ although it unfortunately doesn't have alarms -- I really need to get off my butt and contribute that feature. I set my alarm so that I get up in time to go for a walk at sunrise.
These are people who don't build facts from bottom up but rather support their version of facts based on intuition and desire. Though we all do this to a degree, some will change if confronted with solid evidence but many simply will forever stick with what they feel is true, including that changing the clocks creates an additional hour of sunlight. Even pointing out that it is not as light when they get up Sunday morning after the clock change as it was at the same time the day before, they don't care because they know in the summer it is bright at that time in the morning. The tilt of the Earth on its axis is as fantasy to them as the flat Earth is to the rest of us.
I commute to work everyday on my bicycle through a large city park, all year long, rain or shine, night or day. It's about 3.5 miles one way. I've been doing this for roughly 5 years. I personally look forward to DST just for warmer commute home and not having to night ride with bike lights.
It's astonishing the difference in outside activity I've seen when DST is observed or not.
When DST is not observed, outside activity in the park on my commute effectively evaporates at 5PM except for headlamp runners (which, curiously, are mostly groups of older folks).
When DST is observed, outside activity flourishes well until 8PM.
I have not observed any difference in morning outside activity on my commutes with or without DST. I think people are just more likely to do outside activities in the evening as opposed to the morning, most likely because mornings are colder (far colder in the winter), and on weekdays most start work in the morning and/or have to drop their kids off at school, leaving little time in the morning for outdoor activities.
At least Georgia is far enough south that year around DST might not have any serious negatives. There are people trying to do that here in Washington which is far enough north that it has serious negatives.
Year around DST would put sunrise in the middle of winter at nearly 9 AM at Seattle's latitude, putting nearly everyone's morning commute deep in the dark.
Without DST in the winter, of course, the commute home is in the dark, but I'd argue that this is better for three reasons.
1. Evening dark is generally warmer than morning dark. There is less chance of ice on the roads. It will have been melted by sun or rain during the day, and won't reform until it gets cold again in the early morning.
2. The evening commute tends to be more spread out than the morning commute. Putting the morning commute in the dark combines the worst conditions with the highest density. Putting the evening commute in the dark instead combines the worst lighting with lower density so is probably safer.
3. The morning commute overlaps with children going to school. The evening commute is mostly after children are home.
Sunrise at 9 AM is also bad for our sleep cycles. Our cycles sync to sunrise. The earlier we have to get up relative to sunrise the less healthy it is. (This could be fixed under year round DST by having businesses open/close later in winter, so our commutes happen later, but then we are essentially where we are now except we do it by changing schedules twice a year instead of changing clocks).
Furthermore, in the middle of winter here DST would not really actually get you much, if any, extra usable daylight after work. By the time you get home and have dinner, it is still going to be getting dark. Feb 1 sunset this year was at 5:10 PM, for example. Year around DST would make that 6:10 PM.
So, right now states can't stay on DST because federal law doesn't currently allow it. It does however allow permanent standard time, and petitioning for change of time zone. So, I wish Georgia, Florida, et al would just give Congress a big middle finger by switching to permanent Atlantic Standard Time. Maybe then they'd realize how silly this all is.
States can't unilaterally adopt a different time zone. The boundaries are regulated by the feds.
The chronobiologists say permanent Standard Time is the best thing for humans:
* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...
* https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-turn-back-th...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronobiology
Edit: down vote all you want, that won't change the peer-reviewed published papers.
If DST ('+1') is adopted permanently, the main effects will be during winter in that sunrise is now an hour later (bad) and sunset as well (which is ok). An example for Berlin, in December: if sunrise used to be at 8:00 (8 a.m.) normal time it is now an hour later at 9:00 (a.m.) (spend some time further north and you will know how much this would suck). Sunset that used to be around 16:15 (4:15 p.m.) is now at 17:15 o'clock (5:15 p.m.) (good/ok).
If normal time ('+0') is adopted, the interesting effects are during summer: sunrise is now an hour earlier than it used to be with DST and the same of course with sunset.
