I don’t get this at all. Why would people want the sun to go down in the afternoon? In my time zone it sets at 4:30 part of the year! That’s awful, and sunrise is at around 7:00am. We have way more sun in the morning.
There is a whole body of research, comparing the areas on both sides of time zone boundaries. The results unanimously show that living too far west of your time zone's center line, has negative effects on health and economy. In light of this research, permanent winter time would be good for health and economy. Permanent summer time will be worse.
Permanent winter time would suck here, I like taking my kid to the playground after school, I can't do that in the winter because it is long dark by the time I pick him up. Who cares if the sun is up and bright at 6AM in the morning while I'm still sleeping.
When I lived in Beijing, they are on standard time year round , and it was really horrible having the sun rise at 4AM in the morning during summer. Like really? How can that be healthy?
Permanent standard / solar time proponent here: I'm reminded of that quote about people believing you could get a longer blanket if you were to cut a foot off top and sew it onto the bottom.
While true, it doesn't really disprove what the poster above is saying, since they lived in Beijing, the place that China's timezone is roughly centered on.
That's definitely true for Urumuqi where stores open later (11AM instead of 9:30 or 10AM in the rest of the country). But Beijing is pretty far east where the time zone is mainly meant for.
That's what the research supports. People go out more and spend money more when the sun is up after the working day. Kids play more. People exercise more.
Ahh, I think I read the comment I was replying to backwards (which is par for the course when it comes to TZ/DST-type things with me, "is it an hour earlier? or later").
Farmers don't care about the clock, neither do the cows. Work traditionally started when the sun came up, and cows got fed then too... since cows still can't read the clock, they still get up and want food at sunrise, DST or not.
Haha! I worked on a dairy farm in my youth. Cows also don't care about what days off your government says you should have. Kids have a recital in the afternoon? Better have someone there to milk the cows. Woke up with a tooth ache? better have someone there to milk the cows.
Almost all 'blue collar' work starts at 7:00 AM. It isn't about farmers. I was a farmer once, my day started at 4:30 AM.
But I worked blue collar after that, my job 7:30 to 5:00, or 7:30 to 8:00 on long days.
Even in my current white collar job, that habit has stuck, and I have been working 7:30 AM to 4:30 AM for the last thirty five years, mostly to avoid the bulk of the commute.
So yes, there are millions of jobs across this country where people arrive at work, and punch in on a clock, at 7:00 AM every morning.
I worked a blue color job where I was at work at 5:30 AM, sometimes 4:30 AM. The fact that it was never light out when I went to work, even when standard time was in effect, didn't bother me much.
They care even more about Year-round Standard Time:
> We therefore strongly support removing DST changes or removing permanent DST and having governing organizations choose permanent Standard Time for the health and safety of their citizens.
> Who cares if the sun is up and bright at 6AM in the morning while I'm still sleeping.
Good for you that you're still sleeping at 6AM. But some of us wake up at 6AM (or earlier) and would like to have it be brighter to help kick start our circadian rhythm.
And people who work night shifts would be delighted if every locale instantly adopted a +12 hour time offset.
Any change whatsoever to a status quo will delight some and upset others on an individual basis. I assume your point isn't that we should all adopt your preferences. So if not, what is it?
Why can't you take your kid to the playground after dark? In December we get sunrise at 8 but it's not light until 9 or so. Sunset is at 15 but it's quite dark at 14 already. Kids are happily playing with their parents in the snow no matter how dark it is, you can't stay indoors just because you have 5-6 hours of daylight. You just get a flashlight for your head and can play or go skiing in the forest.
Mostly it is just that there are no other kids to play with: yes, we might do it, but if we are the only ones it isn't great for him. But the real big problem is that sunshine in a Seattle winter is a precious commodity: 7/10 even with daylight we wouldn't get to the park because of rain, or its just not pleasant out. The problem with standard time is that 7/10 turns into not going 10/10, it wastes the precious sunlight we do have.
For us that hour does no difference at all, it's still dark when going to school/work and it's dark again when coming home. We have 4 hours and 20 minutes of daylight on the worst days, Seattle seems to have about 8 hours so there the DST hour actually does a difference I guess.
