The US Tried Permanent Daylight Saving Time in the ’70s. People Hated It
washingtonian.com
washingtonian.com
During DST, we all agree to start our days, open our business, and adjust our schedules one hour earlier, but without changing our individual clock times.
With DST all year long, can we choose to send our children to school at 9:30 instead of 8:30 during the winter? Should the school have a different winter schedule than a summer one? Or should we just wake up our young children well before dawn and drag them off?
If we were really accounting for physical realities, we'd change our schedules by a much smaller amount every week or even every day, as the sun gradually shifts over time, instead of by an hour all at once. But nobody wants to coordinate that.
I think the only logical thing to do is have permanent standard time...
The time change is super inconvenient, both as a regular person who doesn't like futzing with the oven clock, and as a programmer for whom it is pure madness to try and comprehend all the rules and edge case when converting between time zones.
p.s. mdavis6890, I find myself wanting to leave spiteful words in response to your post. Upon inspecting this, I accept that these feelings are on me. You haven't really done anything. I think it stems from feeling like trash due to the hour time shift, combined with my own deeply seated desire to live in a slightly less nonsensical and insane version of reality. In this present version we seem to be forever saddled by the bullshit of y'ore.
See also: Texas and as of today also Idaho regarding abortion rights rollbacks. Combine that with the highly suspicious conflict of interest of our newly appointed supreme court justices ( https://www.npr.org/2022/03/14/1086535100/wife-of-justice-th... ) and we're in full-on regression insanity mode.
All I want at the moment is to stop being subjected to time zone shift fatigue without the benefit of getting to travel somewhere.
9am sunrises are going to be very unpleasant for northern states under permanent DST.
In the Winter, permanent DST means everyone has to get up an hour earlier for work or school, relative to the sun which regulates their body rhythm.
Night people already struggle with getting up early enough for these expectations. An hour earlier is going to be harder for them.
Research suggests that overall, health will suffer, sleep will be shorter, and educational attainment will reduce. But there will be more shopping so that's ok!
The sun affects not just when people prefer to sleep, but also quality of sleep, duration, how refreshed they are, and during the daytime the profile of energy levels, hormones, brain function through the day. Just going to bed earlier doesn't compensate for that.
I think the "not having a change" matters much much more than the absolute value, we can campaign to have realistic hours for school or whatever else, that's a separate topic. Permanent DST lines up with my life better right now.
Time is perhaps one of the most egregious facilitators of harm in the human domain. Both in manifest physical harm and as the root of a gamut of genuinely harmful behaviors without a real justifying rationale to back it. Haste makes waste. Rush drug trials and find out that thalidomide causes birth defects, that PFAs can't be ejected from the body, that tetraethyl lead is actually harmful... Rush to work and get in a car accident, rush the work and destroy the product... Rush the revolution and forget the human costs...Rush through life to get to the end... All so the trains can run on time.
Anyways, the point is that we can do better — we can be more humane. You could set the clock to whatever hour you please and in a decent society you'd be given free agency over your time or due compensation for the sacrifice of it.
That is certainly speculative.
This is the norm for much of America, and has been for a long time (and will continue to be if we move away from changing clocks). If you want to play the "think of the children" card let's talk about moving their school start times later regardless of DST. 8:30 would be a great start, 9:30 would be phenomenal!
What changed? Until about three years ago, I was a night owl with chronic insomnia. Since then, I’ve done some important mental healthy work, and I got a pup. The former helped with my insomnia and helped me adjust to an earlier schedule. The pup, well she used to rise with the sun, but going into her third year she has a much more stable internal clock. Now I understand the dread people feel waking early in wintertime in a way I never did. It feels like waking up in my insomniac days, except that I’d still be able to sleep.
I still understand why others prefer this, and I don’t think there’s a solution that will please everyone. It’s just really strange to (potentially) get something I wanted for almost my entire adult life, just as I’ve had a change of heart.
The primary driver of your circadian rhythm is the hours of daylight. Left to their own devices, (ie literally excluding alarm clocks) humans wake up at sunrise. Daylight savings time is an attempt to make it easy for institutions to have canonical hours while also attempting to account for this essential fact about human physiology. It feels weird because it's optimizing two things simultaneously.
If the primary driver of our circadian rhythm is sunlight, switching from DST and back leads you to doing stuff an hour off from your body’s natural circadian rhythm.
It’s not about changing your clock. It’s about changing your body’s schedule.
It's quite difficult to understand just how much no sun in the morning sucks until you've had to live through it. On Standard time only, you'll go down into the artificial-light-only place in the dark, and you'll come out of it in the dark, for half the year.
Switching permanently to DST means this sector of the population gets an opportunity to see the sun after work before it goes away even when the sun sets at what would normally be 3:30-4 PM. They aren't going to see the sun in the morning no matter what anyway; they're waking up in the dark even if DST is permanent.
Sure, people will complain about the purity of "but 12 means noon", but most of our modern systems of measure have no human-scale base units and everyone loves those, so there's no reason why time should be based on that either.
From an optimization problem / energy conservation point-of-view we should try to place noon as close as possible to the midpoint of the population's wakefulness window.
Wouldn't even need to check the time to see if it is open or not, you can just look outside.
Plus...we have the super advanced technology needed to figure out when sundown is on our smartphones!
And at some point in the summer, the sun never sets. During winter it never rises...
Time isn't easy on a global scale.
