It’s universal around here for a few months each year. Some kids do get hit by cars. No one seems to tie it to Daylight Saving TIme, or lack thereof.
Both of my sisters have recently moved to the Phoenix area. Arizona, as you may know, does not observe Daylight Saving Time; it’s been that way since 1968.
My sisters have managed to survive thus far without any time change. And they prefer it that way.
And oh by the way: it’s Daylight Saving Time, not Daylight Savings Time. Most of the Dopers, thankfully, know this fact.
I agree. But I do think the burden DST-in-winter places on kids, and on people who work with kids, and on caregivers for kids, is significantly greater than the burder EST-in-summer places on any other group of comparable size.
Berating people for not recognizing that this is a controversial matter is a little odd when you entered the thread with this confident certainty:
I agree with your answer to the question you asked. To wit:
Did you enjoy fiddling with the clocks yesterday and the attendant confusion and possible sleep disruption over the next couple of days / weeks?
Damn near anybody who answers that exact question and only that exact question will answer it “no”.
If we change the question to
Do you think the benefit you’ll derive from having the clock more closely match the Sun for the next 4 or 8 months offsets or does not offset the hassle of fiddling with the clocks yesterday and the attendant confusion and possible sleep disruption over the next couple of days / weeks? Is the net of these two things a benefit or not?
That is the actual question that’s relevant, because that is the tradeoff. You can’t not change clocks and still get the benefit. Neither can you change clocks and avoid getting the benefit. They are two inalienable aspects of the same decision.
Now human nature being what it is, most folks will overvalue the negative and undervalue the positive. They will also overvalue the immediate and undervalue the more nebulous future, even though they’ve experienced that exact same future last year, the year before, etc.
Which is why I suggest we’d need to poll people at various dates all around the year to get an accurate and non-nebulous answer to how they really prefer their clocks in e.g. January or e.g. July. That offsets the immediacy bias inherent in human decision-making.
I don’t intend to pick on you personally. You’re just doing an excellent job of being the articulate spokesman for one particular POV shared by many posters.
I don’t mind switching and it makes sense to me.
I don’t mind not switching, but want it to stick at Standard Time because I find it easier when time zones stack up in order.
I was a child walking to the bus in the Energy Crisis. It was pitch dark, cold, and in a residential area without many lights, terrifying. My first letter to the editor was on this topic.
I have no idea where you live but that statement simply isn’t accurate where I live. For the last 30 years I’ve been commuting by bicycle year 'round, routinely in -20 celcius in various places in Canada. I for one would at least like one of my winter commutes to be light and for me, DST year 'round would be great.
From what I’ve read it’s not retail stores in general that benefit from DST - it’s entertainment facilities like batting cages and driving ranges and certain types of retail - outdoor malls and urban stores that are right on the street. DST apparently does not benefit stores in indoor malls.
To be clear I’m not saying it’s not an awful idea - just that I’ve never seen any cite for the idea that more kids would bee waiting in the dark with year round DST. Maybe there would be more , maybe not. I don’t actually have any idea of how many kids take buses to school and what time school starts and when they need to be on the bus or how many have to walk to the bus stop vs how many get picked up right in front of their house. If I had to go by what I see where live, most kids do not take a bus to school until they are in high school and younger students who take a school bus are picked up at their house, not a bus stop. Those who are walking to school would not have to leave in full darkness and high school students may not start their school day until 9:30 or so - I certainly don’t assume those things are true in every school district but they are true in some.
Given how teens’ circadian system works, the societal ideal from that POV is that we awaken the kids about 3 hours after sunrise, get them ready for school in an unhurried fashion, then once they’ve left home for school that day the parents can prep for their own day then leave for work.
So the school day should run from about 11am to about 5pm and the standard workday for most adults should run from about 1pm to about 10pm allowing 8 hours working and an hour for cumulative breaks and a meal along the way.
