Okay, just got through the rather brief CNN article:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/04/07/daylight.saving.ap/index.html
I think I have an inkling as to what they’re getting at, but it just kinda… Seems weird to me. Any thoughts (or even better, cites?) as to why this might or might not work?
Well, the idea of saving energy is that by falling back an hour in autumn, we effectively keep more of our active hours during the time that there is still sunlight out. That means that families will be turning on indoor lights and such later than if there was no daylight savings at all, thereby saving energy. In theory it looks okay, but who knows about in reality.
Oh, cites?
Well, Wikipedia says “When the U.S. went on extended DST in 1974 and 1975 in response to the 1973 energy crisis, Department of Transportation studies found that observing DST in March and April saved 10,000 barrels of oil a day, and prevented about 2,000 traffic injuries and 50 fatalities saving about U.S. $28 million in traffic costs. [3]”.
And the article they reference is, http://www.boulder.nist.gov/timefreq/general/daylightsavingtime.html
I was in elementary school when DST was extended through the winter. OK, we saved a little energy on the evening side. But I had to walk to school before sunrise along a rural highway (no street lights). I’m sure there was an increase in pedestrian accidents for those that had to walk in such conditions.
When you fall back in autumn, that’s reverting to standard time. It gets darker earlier, so indoor lights have to be turned on earlier in the evening. If it gets dark at 6PM during winter, no DST, and you go to bed (year round) at 11PM, that’s 5 hours of indoor lighting. Just setting the clocks to make it get dark at 7PM would save an hour of indoor lighting, but with the longer days of summer combined with DST, it might not get dark until 9PM, so only 2 hours of indoor lighting needed before bed time.
And one of the all-time Cecil classics is on this topic:
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a910906.html
Seems that I see all of this data from the 70’s. We were a lot less enclosed in the 70’s.
Also – and I realize that the sample size of “me” is not all that big – I need indoor lighting at noon just as much as I need it at midnight. Heck, I consume more in A/C than light. The soon it’s darker, the sooner I won’t need it as much to fight the sun. In fact, if it got darker earlier, I may save even more energy by sleeping instead of watching TV in bed until I “feel” like it’s late enough.
Oh well. I’m currently in a non-daylight-saving-time locale – working out so far. I’ll report back with my preference when this job is over.
While we’re Fighting Ignorance: the term is Daylight Saving Time (not “savings”). We’re saving daylight hours.
IIRC, the “saving” the name derives from was saving energy consumed.
Just for the record. During WWII the British normal “summer time,” our daylight saving time, became “double summer time” which was two hours ahead of standard time.
I remember this too, though I had a school bus. Waiting for the bus in the darkness was…weird.
The notion of extending Daylight Saving Time to a greater portion of the year, or the whole thing, baffles me. Presumably, the usual times for going to work and the like predated the establishment of daylight saving time. Also presumably, when such times were established, they were established at whatever time was, on average over the course of the year, most convenient. So it seems absurd to have daylight saving time for more than half the year. To put it another way, the time setting you have for the majority of the year is Daylight Saving Time. So what we’re doing is just defining 1:00 to be the average time of noon, and shifting backwards from that standard for part of the year.