No, you don’t. You’re saying in effect that we should repeal Obamacare because 2/3rds of the population, given three options (keeping it, repealing it, making it stronger), dislike Obamacare. It’s the offering of three options that is the problem here.
Yes, you do. You don’t know whether ending switching is the key feature that the 2/3 of people place value on, or whether they (say) just want to have summer time for as long as possible or winter time for as long as possible.
Consider the following 3 choices, where each food is only served on one type of plate:
1/3 prefer fish on a red plate
1/3 prefer pasta on a red plate
1/3 prefer meat on a blue plate
Is it valid to conclude that there is a democratic preference for red plates? Or is it possible that they just don’t care about the color of the plate, but they care about what they eat?
The fact that a feature is common to two out of three choices does not tell you anything unless you know whether that is the feature that people care about when making their choice.
But when were those polls taken? As @LSLGuy pointed out, polls could be significantly affected by when people are polled. If people are polled right when they have to adjust their clocks, they’ll probably overestimate how much it bothers them to do so, relative to how much the disadvantages of year-round DST or year-round standard time would bother them.
But you cannot conclude anything from just asking if people want change.
Suppose we ask:
Should the minimum wage be changed?
90% answer yes. But it turns out that half of them want minimum wage to be higher, and half of them want it to be lower.
At the very least you need to get people to rank the 3 options - status quo, constant summer time, constant winter time. Ideally you want people to place a scaled utility on each to gauge how strongly they feel about each possibility.
And so many people say they “want to abolish Daylight Saving Time,” when they actually mean they want it year-round:
Every November, countless Americans condemn DST because they conflate it with Standard Time. They think that the dreaded winter months of early sunsets and seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, are the fault of DST. I understand why: It is not obvious why daylight is “saved” when it is backloaded toward the end of the day. The terms are ambiguous, which leads would-be critics of Standard Time to unleash their anguish on their true ally, DST.
To see how widespread this misapprehension is, look at coverage of California’s Proposition 7, which easily passed in 2018. The Los Angeles Times described the measure as “ending daylight saving time”; CBS called it “the first step of abolishing” DST. That is incorrect, as these outlets would’ve known if they’d read the proposition, which is titled the Permanent Daylight Saving Time Measure. As that name indicates, the measure permits the state Legislature to implement year-round DST by a two-thirds vote after obtaining federal approval. The media’s inability to articulate the proposition’s purpose may have led to voter bewilderment, as illustrated in the CBS article, which features a California resident who asserts: “I don’t like Daylight Saving Time. It disrupts me every fall.” Given that DST begins in the spring , this Californian probably meant to assail Standard Time but inadvertently contributed to anti-DST fervor.
It’s totally confusing terminology. I didn’t grow up with it and I just ignore it and say “summer time” and “winter time” and I’m pretty sure nobody has ever misunderstood me, even though they may volunteer the technically correct name for it.
“Keep summer time all year round” or “keep winter time all year round” are also unambiguous when you’re discussing a possible change.
Saskatchewan is geographically in the Mountain time zone, and has been year-round Central Standard Time for decades. The effectively puts us on year-round DST. Local solar noon in Saskatoon is around 1:00pm.
To my knowledge, there is no rash of children being run over on dark winter mornings.
Agree that “Daylight Saving Time” is a confusing / borderline meaningless terminology.
But I think “summer time” and winter time" are actively misleading terminology when applied to / by the typical citizen. Inevitably, “summer time” connotes the idea of long days and short nights. Not clock settings. Or at least not only clock settings. Ditto “winter time”. You and the NIST might define “winter time” to mean only a clock setting. The mostly unthinking public will inevitably associate it with long nights, short days, and cold.
As noted by others above, what most people want is the amount of daylight available in summer to be available year round. Which any thinking person knows can’t be obtained by fiddling with clocks. But Joe and Jane Average don’t think, they mostly intuit or emote. “Summer time” and “winter time” are intuitively misleading terms.
Are you one of those liberal elites I’ve heard about?
Fair point. We do need clearer terminology than we have, though. The problem is that the “forward” and “back” changes are already inherently confusing. I try not to just intuit or emote, but I always have to think for a moment about whether the clock will be reading an earlier time, or the sun will be coming up earlier.
I mean, clearly. The point was more that a sizable minority are fine with the status quo or don’t care (the percentage that did not answer they wanted change.) When I hear supporters of sticking to one time or another, they seem to act as if 90%+ of people are against DST.
I think we’re just saying the same thing using different reference frames.