But one hour less in the night has been shown to give a higher death rate that week every year so it's been discussed to get rid of it here too.
> In light of this research, permanent winter time would be good for health and economy. Permanent summer time will be worse.
Only one of these papers (the researchgate one) actually asserts a hypothesis for the root cause of the correlation observed that might (but see below) make this true--later time of sunrise. The others all assert the hypothesis that being further out of sync with the rest of your time zone (which determines what one paper calls "social time") is the root cause. The way to fix that is not permanent winter time but narrower time zones--for example, a good chunk of what is now the Eastern time zone in the US is closer to the Central time zone meridian and should really be in that time zone. But that fix is orthogonal to the permanent summer time question.
Unfortunately for your argument, the one remaining paper (the researchgate one) is looking at variation with latitude, not variation with longitude. Latitude variation is going to be there regardless of what we do with daylight savings time. The fix for anyone bothered by the researchgate paper's findings is to move further south.
> The authors take the position that, based on comparisons of large populations living in DST or ST or on western versus eastern edges of time zones, the advantages of permanent ST outweigh switching to DST annually or permanently. Four peer reviewers provided expert critiques of the initial submission, and the SRBR Executive Board approved the revised manuscript as a Position Paper to help educate the public in their evaluation of current legislative actions to end DST. […] The choice of DST is political and therefore can be changed. If we want to improve human health, we should not fight against our body clock, and therefore, we should abandon DST and return to Standard Time (which is when the sun clock time most closely matches the social clock time) throughout the year. This solution would fix both the acute and the chronic problems of DST. We therefore strongly support removing DST changes or removing permanent DST and having governing organizations choose permanent Standard Time for the health and safety of their citizens.
The researchers may be completely correct, but this is still bikeshedding. It would be a grave mistake to stick with DST/ST switching just because permanent ST is better than permanent DST.
> If we want to improve human health, we should not fight against our body clock
You know what is really fighting against the body's clock? Suddenly shifting your normal wakeup time in any direction by an hour. No matter what your baseline sleep quality is, no matter if your body prefers getting up when it's light or dark, shifting that wakeup time by an hour with no prep will negatively affect your sleep quality.
The effort to abandon DST and move to ST (as positive as it may be) should be separated from the effort to abandon DST/ST switching. If this bill gets rejected in the House because people are so caught up in the DST/ST debate that they ignore the almost unanimous research conclusion that sudden sleep-schedule shifts are bad for most people -- that would just be a complete failure of policy.
This is like arguing over whether jogging or biking is better for your joints when the status quo is sitting on a couch. For most people, regardless of whether ST is better than DST for them, forcibly breaking their sleep schedule is the worst outcome.
I live in Alberta, Canada, and enough people want to get rid of the time zone switching that it came to a vote last fall. I couldn't believe the question on the ballot was do you want to go to permanent DST, instead of asking if we wanted to go to permanent standard time. It was snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
The people voted against the change, but I really think they would've voted for permanent standard time if it had been an option.
On the upside, local or state governments might be able to alter their time zone to essentially observe permanent Standard Time.
>Seasonal observation of DST was first enacted in the US during World Wars I and II, as an attempt to conserve fuel. The practice was unpopular and promptly repealed after each war; however, lobbyists from the petroleum industry lobbied to restore DST, as they had noticed it actually increased fuel consumption. Petroleum lobbyists joined with lobbyists from golf and candy corporations in the 1980s to form the National Daylight Saving Time Coalition, and they have twice since succeeded in extending the length of DST's observation from six months to seven in 1986, and again to eight months in 2005. The observation of DST has also been found to increase residential energy costs and pollution costs by several million dollars per year.
The big cities in Alberta look to be fairly far west in a timezone so that may have something to do with it. The further east you are the better DST looks on average. And that far north, I can see getting at least somewhat light mornings earlier in the year being a plus.
I admit I haven't read all of these links, but just thinking this through logically, whether we are on DST or ST permanently shouldn't matter one way or another. I can get how shifting back and forth twice a year can have an impact, but just not following the logic on why ST > DST.
