Eliminating Daylight Savings Time would make the average American’s life darker

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254245482...

Besides, it's not like standard time is any more natural than daylight savings. The whole adherence to a strict twenty-four hour cycle is unnatural. In antiquity, people would plan their days around sunrise and sunset, and their bodies would gradually adjust to the seasonal shortening and lengthening of daylight with no abrupt transition necessary.

I think that's probably worse than some additional waking darkness, whether it's in the morning or the evening. We're pretty good at artificial lighting these days.

If we're going to bother again, we should at least go with standard time this instance.

In PST today, December 21, Sunrise was just before 8 am and sunset will be around 4:20 pm. Change that to PDT and we have sunrise just before 9 am and sunset around 5:20 pm.

The coldest time of the day tends to be in the morning before sunrise. On foggy days the fog is more likely in the morning than in the evening. When it freezes the roads are more likely to be icy in the morning. Even if the air temperature doesn't get above freezing all day there is a chance that sunlight during the day might heat the roads enough to melt the ice by evening.

Because of all this if you have to travel in the dark, whether as a driver or as a pedestrian or cyclist, you will generally prefer evening dark to morning dark.

In addition to the asymmetry between morning and evening weather there is also an asymmetry in traffic intensity. Pick any two random people and compare what times they travel to and from work or school.

Their morning travel times are more likely to be closer together than their evening travel times. Offices all start at about the same time, so you get office workers all coming at about the same time. Similar for elementary school start times, and middle schools start times, and high school start times.

At the other end of the day first you've got schools getting out which generally happens a couple hours before offices let out. Second, workers tend to leave work over a wider range of times than they arrive. You've got people who stay late to get something done (much more common than people who go in early). You've got people who do errands after work before heading home.

So at latitudes like that of Seattle permanent DST pushes the morning commute farther into worse weather and the morning commute is the one this is already the highest risk because it is the more concentrated commute and it is the one with the most overlap between adults driving for work and kids walking or biking for school.

Permanent standard time also is better for our circadian rhythms than permanent DST.

Most people here are too young to remember this, but the US tried year around DST in the '70s due to an oil supply disruption caused by war in the mideast. They thought permanent DST would lower energy consumption. It turns out it didn't have affect energy consumption much, but it was pretty much universally hated for the downsides I listed above and ditched after a year.

It's a bogus argument either way.

Now I am in the blessed position of working from home again, I can choose when I get up. What I choose is this:

- for 26 weeks of the year (broadly from spring equinox to autumn equinox) I get up at 7am (which would be 6am in the absence of DST)

- for 6 weeks of the year (broadly centred on the winter solstice) I get up at 7:45am

- it takes 10 weeks for me to switch from getting up at 7am to getting up at 7:45am: I get up 2 minutes later every day for 5 weeks, and 1 minute later every day for another 5 weeks (and the clocks go back during this)

- it takes me 10 weeks to switch the other way: I get up 1 minute early every day for 5 weeks, then 2 minutes earlier every day for another 5 weeks

I do this to maximise the amount of daylight I get during the winter, without having to get up in the dark.

The point of me telling you all this is: the hard part is not getting up at a different time every day for 10 weeks. The hard part is synchronising with people who are essentially living in a different time zone.

This is why I don't do this when I work in an office, even just one day a week: I can change when I get up by a minute or two every day, but the trains won't change when they run by the same amount. That 9am meeting I need to be in the office for is still going to be at 9am, and the guy who controls when it starts won't agree to move it.

When I work in an office, I can't choose my timezone. Neither can you. Neither can anyone else.

(The dates I target aren't really the equinoxes/solstices. What I actually care about is the latest sunrise, which is a week and a half after the winter solstice, and shift everything accordingly.)

It’s like one of those old tricks for scrolling raster graphics. If you want to move the screen over five pixels, you can copy everything in VRAM over five bytes, or you can add five to the base address register and everything moves automatically on the next frame.

>“Making Daylight Saving Time permanent is OK with me!” Mr. Trump posted on social media in March 2019.

I presume by "ending Daylight Saving Time" he meant making DST permanent and ending the process of changing, which seems to be what everyone agrees is the right thing to do.

From that it makes an (incorrect) assumption about the value of AM sunlight over PM sunlight and declares that all-year DST is pointless.

In my opinion the only argument against all-year DST which holds any water at all, and even then not much, is the concern about kids going to school in the dark. However, since many places don't have enough winter daylight to go around, trade-offs need to be made and kids are probably better off on-net having daylight time during their free time instead of while eating their toast inside and commuting to school.