Daylight Saving Time In The US

[KEVIN_224]

One place where it makes sense in the summer is Portland, Maine. On June 21st, their local sunrise and sunset is 4:59 AM and 8:26 PM. Imagine a 3:59 AM sunrise on the first day of summer? No thank you!:(

(Hartford will get as long as 5:16 AM and 8:30 PM.)

[CNGL-Leudimin]

OK, your guys are now in DST, here it won't happen until March 31st. Due to this, I had to change the time offset of this forum to keep in line with my local hour, only to change it again on Easter .

Here we use CET (Central European Time, one hour ahead UTC) despite being sightly West of Greenwich meridian. This, and the DST makes that on June 21st at 10 p.m. we still have sunlight.

[J N Winkler]

Here we use CET (Central European Time, one hour ahead UTC) despite being sightly West of Greenwich meridian. This, and the DST makes that on June 21st at 10 p.m. we still have sunlight.

Don't you have problems with children having to walk to school in the dark in the winter (as English Si describes upthread for the DST/double-DST experiment in Britain between 1968 and 1971)?

[english si]

I've never understood why anyone would want extra daylight in the mornings.  Realistically, all you use the morning for is dragging yourself out of bed and into an artificially-lighted school/work place.

Which is something we need the sun for. Sure, we don't typically need the sunrise before 6, hence DST, but making dawn happen at 8, 9, or even 10 or later (in eg the UK in mid-winter) in winter is just too late, hence the lack of DST in winter.

All that daylight outside is wasted while you're inside.

yes, so getting an hour+ before you start work at 7 to 8 or 8 to 9 is better than having that hour in the afternoon from 3 to 4 or 4 to 5, when you are still at work!

Given the hours we generally work, if you are going to get light outside work hours in winter, it will be in the morning.

Once I enter the workforce, I fully expect that a good chunk of the year I won't see a single speck of daylight thanks to "standard" time.

Much more likely under DST, actually, given working hours.

All standard time does is give everyone seasonal effective disorder.

Again, wrong way around - part of the treatment of SAD isn't 'dusk' boxes but dawn boxes, for giving you a sunrise to wake up with. Also DST in winter/bad social time with the late sunrise gives you 'social jet lag'.

It doesn't help that my sleep cycle just doesn't care about sunlight - I'm naturally wired to go to sleep at 2/3 AM and wake up around 9/10 AM, everything else be damned.  It makes getting up in the morning really hard regardless of the amount of sunlight.

That's a late 'middle' (of about half 5-half 6), not not giving a shit about where the sun is - you'll probably find it's nearer 3-10 on DST and 2-9 on Standard time. You can, I guess, be unnaturally wired to ignore the sun, but by nature we're wired to rely on the sun to reset our body clock (see the video I posted about social jet lag).

Also, it is NOT fun to enter a lecture hall at 4 with it looking like noon and exit at 5 with the sky looking like midnight.

Move South! OK, in the tropics it's get dark quickly at 6 with little variation in time. Move north and the change is more gradual, though earlier in winter and later in the summer. DST just moves that change from the 1600s to the 1700s (though moving the reverse from the 0800s to the 0900s). The problem here is simply the lack of daylight, not where it is.

Certainly, in my uni days, we had our contact hours in the forth quarter of the 12 hours between midnight and midday, and nearly all the first half the 12 hours between midnight and midday (9 to 5:30). If people were good at getting up in the dark, and needed lots of daylight in the evenings, we'd have had our hours of possible contact time running much earlier, say a fifty-fifty split with 0745-0415 times, or even the reverse of the real split with 0630-0300 hours (instead of 5.5 hours in the evening and 3 in the morning, flip that round). The worker's traditional 9-5 day would have been 8-4 or even 7-3; my school day would have been shifted forward by at least half an hour (half an hour would have put it 50-50).

They did an experiment at a school with high rates of truancy in North East England, beginning with September - instead of starting school at 9, move it to 10. Truancy dropped significantly on the equivalent time the year before around mid-October.

One place where it makes sense in the summer is Portland, Maine. On June 21st, their local sunrise and sunset is 4:59 AM and 8:26 PM. Imagine a 3:59 AM sunrise on the first day of summer? No thank you!:(

Err, the 'first' day of summer there is called "midsummer's day" or 'the longest day' (not quite the earliest sunrise or latest sunset, which happen around that time).