The delta is only which number shows on the clock each hour. Whether we choose to start school/work/whatever commitment at 7am, 8am, 9am, etc. shouldn't be coupled to ST or DST.
That is, if we want to start work when the sun rises (on average), there's nothing stopping us from doing that, particularly if it's proven to be more healthy.
That alone makes me question, a bit, the validity of these studies.
But again, maybe there's more context that I'm missing -- which is why I'm posting here, in case there's context that would explain this.
The reason that ST > DST is that bedtime is largely influenced by the sun, yet wake time is largely influenced by work / school. When sunset is pushed back an hour, people get less sleep, and for kids this is massively detrimental to their education. India is doing this experiment in real time because they only have one time zone. Kids in the western half, where the sun sets later, have much worse educational outcomes, and as you move east the education outcomes get better.
The sun sets where I am at ~430pm during the winter in standard time. I don't really see how having the sun set at 530pm instead would have a substantial effect on bedtime. There is so little sunlight in the winter that work/social life are what drive wakeup and bedtime. I imagine this isn't as true in India. Is there any research that accounts for the actual length of daylight available?
Seeking to understand the research is still a valid endeavor. We shouldn't blindly accept research without understanding it's implications and trying to suss out the reason for the observed results.
> We shouldn't blindly accept research without understanding it's implications and trying to suss out the reason for the observed results.
You're not wrong, but (e.g.) this paper has several dozen references, stating at the end:
> In summary, the scientific literature strongly argues against the switching between DST and Standard Time and even more so against adopting DST permanently. The latter would exaggerate all the effects described above beyond the simple extension of DST from approximately 8 months/year to 12 months/year (depending on country) since body clocks are generally even later during winter than during the long photoperiods of summer (with DST) (Kantermann et al., 2007; Hadlow et al., 2014, 2018; Hashizaki et al., 2018). Perennial DST increases SJL prevalence even more, as described above.
If you want to fact check the folks who have this as their careers, you're welcome to pick up studying circadian rhythms as a hobby. But most of us ain't got time for that, so I'm willing to trust the experts and move on with my life.
We just spent two years having to put up with folks being arm chair epidemiologist with COVID, do we have to do it all over again with chronobiologists?
Presumably because opening/working hours remain the same by the clock when we switch (or when you are on the edge of a zone as in some of the studies) rather than adjust, and they are currently more optimal for one of those.
At any rate, I also strongly suspect it doesn't matter which one is picked but only as long as everything else is adjusted around it.
Would this be due to lack of light in the morning when waking up?
If so, that's a solved problem these days. There's hundreds of ways to have lights that turn on in the morning. Having some kind of wakeup-light (simply two bright Philips Hue bulbs in the bedroom ceiling lamps these days) and taking vitamin D has solved the issues I've had with living far north, where it's dark most hours in the morning in mid-winter.
I wonder how much of the population in US (and worldwide) lives in Eastern/Western part of timezones and whether people's preference is correlated with what part of the timezone they live in. I'd also like to see research if moving an extra hour or two would continue to see gains (not sure how one would do that, perhaps recruiting people with different life schedules).
Eg. I prefer having DST on all the time, but I am at the almost Eastern end of the timezone, so perhaps my preference is affected by my experience too: eg. I already get 1h of earlier sunrise than Western-most parts of the TZ for the same wall clock time, but it's already dark outside at 4pm in winter months so way before work is done, which is what makes me unhappy.
If it turns out majority of the population would prefer DST only because majority of the population lives in Eastern parts of the timezones, that'd be pretty unfair to those living in Western parts of the timezones, which is why I wonder what's the population distribution across timezones.
I'm happy to believe that sleeping for 19 minutes less makes you less productive and less healthy, but does that effect outweigh having an extra 19 minutes of presumably leisure time? E.g. your paper says 3% lower salary, but 19 minutes is probably much more than 3% of a typical person's free time.
> Why would people want the sun to go down in the afternoon?
They don't. They want it to come up in the morning. In many places there isn't enough sunlight in the middle of winter to have it up both in the morning and the afternoon, so they need to pick one.