Example for Berlin, in July again: sunrise that used to be at 5:00 o'clock (a.m.) in DST is now at 4:00 (a.m.) (bad), sunset that used to be at 21:30 o'clock (9:30 p.m.) is now at 20:30 o'clock (8:30 p.m.) (bad if you like spending long summer evenings outside).
From my experience most people do not actually hate either, they just do not like the sudden transition. Shifting the daily routing to later hours, especially the sleeping time, is not that bad in autumn. Changing it forward in the spring is harder but not really a problem if you gradually change your sleeping and meal times in advance. I'm currently at it by going to bed a bit earlier, getting up earlier and (trying to) change eating times. Lunch is a bit problematic but breakfast and dinner do not affect others so much, so it's easier to shift them.
I remember, school classes were starting at 8 and I exited home at 7. Venus was beautiful.
As long as we are not just able to gradually transition I prefer to get rid of it and I'm quite happy that it's going to happen.
Nonetheless if sun goes down at 4 instead of 5 I wouldn't feel any issue with it. Winter is dark I leave in dark and go home at dark.
What we really need is for schools and work to start later in the day for a larger number of people so that the morning can be a time to sleep in, or if you are a morning person do your morning things.
I almost think that getting rid of time zones in the US might make it so that people are more cognizant of where the sun is and so that society runs on a more local time.
isn't this even worst in DST? Maybe I'm thinking about it backwards...
Google time or Apple time?
I also think it would make it harder than it already is for people to coordinate multi-time zone activities such as VTC.
I think they just altered the DST start/end days, I remember it used to end before Halloween until too many kids got hit or killed by cars in the dark.
> and there were no effects of the fall-back transition to Standard Time (ST) on MVA risk
EDIT: It seems our assumption was correct, at least for the UK:
> There is substantial evidence that fewer people would be killed and seriously injured on Great Britain’s roads if this country were to put the clocks forward by one hour throughout the year. The Department should take the lead in re- examining the practice of changing clocks at the end of British Summer Time with other central Government departments.
I wonder why the OP study (using US data) found something different?
Source: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmpu...
London: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/uk/london
Chicago: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/chicago
Assuming my co-workers are typical, workday also seems to end more like 5:30pm in London vs 5pm in the US.
Restricting the topic to just DST changes: considering modern society sadly is obsessed with clocks, DST is IMO the best way to maximize how much of the waking hours of people are during sunlight. DST itself isn't the problem, the problem is that apparently people don't get enough time to adjust. So why not introduce a national holiday twice a year, call it 'DST day', so everyone gets an extra day to adjust. I guess that would go a long way to alleviate the negative effects. Obviously then all of a sudden it's not about fatal traffic accidents anymore, but about economic effects and money... :-(
In any case, the solution is to pick one timeframe and stop changing it.
> observed that spring DST significantly increased fatal MVA risk by 6%, which was more pronounced in the morning and in locations further west within a time zone. DST-associated MVA risk increased even in the afternoon hours, despite longer daylight hours. The MVA risk increase waned in the week subsequent to DST, and there were no effects of the fall-back transition to Standard Time (ST) on MVA risk, further supporting the hypothesis that DST-transition-associated, preventable circadian misalignment and sleep deprivation might underlie MVA risk increases.
>If we stayed on Standard Time throughout the year, sunrise here in the Chicago area would be between 4:15 and 4:30 am from the middle of May through the middle of July. And if you check the times for civil twilight, which is when it’s bright enough to see without artificial light, you’ll find that that starts half an hour earlier. This is insane and a complete waste of sunlight.
>If, by the way, you think the solution is to stay on DST throughout the year, I can only tell you that we tried that back in the 70s and it didn’t turn out well. Sunrise here in Chicago was after 8:00 am, which put school children out on the street at bus stops before dawn in the dead of winter. It was the same on the East Coast. Nobody liked that.
Changing clocks is a hassle but the alternatives are worse.
I think I did read some place that it was more connected to that our sleep pattern isn't accurate with 24h, so if we get up later we would go to be later and be back to square one.
It's about half and half, when you consider the school year starts in daylight saving time, switches to standard, and then switches back. I don't see how changing the time kids go to school twice in the year is beneficial. And I certainly don't see how sleep-deprived bus drivers in the spring are an acceptable risk.