I have roughly these times for daylight at the summer solstice: 4:43 AM to 9:23 PM for this year (with DST included). Both an 0343 sunrise and a 2123 sunset have their problems (especially as the light lasts about hour more at either end, before becoming twilight), dealing with the sunset causes the problem of changing back for the height of summer (we don't really need the daylight in the evening then). It's almost as if we have too much light at that time of year! In reality it never gets dark around that time of year, even in Southern England.

Glasgow has midsummer times of 4:31 AM and 10:06 PM (times with DST), and mid-winter times of 8:46 AM and 3:45 PM (times without DST - and pretty much identical to my school day at high school), here has winter solstice times of 8:06 AM and 3:54 PM (which if on DST would be the classical 9-5 work day and thus means workforce see no daylight, rather than have an hour before work if they start at 9).

[CNGL-Leudimin]

Here we use CET (Central European Time, one hour ahead UTC) despite being sightly West of Greenwich meridian. This, and the DST makes that on June 21st at 10 p.m. we still have sunlight.

Don't you have problems with children having to walk to school in the dark in the winter (as English Si describes upthread for the DST/double-DST experiment in Britain between 1968 and 1971)?

Nope. On December 21st there is sunlight at 9 a.m. I had already to get up at 6 a.m., and I can confirm sunrise is around 8:30 a.m. OTOH, at 6 p.m. is already dark.

[1995hoo]

Ms1995hoo and I were just out for a walk due to the later sunset and it occurred to us that in the United States we now observe "standard" time for about four months and Daylight Saving Time for about eight months each year. Maybe the terminology ought to change so the advanced clock is "standard" time and the "winter" clock is "winter" time (so you'd have EST from March to November and "EWT" from November to March). Of course, I know an awful lot of people who misuse "EST" during the summer in an attempt to be precise when in fact "EDT" would be correct.

Earlier today prior to puck drop at Verizon Center I was wondering how many people might show up an hour late (not many, as it turned out) and it occurred to me that one constituency that ought to like the current DST schedule in the US is Western Christian churches (meaning non-Orthodox denominations) because under the current DST rules, Easter Sunday can never fall on the day the clocks go ahead (under the Western system, Easter can't fall prior to March 22, and under current US law, DST can't start later than March 14). This doesn't apply to most of the Orthodox Church because they calculate the date of Easter differently using the Julian Calendar mapped onto the current calendar.

[oscar]

One place where it makes sense in the summer is Portland, Maine. On June 21st, their local sunrise and sunset is 4:59 AM and 8:26 PM. Imagine a 3:59 AM sunrise on the first day of summer? No thank you!:(

(Hartford will get as long as 5:16 AM and 8:30 PM.)

Nothing on Alaska, where summertime daylight and winter darkness are so long (up to 24 hours each north of the Arctic Circle, but it gets close even at lower latitudes) that DST is almost irrelevant.  It matters only to keep Alaska in synch with most of the U.S. and Canada.  Some Alaskans would give up DST, to stay closer in synch with business partners in Asia (apparently the rest of North America doesn't matter as much for those people). 

DST is pretty irrelevant in Hawaii for different reasons -- maximum daylight is about 13 hours, minimum daylight is about 11 hours.  Hawaii's strong economic ties with countries not observing DST are just icing on the cake. 

[kkt]

Changing to DST in spring and back in fall works well for us.  It approximates the natural schedule of waking near dawn year 'round.  I do realize that the advantages are bigger the farther north you go, so for me in Seattle the advantages are bigger than for someone in San Diego.

If we had standard time year 'round, in June dawn would come about 3:30 AM.  We don't need sun that early, whereas having that hour in the evening makes exercise, gardening, etc. in the evening more pleasant. 

On the other hand, if we had DST year 'round,  in December dawn wouldn't come until after 8:00 AM, so rising and the morning commute would be in darkness.

Students of history may remember that every place choosing its own time based on the sun being at its highest at noon is what we used to do, before railroads.  It caused huge problems.  The timetables had to be at different times every railway stop.  The problems become more severe now, as the world is more connected.  We call all over the place and don't want to think about office hours being different in every town in the country. 