That’s going to be a tough sell. But it would work better / best from the POV of maximizing the kids’ welfare.
All of this stuff is about cramming 10 pounds of personal prep, work, school, parenting, housework, recreation (hah!), and sleep into far too few total hours in a day and far far fewer total daylight hours.
Right. I suspect that the reason you hear more complaints about the time switch is that the hardship / inconvenience happens all at once, instead of being spread out throughout the whole winter or the whole summer.
…and I don’t think it’s even possible to know exactly without trying it, because people’s behavior would surely adjust somewhat.
By the time I was a teen, I was getting myself ready for school.
Again, what I was confidently expressing certainty about was that was my own personal opinion, painstakingly gained after many years of contemplation of the issue, not that everyone agrees with me.
In a way, this is one big problem with democracy (not that I mean to hijack the discussion, just perhaps broaden it a bit): a position can have majority support while still being unpopular.
To wit, one of the things I noticed about Obamacare was all the polls at the time insisting that the majority of Americans were opposed to it, which was technically true, but the problem was (crudely re-stated) that 1/3 liked Obamacare, 1/3 hated it because it went too far, and 1/3 hated it because it didn’t go far enough. This 2/3rds disapproval was cited as evidence that it was unpopular, but in fact 2/3rds approved of it and wanted it even stronger than it proposed to go.
Same situation here–by trisecting the options, we arrive at a misleading conclusion that most people approve of DST/non-DST switching.
Amen. I like having extra daylight in the evening to do chores around the farm. I’m in the office in the morning, doesn’t matter whether it’s dark.
Everyone has an individual preference, and individual reasons to support that preference.
I think it’s as much that those (like me) who are fine with it don’t say anything because it’s the status quo, and you’re simply going to hear more from people whom it bothers and who want change. A majority of people do, however, want change. The polls I generally see are 60-65% for sticking to one time. So, while a majority, it’s not quite as overwhelming as one may think if you just go by your impression of hearing people complain about it all the time. The complainers will be more noticeable and vocal than those who like the status quo.
Excellent post, @LSLGuy, and you make a number of good points. Just one nitpick on this point, which I’m probably misunderstanding, but to my reading this sounds backwards. As one moves west across the continent, solar time of course gets progressively earlier, and eventually one pops into a new time zone where clock time is one hour earlier than in the more easterly one. So I’d phrase it as “the farther west you are within a single time zone, the earlier the “true” (solar) time, and therefore the later the clock is compared to the sun”.
For instance, over in this thread where I try to make the case for year-round Standard Time (not Daylight Time) I calculated that where I live, on the last day of Standard Time solar noon occurred at 12:19 PM clock time. That’s because the eastern time zone is huge and I’m a fair bit west of the center line, so the clock is a bit later than solar time.* My argument there is that when we switched to Daylight Saving Time, solar noon now occurs at 1:19 PM, which is quite a discrepancy from what the sun is actually doing. I must admit, though, that this argument largely relies on the premise that clock time and solar time should be reasonably aligned.
As for the reasons for the preference for year-round Daylight time, I suspect that a lot of it comes from the reasons that we have Daylight time in the first place, one of which is people’s general preference for more daylight at the end of the day for leisure activities. To the extent that there’s a political angle to this, it’s been suggested that longer daylight hours at the end of the day encourages people to be out shopping and dining, providing a commercial benefit. Another reason Daylight time was introduced was allegedly for energy savings, but I think it’s generally acknowledged that very little was achieved in that regard, and today probably even less because of energy-efficient lighting and appliances.
* Assuming that the eastern time zone is actually aligned with true solar time somewhere around its east-west geographic mid-point, which may not precisely be the case.
Your analogy does not hold. If first choice preferences are split 1/3 - 1/3 -1/3, you cannot conclude that ending switching is the democratically preferred option. You need to know how people rank the 3 options in order, and you need to know strength of feeling.
So DST causes bi-polar disorders.