From a safety point of view, probably sunlight in the morning in more useful because sunlight drives temperature. That means mornings tend to be colder than afternoons, and so are more likely to have hazards such as ice on the roads.
When you go with dark mornings, you are combining the worst road conditions with the worst visibility. When you choose light mornings over light afternoons, then morning is combining the best visibility with the worst road conditions and afternoon is combining the best road conditions with the worst visibility.
Another factor is that commutes tend to fall into a narrower time range in the mornings. The commutes back home after work tend to be more spread out. This tends to make the morning commute more dangerous, which further argues against placing the morning commute in darkness.
You also have the issue with kids who take the bus to school. With dark mornings, kids sit by the road and wait for the bus. So they walk in the dark to the bus stop, then wait there for some indeterminate amount of time in the dark.
Getting darker earlier at night, there are two advantages for schoolkids. One is that school tends to get out before the sun goes down even on the shortest days for most areas. So, many kids who'd have to wait in the dark in the morning don't have to deal with the dark at all in the afternoon. The other is that even when it's getting dark by the time the kid gets home, they don't have to wait next to the road for an indeterminate amount of time until the bus gets there.
I'd argue that evening darkness is somewhat safer than morning darkness when I'm considering winter weather. The temperature of the roads are higher after ten hours of daylight than they are after ten hours of darkness. The coldest and iciest conditions are often found right before dawn.
Another important thing is, that people might be tired in the morning as they are not fully awake yet. This gets worse, the earlier they have to rise vs. the sun raise.
My point is that given equal lighting morning is probably going to be worse for driving because of road conditions.
If we then have to add darkness to one of those, adding it to evening will probably be less damaging because evening has a larger safety margin due to better road conditions.
Adding darkness to morning is taking what is already the hardest case and making it even worse.
Do you have kids? Do you have to wake those kids up for school in the dark and wrestle with your own ability to wake up in the dark? Have you been to school board meetings and listened to other parents who are extremely opinionated about every aspect of their children's schedules.
The simple answer is that while lots of people "want" the sun in the evening, there is a sizable group of people that "need" the sun in the morning.
But that shifts work schedules to later in the morning, which pushes lunch and dinner schedules, and bedtime schedules, and then you're right back where you started.
If your desire is to make sure that kids have light on both ends of the school commute, then adjust your time zone such that winter is optimal. Then just keep that time zone year round. Why bother moving the clocks?
Daylight savings effectively shifts school 1 hour earlier relative to sunrise, which is the exact opposite of what is good for kids (who need more sleep than adults).
School just starts way too damn early. I remember school at like 8:30 in elementary school. My son starts at 7:20. He has to get up at like 6:00 because it takes so long to get him up.
Morning vs Evening Light Treatment of Patients With Winter Depression
"These results should help establish the importance of circadian (morning or evening) time of light exposure in the treatment of winter depression. We recommend that bright-light exposure be scheduled immediately on awakening in the treatment of most patients with seasonal affective disorder."
It really doesn't matter whether we're on daylight time or standard time, schedules will adjust to whatever makes sense for that particular locale. Just stop changing the damn clocks back and forth.
What I can't get past is that we are literally changing the numbers on our clocks. That can't be a less invasive or easier to coordinate solution than a schedule shift for a business would be. If we can pass a law mandating daylight savings time, is that less invasive than passing a law saying that some businesses should shift their hours in the winter?
Even without a law -- businesses can voluntarily have summer hours and winter hours, because they already do, we just change the clocks to pretend that's not what we're doing. Businesses can already ignore or set their own hours voluntarily regardless of DST, and the majority have completely voluntarily decided that in the winter they'll shift their opening and closing times by an hour.
I just feel like -- couldn't they do literally the exact same thing they're doing right now, except without us all having to pretend that time itself has changed? Is it a mental thing, are we just relying on CEOs not understanding how DST works, so we have to trick them into having seasonal hours?
It's a mass coordination problem. Businesses have customers. OK, segments of the business that don't interact with customers could choose to switch working hours. But if I'm retail say, my customers probably expect that I'll be open at 10am for a random store.