I do wish all the northern hemisphere countries could agree to change on the same dates, though.

I am amazed that any computer operating system in use today uses local time, rather than keeping time in CUT and displaying it according to locale.

[thenetwork]

I remember back in that late '60's/early '70s when Michigan never changed their clocks.  Thus in a place like Detroit, it was an hour behind it's Canadian neighbor Windsor Ontario in the summer months as well as Toledo, Ohio. 

[route56]

I am amazed that any computer operating system in use today uses local time, rather than keeping time in CUT UTC and displaying it according to locale.

FTFY: The proper abbreviation for Coordinated Universal Time is UTC. If you have a problem with that, blame the French 

[broadhurst04]

Well Daylight Saving Time (DST) starts at 2:00 am local time on Sunday, March 10. Most of the country will spring forward an hour. There are certain areas that don't observe it (Hawaii, most of Arizona, various US territories). Some of you love it, some of you hate it, most probably don't pay attention except for twice a year. Any thoughts or opinions?

Somewhat related, are there a lot of signs out there marking time zone boundaries?

The only sign I've ever seen marking a time zone boundary is on I-40 West between Knoxville and Nashville, TN.

I wish they would just make DST the new Standard Time. We're on DST basically 3/4 of the year now as it is.

[cpzilliacus]

Nothing on Alaska, where summertime daylight and winter darkness are so long (up to 24 hours each north of the Arctic Circle, but it gets close even at lower latitudes) that DST is almost irrelevant.  It matters only to keep Alaska in synch with most of the U.S. and Canada.  Some Alaskans would give up DST, to stay closer in synch with business partners in Asia (apparently the rest of North America doesn't matter as much for those people).

Finland, Sweden and Norway are similarly far north - and even in the far south of Sweden (the province of Scania, where the city of Malmö is located, it really does not get totally dark overnight in June and July.

[kkt]

I am amazed that any computer operating system in use today uses local time, rather than keeping time in CUT UTC and displaying it according to locale.

FTFY: The proper abbreviation for Coordinated Universal Time is UTC. If you have a problem with that, blame the French 

Oops.  I knew that...

[kphoger]

I hate Daylight Savings Time.  I loathe it.  I wish I could run over it with a forklift.  I wish I could put it through a meat grinder and stomp on it with boots.  I've started calling it Exactly The Same Amount Of Daylight Time, since it doesn't save one second of daylight.

For me, it's hard to get out of bed when the sun isn't up.  Once my feet hit the floor, I'm all right, but it's a real struggle to make my body vertical while it's still dark.  Come March, it starts getting a tiny bit lighter each day around the time I get up, and so I get my hopes up about it getting easier to get out of bed in the mornings.  Then my hopes are VIOLENTLY CRUSHED by the EVIL time change.  AAAGGGHHH!!!!!  KILL!! KILL!! KILL!! KILL!! DIE!! DIE!! DIE!!

I don't care if the sun is up or not when I get off work.  It's cold in the winter, so I don't feel like going out anywhere.  By the time the weather warms up, it's light outside later anyway, even without ETSAODT.  By the time summer is in full swing, and the kids are playing outside, and all that jazz, it's light almost till their bedtime.  In fact, it's hard to get them to bed on time in the middle of summer, because ETSAODT means it's not dark yet at their bedtime.

With the extended season for ETSAODT, it can make driving to México interesting.  Three years ago, we drove south without having to change our clocks.  A week later, driving north, we had to change our clocks at the border.  The USA had sprung forward while we were in México.  People were sort of confused at first.

As for signs indicating the time zone boundary, I only recall seeing them at the Central/Mountain change on I-70, but I hardly ever travel outside of the Central Time Zone, escpecially driving.

[route56]

As for signs indicating the time zone boundary, I only recall seeing them at the Central/Mountain change on I-70, but I hardly ever travel outside of the Central Time Zone, escpecially driving.

Westbound I-70, 2002


Eastbound I-70, 2007

[1995hoo]

I've only driven across time zone boundaries a few times (and I do not recall my first trip across one because I was 1 year old at the time), but I do recall time zone signs at the Alabama/Georgia state line and on either side of the border between Maine and New Brunswick. (In the latter case, my first trip to New Brunswick was simply a day trip to Campobello Island, so we didn't bother changing our watches.) I don't recall any signs upon exiting the ferry between Maine and Nova Scotia or the ferry between Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, though I'm pretty sure I recall there being a PA announcement in each case reminding people of it, much like how when you fly they usually announce the local time upon landing.

