Daylight Savings Time (2022): Once And For All!!!

[tradephoric]

Interesting map looking at the average bedtime by county.  The further West you go in a time zone generally the later people go to bed. 


https://vividmaps.com/average-bedtime-by-us-county/

[tradephoric]

A great map created by Stefano Maggiolo looking at how out of sync the time zones are from solar time.  Shaded green areas are too early, shaded red areas are too late.  Throughout the entire world it's somewhat common place for time zones to creep west (ie. more shaded red areas).

[tradephoric]

And here is why I ultimately expect this to go nowhere. The senate may have unanimously passed a bill about this while no one was paying attention, but once news of that broke the usual cacophany both for and against has erupted and the house will not be able to handle the matter in absence of said cacophany as the senate did. The ensuing debate will kill the bill for lack of consensus and that will be that.

These debates have already been taking place throughout the country.  Nearly half of the states have legislation that would make DST permanent once the Sunshine Protection Act is signed into law (assuming it can pass through the house and lands on the President's desk).  This is much different from the 1970s when year-round Daylight Saving Time was kind of just sprung up on everybody in the midst of the energy crisis.  Even the Michigan house passed a bill to make DST permanent, and that's a Northern state on the far Western edge of a timezone - presumably a state that would be most impacted by "late winter sunrises".  In the end i think you are drastically underestimating the pull the tourism industry has in Congress.

[Duke87]

In the end i think you are drastically underestimating the pull the tourism industry has in Congress.

Why would the tourism industry have a strong preference on this? Later sunrises and sunsets in winter going to make people take more winter vacations for some reason?

[tolbs17]

The darker the red, the more likely they will change the timezone if we were to go to Permanent DST.

Tbh, all of Maine should be AST. Just Maine. Other New England states are fine where they are imo.

[ran4sh]

There is no cosmic law that the sun "should" peak in the sky approximately when the clock reads 12:00.

That's exactly the argument against permanent DST. Since the numbers are social constructs, might as well make them at least somewhat meaningful for those that need or want to align the clock with the sun. Let everyone else change their schedule according to whatever social construct they think they should use. E.g. start school at 10 am if the clock is aligned with the sun but kids are still going to school in the dark.

[epzik8]

I'm in the minority who prefer to change their clocks twice a year, because I love the large gap between winter and summer solstice sunset times.

[tolbs17]

I'm in the minority who prefer to change their clocks twice a year, because I love the large gap between winter and summer solstice sunset times.

could happen do and that could be the best case scenario.

[kalvado]

A great map created by Stefano Maggiolo looking at how out of sync the time zones are from solar time.  Shaded green areas are too early, shaded red areas are too late.  Throughout the entire world it's somewhat common place for time zones to creep west (ie. more shaded red areas).

Honestly speaking, that is the least relevant map. We do not really need solar noon and clock noon to coinside, we need some convenient lineup of sun cycle to life and business cycle.

[jeffandnicole]

Honestly speaking, that is the least relevant map. We do not really need solar noon and clock noon to coinside, we need some convenient lineup of sun cycle to life and business cycle.

The maps were actually very relevant - it's in response to a few people who referenced that time zones are ignoring the fairly basic thought process that 'high noon' isn't really noon, and that midnight isn't really the middle of the night.  The world is pretty much just making up time zones to be convenient to whatever system they want.  We could make sunlight be all night long and darkness during the normal daylight hours if we wanted just by going to Daylight Octuple Time.

Individuals decide for themselves what life and business cycle is.  Society has dictated over time that we generally work first, then do errands, play, and have family time later.  But that doesn't work for everyone.  There's people at the gym at 4am.  There's people that work shifts such as 3pm to midnight that need to do their errands and appointments in the morning and around noontime.  What the majority wants as daylight hours could change if the majority decided they'll rather play and do errands first, then worked.

[tradephoric]

Why would the tourism industry have a strong preference on this? Later sunrises and sunsets in winter going to make people take more winter vacations for some reason?

Here are the hours for Mall of America in Minneapolis:
Sunday: 11 a.m. — 7 p.m.
Monday — Thursday: 10 a.m. — 8 p.m.
Friday and Saturday: 10 a.m. — 9 p.m.

Point of showing this is people don't necessarily buy a lot of things early in the morning... if they did the most famous mall in America would likely open before 10 a.m.  With permanent DST, people have a full hour longer of daylight during the winter months to be out and about buying things.  While it's true the mall doesn't close once the sun goes down, there are plenty of reasons why someone might not want to be out past dark:

....maybe their eyesight is bad and they don't like driving at night.
....maybe they don't feel safe walking around at night.
....maybe it's frigidly cold when the sun goes down in Minneapolis and they'd rather retreat to their home.