Even if we take the perspective that we need complete coordination across the board, it still seems weird to me that our solution to that isn't to regulate that business hours should shift in the winter, it's to regulate that time itself bend to our whims.
It seems like a solution where retail businesses were required to shift hours in the winter would still be preferable to what we have. Because what we have is kind of that already, except also it makes a lot of date math harder and affects non-retail workers too.
If the problem is that we need businesses to shift hours, we can do that through either regulation or social behavior or through other incentives -- we don't have to on top of that also change clocks, do we? Even just shifting public school hours and public transportation schedules alone would probably be a large incentive for many businesses to follow along.
This seems like a laughable reason given that traditional business hours are literally the exact same as traditional work hours, so by this argument all the supposed customers are at work anyway and thus not at your store.
Aren't the health detriments the same whether you shift your working hours / schedule or shift the clock?
Aren't they effectively exactly the same thing, especially if they're coordinated? And if they're not coordinated, isn't it a bigger mess in terms of knowing when things are supposed to change?
> Aren't the health detriments the same whether you shift your working hours / schedule or shift the clock?
Yes. I don't personally advise that we do shift working hours, I think that breaking people's internal clocks and wakeup time is harmful. But, if for some reason people really want to do that, we don't need daylight/standard time changes to do it.
> Aren't they effectively exactly the same thing, especially if they're coordinated?
Yes, and that's actually a really good summation of my point. We aren't doing anything magical with time shifts, we are just coordinating business/school times. But we are doing it in a way that is a lot more complicated than it needs to be, and that is in some ways a lot less granular and useful than it could be.
Not every part of the US needs time shifts in order to make sure it's bright in the evenings/mornings. There could be some municipalities/states where having seasonal work times might make sense (again, I don't think that's the case, but I can see the argument for it). Other parts of the US might not need that at all. The time shifts are a really clumsy system for handling winter sunrise times given just how large the US is and how much daytime variety there is across the country.
> And if they're not coordinated, isn't it a bigger mess in terms of knowing when things are supposed to change?
Personally, I don't think we need that much coordination and I don't think the current system really requires that much coordination or that it's desirable for everything to be synced up that way. I don't think anything would fall apart if we all stuck with DST permanently but in one state there was a local regulation that made retail shops open an hour later in the winter, or where school hours were different in the winter than in a few Northern states. I think that would probably be fine? I already have to check local store hours if I get up early and I'm visiting an unfamiliar neighborhood.
To go a step further, I also kind of feel like even that would be a mistake for many businesses (at least non-retail ones), I think forcing people to suddenly get up an hour earlier probably does more damage than seasonal depression for most people, and I would rather buy the remaining people with really bad seasonal depression sun lamps.
However, my point is -- the system is just obfuscating what we're really doing, which is shifting business/school hours. Even if you disagree with me about everything in the previous two paragraphs, even if you think this does need to be perfectly coordinated, and we do need to keep shifting business hours -- even in that scenario, we don't need DST/standard shifts to do that.
The time shift is just an illusion, what's really happening is the government is saying everyone should get up an hour earlier/later. Well, if we're OK with the government saying that, and if (for some reason) we want the government to say that -- then the government can just say that, it doesn't have to also force everyone to pretend that clocks are different. I don't necessarily think we should shift business hours at all, I'm just saying that we don't need to pretend that we have altered the timestream if we do want to shift business hours.
Shifts, etc, are all basically negotiated business by business, school system by school system, etc. The night shift, restaurant workers, school kids, etc, are really pushed around by logistics to match rush hours for office workers.
A split between organizations changing their winter and summer hours and ones choosing an hour earlier or later permanently is not necessarily harmful because it ends up spreading the traffic across more time. Everyone moving in sync causes a very precise traffic jam.
But isn’t it the case that the jobs that are directly concerned with whether the sun is up would also just do the job based on solar time with no regard for standard time? There’s obviously some need for accommodating those people so they can get their kids to school or have some time to go to the bank or whatever, but I find it hard to believe that applying standard time offsets twice a year is the most efficient way to make these accommodations.