(The most fun I've had with time zones was on the flight shown in my avatar at left. A friend of mine shot that video at Heathrow at 18.45 on a Sunday. The flight landed at JFK at 17.06 the same afternoon. Five-hour time difference, flight took 3 hours 21 minutes. Hence "arrive before you leave.")

[agentsteel53]

I hate daylight saving time.  it's a stupid illusion perpetuated by stupid people.

if you want an hour of extra daylight in the afternoon, wake up an hour earlier.

don't make me lose an hour once a year, resulting in several days of disorientation, just because you can't drag your sorry ass out of bed.

[NWI_Irish96]

I love Daylight Saving Time...but wish it were still done on the first Sunday of April, not this early. Also...why isn't Indianapolis in the CENTRAL time zone? Their longitude is nearly identical to that of Nashville, which is obviously in the central time zone.

Time zones have been such a tumultuous subject in Indiana that it even has its own Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Indiana

Indiana naturally falls in the Central Time Zone band (actual line should be near Columbus, OH).  When most of the state got switched to Eastern, they were allowed to not observe DST as a concession.  That made being on Eastern more tolerable since we didn't have the extremely late sunrises and sunsets in the summer.  Over time, there seemed to be a lot of confusion on the part of people from other areas traveling to Indiana about the time zones, and it got to the point where not observing DST was perceived as an economic disadvantage to the state.  There was even a 2-part episode of The West Wing with a major plotline that involved time zone confusion in Indiana.

In 2006, the state voted to begin observing DST.  This was nice as it eliminated the confusion nationwide, but moving clocks forward an hour for DST combined with already being an hour ahead of the natural time zone has created some obscene sunrise/sunset schedules for March.  Today in Lafayette, IN, the sunrise was not until 8:06 am and sunset will be at 7:49 pm. 

I get that there are a lot of people who will enjoy that 7:49 pm sunset, but an 8:06 am sunrise is not good.  There are a lot of adults commuting to work and kids commuting to school between 7-8 am, and safety has been raised as a serious reason why this kind of schedule is bad. 

I would prefer to see Indiana move to Central Time with an observance of DST and my second choice would be to keep Eastern Time but revert back to non-observance of DST. 

[vdeane]

Which is something we need the sun for. Sure, we don't typically need the sunrise before 6, hence DST, but making dawn happen at 8, 9, or even 10 or later (in eg the UK in mid-winter) in winter is just too late, hence the lack of DST in winter.

Well, maybe the UK needs the switch then.  Down here in upstate NY, we never have sun rise later than 7 no matter what.

yes, so getting an hour+ before you start work at 7 to 8 or 8 to 9 is better than having that hour in the afternoon from 3 to 4 or 4 to 5, when you are still at work!  Given the hours we generally work, if you are going to get light outside work hours in winter, it will be in the morning.

Likewise, we never have the sun set earlier than 4:30 either, so you actually would get some after-work daylight here.

You can, I guess, be unnaturally wired to ignore the sun, but by nature we're wired to rely on the sun to reset our body clock (see the video I posted about social jet lag).

I think the video might be missing (or is it in another post?).  I did read some articles though - while many were basically early bird propaganda, there were some interesting points.  "Social jet lag" is a bit of a misnomer in my case - I'm not up late on the weekends because of social reasons, I'm up because my body just isn't tired.  During the week, the hours I'm awake on the weekends are spent awake in bed trying to fall asleep (and failing).  I've had this problem for as long as I can remember, though it got worse once I got my own computer (I'm in front of a computer screen just about every waking moment, which might be why my sleep cycle doesn't care about daylight).

The worker's traditional 9-5 day would have been 8-4 or even 7-3; my school day would have been shifted forward by at least half an hour (half an hour would have put it 50-50).

Here in the US, "9-5" is more like "8-5" since lunch is not included in the hours and most managers are early birds.

They did an experiment at a school with high rates of truancy in North East England, beginning with September - instead of starting school at 9, move it to 10. Truancy dropped significantly on the equivalent time the year before around mid-October.