Quite simply that extra hour of evening daylight encourages people to spend more money.  In the case of Mall of America, it's not as if the barriers that prevent people from wanting to shop (ie. driving at night, walking at night, being out in frigid night temperatures) are just shifted around.  When the mall opens at 10 a.m. it's been light out for hours in Minneapolis, even with permanent DST.  The same arguments for Mall of America can be made for going out to restaurants.  Maybe someone really wants to go out to Outback for a blooming onion at 7PM... but it's already dark out so they just open a can of Cambell's soup instead.  Are you really going to have a booming economy if people are eating Campbell soup for dinner?

[vdeane]

Incidentally, that map is a little dated.  It looks like it was made when Russia was experimenting with permanent DST (really double DST, given that their regular time zones were already offset by an hour).

Assuming permanent DST happens and Canada follows suit, I wonder if Newfoundland will finally normalize itself into the Atlantic time zone rather than having its half hour offset.  If the Maritimes went permanent DST, Newfoundland jumped forward by a half hour instead of a full hour, and Saint Pierre went permanent standard time, all of those places would be in one time zone, which would seem to be a lot simpler.

[bm7]

Have to ask the question: so what?

There is this common argument that DST is bad because it desynchronizes solar noon from clock noon... okay, but why is that bad? There is no cosmic law that the sun "should" peak in the sky approximately when the clock reads 12:00. Clocks are human inventions and the numbers on them are arbitrary.

It's not arbitrary, that's how people have always told time. AM means before mid-day, and PM means after. Noon is the point at mid-day, and midnight is as the name suggests, the middle of the night.

Would society collapse if we made the middle of the day be at 7 pm instead? No, but how would that make any sense?

[Duke87]

Have to ask the question: so what?

There is this common argument that DST is bad because it desynchronizes solar noon from clock noon... okay, but why is that bad? There is no cosmic law that the sun "should" peak in the sky approximately when the clock reads 12:00. Clocks are human inventions and the numbers on them are arbitrary.

It's not arbitrary, that's how people have always told time. AM means before mid-day, and PM means after. Noon is the point at mid-day, and midnight is as the name suggests, the middle of the night.

Would society collapse if we made the middle of the day be at 7 pm instead? No, but how would that make any sense?

"We've always done it that way" is still an arbitrary reason, and... well guess what, it's not even a true statement. For one thing the very existence of DST makes it not true, but even notwithstanding that you're talking about a system that did not exist as we now know it prior to the industrial revolution. Over the centuries and millennia, various cultures have deemed the day to begin and end at sunset (this system is still in use to this day for observance of Jewish holidays), at sunrise, or even at noon instead of midnight. Various cultures have also divided calendar dates into numbers of segments other than 24, and there have also been cultures that have had the length of an hour (or equivalent measure) vary throughout the year since it was defined as a fixed fraction of the length of daylight on that day rather than a fixed unit of time.

Read up if you wanna go down this rabbit hole some more.

Anyway, point being, the 24-hour clock with solar noon pegged to 12:00 is a human construct. There is no scientific reason the day must naturally be measured this way.

[kkt]

Noon is fairly arbitrary, and even hard to observe exactly without instruments.  By eye you just get within a couple of hours either way.

Sunrise is easy to observe, unless it's obscured by clouds.  Even if it's cloudy you can tell within 15 minutes or so just because of getting brighter and the birds singing. 

[kalvado]

Noon is fairly arbitrary, and even hard to observe exactly without instruments.  By eye you just get within a couple of hours either way.

Sunrise is easy to observe, unless it's obscured by clouds.  Even if it's cloudy you can tell within 15 minutes or so just because of getting brighter and the birds singing.

Solar noon is a convenient reference point for discussion like this, as it provides a centerpoint with equal amount of sunshine before and after. Unlike sunrize and sunset, noon has only a limited shift against 24 hour cycle over the year (20 min or so) .   
We can talk about clock setting as a way to budget limited natural resource - sunshine - with respect to schedule. Clock setting for solar noon is one of basic knobs to tweak.   
For example, standard time at timezone center means "solar noon at beginning of typical lunch hour. 5 hours of sunshine before and after that point in winter, 7 hours in summer". 
DST - "solar noon at the end of lunch hour" 

[1995hoo]

Have to ask the question: so what?

There is this common argument that DST is bad because it desynchronizes solar noon from clock noon... okay, but why is that bad? There is no cosmic law that the sun "should" peak in the sky approximately when the clock reads 12:00. Clocks are human inventions and the numbers on them are arbitrary.

It's not arbitrary, that's how people have always told time. AM means before mid-day, and PM means after. Noon is the point at mid-day, and midnight is as the name suggests, the middle of the night.

Would society collapse if we made the middle of the day be at 7 pm instead? No, but how would that make any sense?