How is 8am so much better? If you start work at 8am, you need to be up 1-2 hours earlier to get ready, commute, etc. The only people who wake up with the sun in the winter are folks that roll into work at 10am.
Because it make zero sense for everyone to have to get up an hour earlier. And it makes no sense for kids to stand around in the dark at freezing cold bus stops every morning.
I get the feeling that it's fairly common in US schools to have kids in before 8am, possibly even before 7am!
Is this because of the widespread school transport and the need to stagger the bus usage? In the UK it's quite rare to have school transport, with most kids at high school taking public transport, and at primary school either walking or being driven
I got the feeling from German textbooks at school that early starts were common in Europe too.
Early school hours are often a result of teachers' desires to get out of work early. Many teachers' unions include school hours in their bargaining/contracts.
Yeah, and that is because being a teacher is not just an incredibly mentally taxing job (made worse by the fact that class sizes are way too large) but also involves an awful lot of invisible after-school work: preparing and correcting exams, preparing class material, dealing with IEPs, following up with parents (particularly in financially or otherwise challenged families), organizing after-school and extra-curricular activities, dealing with other bureaucratic bullshit because the administration is understaffed...
Yes, it is commonplace for bussing to be staggered -- they often pick up a route for one school (maybe a high school), then run another route for another school (maybe an elementary school).
"And it makes no sense for kids to stand around in the dark at freezing cold bus stops every morning."
I mean, coats exist. We could make sure everyone has winter wear appropriate for the weather, and then it just won't be an issue. Kids here are out in it and are from a young age here (Norway).
It's easy to focus on abductions and forget all of the other relevant crime, which makes up the majority of it.
Yes abductions are low, but in many many areas crime as a whole is high, and children are often involved or impacted, and likely more so when they are stuck standing around in the dark.
I'm from the US - the midwest. It wasn't a big deal catching the bus when it was cold/dark there, either. We had lights at the bus stops, and half the time it was in front of the house. No big deal. We had coats, too. There are multiple programs to make sure kids have coats in the US, though they don't go far enough.
Most places in the US are pretty safe, by the way, though folks will swear they aren't.
When I was in school, there were absolutely kids who lacked basic necessities, including quality clothing. Clothing was also more expensive back then... but universal schooling means that we're also catering to the poorest of the poor.
Kids shouldn't be forced to start that early anyway. It's borderline child abuse imo. Maybe permanent DST will lead to school schedules that benefit children not adults.
It's actually the exact opposite. Permanent DST means that kids will be starting 1 hour earlier relative to sunrise, which is terrible for educational outcomes.
It's already bad. The issue isn't when you sleep up relative to the sun, but relative to your responsibilities. Some kids have to wake up before 6am not to keep up, which severely limits their options in the evenings and their phyiscal development.
We'd have to change work timing too, then, to facilitate dropoffs and parents who want to watch their kids at the bus stops. And at that point, we are back where we started. Better to just not mess with the time, and stick with standard time.
If you change what time people go to work from 8 am to 9 am then you will also be changing when they get home from 5pm to 6pm. Then you have lost that extra daylight in the evening, which was the entire point of the time change!
> And at that point, we are back where we started.
Except only for people at latitudes where it's worth doing. Those people are precisely where they started, and everyone else has a much simpler year-round standard time.
Because the hours of sunlight are limited, and many people prefer having the sun set in the afternoon over having it rise after the day's routine is well under way. Many people prefer it the other way around. There are some inconveniences both ways, but we'll make it work one way or the other.
Even those of us who prefer DST in general don't like the change in general. (OK, I remember in college extending the party by one hour was pretty cool but the other end wasn't so great.)
>OK, I remember in college extending the party by one hour was pretty cool but the other end wasn't so great.
The magic really goes away when you hit bar-going age and realize that even though the time-change lines up with last-call perfectly, they don't stay open an extra hour.
Linkdump:
https://www.econ.pitt.edu/sites/default/files/WP%2017-009.up...
http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/content/cebp/26/8/1306.full.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21231877
https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/10.5664/jcsm.8780
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29636342
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276058441_The_incid...