Wow, school sure starts later in England than here!  In the US, I know of no school that starts as late as 10 - even 9 is considered REALLY late, with 8 being common for elementary-age kids and 7:30 or even earlier for teens.  One teacher I had in high school even did lab makeups at 6 AM!

[kphoger]

Indiana's change of heart gave University of California-Santa Barbara economics professor Matthew Kotchen and Ph.D. student Laura Grant a unique way to see how the time shift affects energy use. Using more than seven million monthly meter readings from Duke Energy Corp., covering nearly all the households in southern Indiana for three years, they were able to compare energy consumption before and after counties began observing daylight-saving time. Readings from counties that had already adopted daylight-saving time provided a control group that helped them to adjust for changes in weather from one year to the next.

Their finding: Having the entire state switch to daylight-saving time each year, rather than stay on standard time, costs Indiana households an additional $8.6 million in electricity bills. They conclude that the reduced cost of lighting in afternoons during daylight-saving time is more than offset by the higher air-conditioning costs on hot afternoons and increased heating costs on cool mornings.

"I've never had a paper with such a clear and unambiguous finding as this," says Mr. Kotchen, who presented the paper at a National Bureau of Economic Research conference this month.

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120406767043794825.html

[kkt]

I hate daylight saving time.  it's a stupid illusion perpetuated by stupid people.

Is it possible to discuss something you feel strongly about without namecalling?

if you want an hour of extra daylight in the afternoon, wake up an hour earlier.

Um, right.  Also, persuade my work that their open hours should be an hour early.  And Metro that their bus schedules need to be an hour earlier.  And my daughter's school that they should adjust their schedule an hour earlier.  Also, after-school lesson times, business opening times.  Now, if only there was some simple way all those different entities could change their schedules on the same day...

don't make me lose an hour once a year, resulting in several days of disorientation, just because you can't drag your sorry ass out of bed.

Several days of disorientation seems to be the reaction of a small minority.  Have you tried getting up a little bit earlier each day for a week before the change happens?  Do you get jetlag when crossing a single time zone?

[kphoger]

if you want an hour of extra daylight in the afternoon, wake up an hour earlier.

Um, right.  Also, persuade my work that their open hours should be an hour early.  And Metro that their bus schedules need to be an hour earlier.  And my daughter's school that they should adjust their schedule an hour earlier.  Also, after-school lesson times, business opening times.  Now, if only there was some simple way all those different entities could change their schedules on the same day...

Well, they've already been persuaded to open an hour early and close an hour early.  It's called Daylight Savings Time.  We just get to pretend that's not what's actually happening.  The sun doesn't really come up an hour later and set an hour later, after all.  So, really, it would just be convincing everybody to stop adjusting their schedules on the same day twice a year.  Think how many headaches could be prevented just in payroll departments around the country–no longer will time clocks be off an hour four times a year, as it is at my workplace (current start of DST, old start of DST, old end of DST, current end of DST).



My favorite story was of a lady who complained about Daylight Savings Time because her flowers couldn't handle a whole extra hour of sunlight every afternoon.

[formulanone]

Based on the posts, I guess the reply "yawn" is okay for this thread?

I prefer the extra hour of sunlight after the work day is done, since it's usually dark when I start my day, no matter where I am. Waking up when the sun is out is a pipe dream perpetuated by sleep-aid commercials.

Same crap as jetlag. Deal with it, it's not going away, either.

[kphoger]

Waking up when the sun is out is a pipe dream perpetuated by sleep-aid commercials.

My alarm is set for 6 AM, and it was already starting to be light outside when EVIL!! KILL!! KILL!! DIE!! DIE!! STOMP!! CRASH!! SLASH!!
[/terminated]

[ghYHZ]

............or the ferry between Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, though I'm pretty sure I recall there being a PA announcement in each case reminding people of it

And Newfoundland is in one of those half-hour zones.........a half-hour ahead of Atlantic Time and an hour and a half ahead of Eastern.

.....most fun I've had with time zones was on the flight shown in my avatar at left. A friend of mine shot that video at Heathrow at 18.45 on a Sunday. The flight landed at JFK at 17.06 the same afternoon. Five-hour time difference, flight took 3 hours 21 minutes. Hence "arrive before you leave.")

I've wondered about your avatar......Cool!!