"We've always done it that way" is still an arbitrary reason, and... well guess what, it's not even a true statement. For one thing the very existence of DST makes it not true, but even notwithstanding that you're talking about a system that did not exist as we now know it prior to the industrial revolution. Over the centuries and millennia, various cultures have deemed the day to begin and end at sunset (this system is still in use to this day for observance of Jewish holidays), at sunrise, or even at noon instead of midnight. Various cultures have also divided calendar dates into numbers of segments other than 24, and there have also been cultures that have had the length of an hour (or equivalent measure) vary throughout the year since it was defined as a fixed fraction of the length of daylight on that day rather than a fixed unit of time.

Read up if you wanna go down this rabbit hole some more.

Anyway, point being, the 24-hour clock with solar noon pegged to 12:00 is a human construct. There is no scientific reason the day must naturally be measured this way.

This is true of pretty much everything time-related other than that overall our planet takes a specific amount of time to make one revolution around the sun and rotates on its axis once every so often. Those periods are fixed, but how we define and subdivide them is a man-made creation. Look up the French Republican Calendar if you want an extreme example: 12 months of 30 days each, with each month divided into three ten-day periods that replaced the seven-day week, each day divided into 10 hours of 100 minutes each, etc. To complete the year, there were five extra days not assigned to a month plus an extra such day in leap years. Aside from religious objections to not having the seven-day week, one practical objection many people had was that using a ten-day period meant you got fewer days off from work.

Calendar reform so that every year would start and end on the same day has been a proposal that's never gotten much traction because doing that requires insertion of a "blank day" that is not assigned to a particular day of the week. Probably the best-known example of this (because so many copies have been sold) is the hobbits' calendar in the appendices to The Return of the King. Midyear's Day (and, in leap years, the Overlithe) was not assigned to a weekday. In our society, of course, that causes lots of religious objections. But from a practical standpoint, there's nothing preventing the use of such a day aside from it seeming like an utterly alien notion because we're so accustomed to the seven-day week. Some people also object to the idea of a calendar reform that would change the lengths of the months and do away with existing dates–for example, I was born on May 31, so in an all-30-day-month calendar like the French one, my "birthday" would cease to exist–but then, people's birthdays changed during the conversion from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar and it wasn't all that big of a problem in the end. Whether existing fixed-date holidays (July 4, December 25, November 11) might have to be remapped would be another question.

[tradephoric]

The International Association for Energy Economics (IAEE) put together a meta-analysis in 2017 looking at 44 different studies to answer the question does Daylight Saving Time save electricity.  They concluded that DST results in 0.34% electricity savings and that electricity savings are larger for countries farther away from the equator, while subtropical regions consume more electricity because of DST.  .

https://www.iaee.org/en/publications/init2.aspx?id=0

This makes perfect sense if you think about it.  While DST extends the use of (waking) daylight hours and helps reduce the electricity usage for lighting, the added hour of daylight in the evening encourages more air conditioning usage especially in regions of the country that experience sweltering summer heat.  So you have a scenario where DST may increase energy usage in Texas but decrease energy usage in Washington State.  However, overall it was found that overall DST reduces electricity usage by 0.34%. 

[tradephoric]

Here are the monthly average temperatures for Dallas and Seattle.  People in Dallas are cranking their AC pretty hard with monthly average highs of 98 in August, but Seattle's high of 79 in August is relatively comfortable.



Now look at January, February, November, and December temperatures of both cities.  Wouldn't both cities benefit from having an extra hour of sunlight during the evening and have a natural heating source (the sun) help heat their homes?  People in Dallas aren't cranking their AC in January when the average high is only 57 degrees.  That extra waking hour of sunlight naturally heating homes/businesses could really put a dent on people's heating bills during the winter.

[kalvado]

The International Association for Energy Economics (IAEE) put together a meta-analysis in 2017 looking at 44 different studies to answer the question does Daylight Saving Time save electricity.  They concluded that DST results in 0.34% electricity savings and that electricity savings are larger for countries farther away from the equator, while subtropical regions consume more electricity because of DST.  .

https://www.iaee.org/en/publications/init2.aspx?id=0

This makes perfect sense if you think about it.  While DST extends the use of (waking) daylight hours and helps reduce the electricity usage for lighting, the added hour of daylight in the evening encourages more air conditioning usage especially in regions of the country that experience sweltering summer heat.  So you have a scenario where DST may increase energy usage in Texas but decrease energy usage in Washington State.  However, overall it was found that overall DST reduces electricity usage by 0.34%.

Again, a lot of DST stuff comes from the times when light was expensive. Be it candles, kerosene, or incandescent lamps.
Today, LEDs changed that completely.
I don't think AC energy use is really going to change with time setting too much.

[kalvado]

Now look at January, February, November, and December temperatures of both cities.  Wouldn't both cities benefit from having an extra hour of sunlight during the evening and have a natural heating source (the sun) help heat their homes?  People in Dallas aren't cranking their AC in January when the average high is only 57 degrees.  That extra waking hour of sunlight naturally heating homes/businesses could really put a dent on people's heating bills during the winter.

