RescueTime: Daylight Savings Time costs the United States $480,000,000
blog.rescuetime.com
blog.rescuetime.com
Twice a year, once in the spring and once in the fall, commuters experience a period during which the sun is right in their eyes. For those of us driving east in the morning, and west in the evening, the sun is right in front of us all the time, and when it's at the right (wrong) elevation, vision is painfully obscured.
Earlier in the year the sun is too low to bother; later, the sun has risen high enough that your visor can block it. But for that time period, traffic is terrible because drivers can't see where they're going.
The thing about DST is that it resets this period. After having made it through once, DST drags the clock around so that we must endure the same sun glare again.
Once you start to think about this effect, it's clear that it must be costing fuel and lost productivity from the traffic, and likely even injuries and lives from accidents.
I'm also less inclined to believe the RescueTime productivity number when they take their own solid figures on user involvement and then mix them in with a few SWAGs to come up with what people now believe is a solid figure. Once you throw BS into the recipe you've spoiled the final product.
From the DOE report--- Changes in national traffic volume and motor gasoline consumption for passenger vehicles in 2007 were determined to be statistically insignificant and therefore, could not be attributed to Extended Daylight Saving Time.
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/ba/pba/pdfs/epact_sec_110_edst_r...
In the spring the sunrise is getting earlier as time goes by. Then the clock jumps forward an hour, which makes sunrise an hour later, causing the repeat the op talked about.
In the fall, sunrise is getting later. The clock jumps backward an hour, which makes sunrise an hour earlier. This causes the same repeat, in reverse (aka, trending darker rather than lighter).
edit: Also, I have the experience to back this up. I've been one of the living west of my workplace people for too long.
In exchange for the cost of thirty-two (32) minutes I get ~eight (8) months of an extra hour of daylight later on in the day (~240 hours more). I'd argue that this has a benefit to people. Further, I'd argue this benefit outweighs the cost.
This article strikes me as only pointing out the thing that is seen and wholly ignoring the unseen. It is cute but reality is not nearly so simple. In the context of a company that makes monitoring software, this article makes sense. They produce a metric, their view is through that metric, and they report the metric.
While the conclusions from such a comparison may not necessarily apply to more northern states, it would give an additional point of reference. (It's a pity they don't have data for Indiana in 2005, which only went to daylight savings time in 2006...)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_the_United_States#Dayli...
Neither does Indiana.
But it's a good question to ask. Maybe Tony & Co can tell us whether workers make up for this loss over the course of the week.
I'm not effective my first hour at work anyway. Its coffee and email time. Second the lighter day has a tendency to make me more apt to work longer - there's no accounting for that.
Now, I'll concede that some of the other numbers (salaries of knowledge workers, numbers of knowledge workers, etc) are not toooo thoroughly researched, but they are in the neighborhood.
A commenter suggested that "we make it up on the other end" (with "fall back"), so we compared the fall DST to typical mondays and found that PEOPLE LOGGED BELOW AVERAGE TIME THERE AS WELL (which was a bit of a surprise). I'm assuming that people take the extra time they get if they wake up early to have a hearty breakfast or watch the news or somesuch.
But a few more points
One the time isn't lost, as long as I've been working we've been changing our clocks. Its time already counted for in the natural cycle of business. Same as the lost productivity around 3 day weekends - and productivity gained by leap years.
Second if you can it would be interesting to compare productivity from the 3 weeks prior to the time change to the 3 week post the time change - I posited that I'd work more in the days after the time change due to the additional light at the end of day. I'd like to see if this is true.
The whole thing is a beat-up. Human nature, not any particular outside cause, is responsible for "lost" time. And human nature picks it right back up, too - this idea that "minutes spent with an app open" is some kind of definitive measure of productivity is utterly useless.
What is it with people and DST, anyway? I've never had even the slightest problem with it. Time zones are pretty much arbitrary, and we have to constantly adjust them anyway (witness the leap second at beginning of this year). All the infrastructure to do that is already in place. I don't see why it's such a huge issue. Personally, I like it - if we didn't have DST here, the sun would come up before 5am. I find the arguments about "the sun is in my eyes when commuting" utterly spurious, the sun is always going to be in someone's eyes.
Don't see what the problem is or what necessitates these contrived justifications against it.
Moreover, everyone wastes time every day at the job, except sometimes, when they have deadlines. If a worker misses 16 minutes some Monday, they'll probably make it up over the course of the week.
Big deal.
DST covers 2/3 of the work-year, or approximately 160 work days. So it buys us 160 hours of extra evening light. (I'm not counting weekends, because then the distinction between the hour lost of morning light and that gained of evening light is immaterial.) That means we're paying $0.01 each per hour of evening light. I'll take that deal.
In truth, I find that DST sucks for about 3 days, but after I've adjusted, I'm very glad it's there. I'm not a dairy farmer, though.
The issue is that, when political time is fixed, most people naturally develop a habit of waking up around the winter sunrise, year-round. This means that 1-3 hours of light, during the rest of the year, are "wasted".
Some anti-DST advocates have proposed making DST year-round, effectively taking the time zone that is one hour eastward. The problem is that this would put the winter sunrises into the 8:00 am hour, which people tend to like even less than a mid-afternoon sunset.
That's a fine story for little-house-on-the-prairie anecdotal value, but I wouldn't wish year-round DST on anyone. Not when you're farther north. Not when the nearest ocean not blocked by mountains is the Arctic. Winter "morning" per the DST clock is just too dark and too cold.