I don't want to have to guess if a business will still open by the time I get there. I know that it's 6:15, it's a 22 minute drive, and the business closes at 7. I have no idea if "sundown" will have happened by the time I get there.
It's the old tired refrain "We already tried that!* (*under different circumstances, at a different time, with a different generation)
We did permanent standard time in the past too, and people didn't seem to have a problem with it. I think we should go with the option that society liked in the past, not the one they disliked.
Society changes, people adapt. If there was not a strong desire, it wouldn't have passed unanimously.
I don't think this has been thought through properly. Time changes are difficult to reason about, and DST is associated with the part of year when the sun is up for longer anyway. Everyone thinks "yay sunlight" without realizing what that really entails (waking up earlier relative to our internal clocks, which are set by the sunrise).
Hence why we should look at public sentiment at the time we actually implemented this.
Almost all scientists who study sleep say we should be doing permanent standard time, not permanent DST.
> In one 2017 study[1] from Denmark, scientists analyzed a psychiatric database of more than 185,000 people from 1995 to 2012. They found that the fall transition to standard time was associated with an 11 percent increase in depressive episodes, an effect that took 10 weeks to dissipate. The spring switch, by contrast, had no similar effect.
> Retail and leisure industries have argued that more light in the evenings would give consumers more time to spend money, and proponents also argue that lighter evenings would translate to fewer robberies[2] and safer roads[3].
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/15/us/politics/daylight-savi...
1 https://journals.lww.com/epidem/Fulltext/2017/05000/Daylight...
2 https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brookings-now/2015/10/29/figh...
Yeah, I've seen that before, and I've always found it incredibly unconvincing. The thing about the fall is that there's also less sunlight in general, at any time of day, and DST won't change that. I'd be very curious to see a study conducted before/after temporary all-year DST in the 70s, although it probably doesn't exist.
The actions of legislators are not, in a practical sense, directly representative of the citizenry. Sure, some things end up going to popular vote, but some things are just proposed and passed with zero citizen input.
In the winter of 1973-1974 I was carpooling to college, leaving the house about 6:30 to get to campus before 8. I could have done without the DST. It was imposed with the notion of saving energy after the oil shock. Did it really save energy, though?
Arguably our timezones have grown too wide to accommodate preferences of both edges. Our timezones were optimized for train schedules and full hour-wide zones made some sense based on the speed of train travel. Maybe instead of trying to pick just "Standard" Time or just Daylight Time we should instead be talking about narrowing our time zones (to half-hour wide, perhaps) and better figure out what geography we are best trying to represent versus solar noon, the center of a timezone, one edge or the other.
It'd be most convenient for local events, but maybe not for non-local events.
I'd open my bar at the most eastern point.
I don't know exactly how that fares with scheduling and whatnot but it's been implemented.
I don't know if a return to per-city offsets is the best idea. Software could handle a lot of the messy details for us in ways that the railroads could not have taken advantage of with only so much space for physical clocks. But a return to per-city offsets isn't really the worst idea either if we are looking at what problems Daylight Saving Time was supposed to solve and didn't solve very well.
The half hour is only confusing if you're not used to it.
(Nepal has a 45 minute offset, which is a great timezone to check things work. Chatham Island in NZ too)
Example: New Zealand, Chatham Islands: UTC +12:45 / +13:45
https://www.timeanddate.com/time/time-zones-interesting.html
Historically even weirder offsets have been used:
UTC-00:44 – Liberia, 1919–1972
UTC+04:51 – Bombay (now Mumbai), India, prior to 1955
UTC+05:40 – Nepal, 1921–1986
UTC+07:20 – daylight saving time in Malaya (now Malaysia's peninsular region) and Singapore, 1933–1941
But at least all of those were to the minute. In the past, some places have even used offsets to the second:
UTC-00:43:08 – Liberia, prior to 1919
UTC-00:25:21 – Ireland, 1880–1916
UTC+05:41:16 – Nepal, prior to 1920
Most software probably handles minute-based offsets correctly, even weird ones which aren't on the hour/half-hour/quarter-hour mark, but very little software would support seconds-based offsets. Prior to the introduction of standardised time zones, people used mean local solar time – which can be defined to as precise an accuracy as you'd like, down to the second, even the sub-second, provided you have a sufficiently accurate measurement of your location – and some early attempts at time zones just used the capital's local mean solar time down to the nearest second, hence the seconds-based offsets. Most clocks were not very accurate in those days, rendering the seconds-based offset largely theoretical. I doubt anybody is going to do that again.
Let it die already, trust me not having it is great.
In December 1973, supposedly 80% of Americans favored DST through the winter, but this fell by fully half to 40% only three months later — during the DARKEST three months of the year? How does that make any sense? Americans then would rather that darkness begin at 5, BEFORE they can drive home?
Nonsense. Any statistic that counterintuitive bears much fuller explanation. It reeks of manipulation, such as a PR campaign by some social influencer of the day claiming to “protect our helpless little children brought to death's door by a wicked law obviously invented by Communists”.
However, if a greater context behind the story HAD been provided, it's likely there woyld be no story — just as there WAS no threat to schoolchildren. (Nor would there be any today, since nobody walks to school anymore.)
Now THIS is news I can’t use.
There would be no difference here if the article said: "The US Tried Permanent Daylight Saving Time in the ’70s. People Loved It"
Both imply (some) people. Both would (technically) be correct. A story could be squeezed out of either. Bad writing.