News flash: you are not changing total amount of sunlight when you move clocks. Any energy savings would depend on much smaller effect of thermostat down during colder hour in the morning vs maybe hopefully a bit warmer hour in the evening.
Major (well, few %% during few days) economic effect was about using more sunlight during normal day cycle vs loosing it while sleeping behind dark curtains and having to turn lights earlier in the evening. 

[tradephoric]

Now look at January, February, November, and December temperatures of both cities.  Wouldn't both cities benefit from having an extra hour of sunlight during the evening and have a natural heating source (the sun) help heat their homes?  People in Dallas aren't cranking their AC in January when the average high is only 57 degrees.  That extra waking hour of sunlight naturally heating homes/businesses could really put a dent on people's heating bills during the winter.

News flash: you are not changing total amount of sunlight when you move clocks. Any energy savings would depend on much smaller effect of thermostat down during colder hour in the morning vs maybe hopefully a bit warmer hour in the evening.
Major (well, few %% during few days) economic effect was about using more sunlight during normal day cycle vs loosing it while sleeping behind dark curtains and having to turn lights earlier in the evening. 

Daylight saving time in the winter (just like the summer) gives people back waking hours of daylight.  Maximizing the waking hours of heat generating sunlight would help reduce people's heating bills.  During the winter solstice the sun rises in Boston at 7:15AM and sets at 4:15PM.  So any Bostonian who sleeps in past 7:15AM isn't maximizing a free natural heating source during the winter... A.K.A. the sun. 

[NWI_Irish96]

Now look at January, February, November, and December temperatures of both cities.  Wouldn't both cities benefit from having an extra hour of sunlight during the evening and have a natural heating source (the sun) help heat their homes?  People in Dallas aren't cranking their AC in January when the average high is only 57 degrees.  That extra waking hour of sunlight naturally heating homes/businesses could really put a dent on people's heating bills during the winter.

News flash: you are not changing total amount of sunlight when you move clocks. Any energy savings would depend on much smaller effect of thermostat down during colder hour in the morning vs maybe hopefully a bit warmer hour in the evening.
Major (well, few %% during few days) economic effect was about using more sunlight during normal day cycle vs loosing it while sleeping behind dark curtains and having to turn lights earlier in the evening. 

Daylight saving time in the winter (just like the summer) gives people back waking hours of daylight.  Maximizing the waking hours of heat generating sunlight would help reduce people's heating bills.  During the winter solstice the sun rises in Boston at 7:15AM and sets at 4:15PM.  So any Bostonian who sleeps in past 7:15AM isn't maximizing a free natural heating source during the winter... A.K.A. the sun. 

Well then don't sleep past 7:15.

When did we get the idea that the clock should adjust to our sleep schedules rather than the other way around?

[Max Rockatansky]

Now look at January, February, November, and December temperatures of both cities.  Wouldn't both cities benefit from having an extra hour of sunlight during the evening and have a natural heating source (the sun) help heat their homes?  People in Dallas aren't cranking their AC in January when the average high is only 57 degrees.  That extra waking hour of sunlight naturally heating homes/businesses could really put a dent on people's heating bills during the winter.

News flash: you are not changing total amount of sunlight when you move clocks. Any energy savings would depend on much smaller effect of thermostat down during colder hour in the morning vs maybe hopefully a bit warmer hour in the evening.
Major (well, few %% during few days) economic effect was about using more sunlight during normal day cycle vs loosing it while sleeping behind dark curtains and having to turn lights earlier in the evening. 

Daylight saving time in the winter (just like the summer) gives people back waking hours of daylight.  Maximizing the waking hours of heat generating sunlight would help reduce people's heating bills.  During the winter solstice the sun rises in Boston at 7:15AM and sets at 4:15PM.  So any Bostonian who sleeps in past 7:15AM isn't maximizing a free natural heating source during the winter... A.K.A. the sun. 

Well then don't sleep past 7:15.

When did we get the idea that the clock should adjust to our sleep schedules rather than the other way around?

I'm always fairly amused at how many east coast people have the luxury of waking up past 7 AM or even later.  Out west the work week tends to bend towards the whims of what the largely east coast driven economy is doing, meaning a lot of people are on the road for a 6 AM or 7 AM start time to their day. 

[jeffandnicole]

I'm always fairly amused at how many east coast people have the luxury of waking up past 7 AM or even later.  Out west the work week tends to bend towards the whims of what the largely east coast driven economy is doing, meaning a lot of people are on the road for a 6 AM or 7 AM start time to their day. 

That's what I would think too, and was surprised someone commented in the San Fran area their rush hours were generally later in the traditional commuting period.