I’m starting from the POV that people have rigid expectations about what clock time things like school and work start and end and we’re discussing how to tweak the clock settings to “move the Sun” to put the daylight where it does the most good given the fixed notion that e.g. “Schools start at 7, retail opens at 8, and government, banks, and big businesses open at 9. And that we are unwilling to change these fixed numbers seasonally to accommodate the changing time and amount of daylight.”
I’ll pick the eastern time zone for concreteness, but any zone works the same way. Being as you’re Canadian I’ll talk about both US & Canadian cities, but we both understand that latitude also has has a (big) effect which I’ll ignore.
Throughout the eastern time zone everyone’s clocks are set the same. Whether one lives in eastern Maine or eastern Quebec, or in western Michigan or Sudbury Ontario, everyone’s clocks say the same thing at the same moment.
Now let’s consider the moment it’s sunrise in eastern Maine or Quebec. For concreteness let’s say that occurs at 7:00 on those folks’ clocks.
What’s going on at the same moment in western Michigan & Sudbury, ON? It’s 7:00 on the clock and it’s real dark; the Sun won’t be up for an hour or so. The clock says 7:00 but it’ll be 8:00 on the clock before the sun begins to rise. The clock says “the Sun ought to be up now”, but the Sun won’t cooperate for another hour.
And moving the clock earlier would make the problem worse in Michigan and Sudbury. But the clock could be moved a whole hour earlier in Maine or eastern Quebec before the mismatch there got as bad as it already is in Michigan and Sudbury.
Nitpicking, I think. I DON’T CARE what we choose to call the time. The sun does what it does, and you can call noon “milk” and midnight “necromancy” for all I care, as long as we pick one thing and stick to it.
I believe this applies to the vast majority you are characterizing as “confused” or “misinformed” here.
I never know if I am switching TO DST or AWAY from it. I just want the switching to stop.
I’m not a fan of year-round DST for a few reasons, one of them strictly personal. I’d like year-round standard time.
• Nationally, we’ve tried year-round DST three times and hated it. WWI: Enacted in 1918, repealed over Wilson’s veto in 1919; enacted (as “War Time”) in 1942, repealed in 1945. In 1974, support for DST dropped from 79% before it was enacted to 42% after only three months. It was repealed that September
“I’m one of the many sleep experts that knows it’s a bad idea,” said Dr. Elizabeth Klerman, a professor of neurology in the division of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School.
“Your body clock stays with (natural) light not with the clock on your wall,” Klerman said. “And there’s no evidence that your body fully shifts to the new time.”
Dr. Phyllis Zee, director of the Center for Circadian and Sleep Medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Evanston, Illinois, also opposes Daylight Saving Time.
and
Standard time, which we enter when we move our clocks back in the fall, is much closer to the sun’s day and night cycle, Zee said. This cycle has set our circadian rhythm, or body clock, for centuries.
That internal timer controls not just when you sleep, but also when you want to eat, exercise or work, as well as “your blood pressure, your heart rate and your cortisol rhythm,” Zee added.
In fact, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine has called for a ban on DST, and over 20 other organizations, including the National Safety Council and the National Parent Teacher Association, have supported a ban.
• The personal reason: I’m a pedestrian, not a driver. Night blindness and flaring street- and headlights make it hard for me to see in the dark. I can stay home in the evening. There’s more reason for me to have to be out in the morning, and with DST in winter in the PNW, I wouldn’t be able to safely leave my house until after 9 a.m. But that’s just me and not an argument for year-round standard time.
If we go to permanent permanent DST, it’ll be interesting to see if as many of us hate it as much as we did in 1974. Which factors have changed since then? (Sincere question.)
Okay, you “don’t have any idea of how many kids take buses to school.” I do: I work bus duty in the morning, and at my school of about 400 kids, watch about 100 or so get off the bus each morning. This is in a school with relatively low numbers of low-income students, who are much likelier to ride the bus. Go to a school with higher numbers of low-income students, and the number of bus riders is going to increase dramatically.
Want a cite? In North Carolina, almost 800,000 students ride the bus. That’s 800,000 students who would be affected by this change. In the United States as a whole, it’s close to 25 million, more than 5% of all Americans.
I promise if we switch to any year-round designation of the time, DST or Mars Standard Time or anything, I will never post again on this subject except to praise those who made the change happen. I will die deliriously happy.
Two points in favor of permanent DST:
Since “but what about the children” is always used to argue against it, I’ll use it the other way. After-school sports leagues (and after-work leagues for adults) can run in the spring and fall because with DST, there is enough light to make it viable. Move to Standard Time, and those leagues must start a month or more later in spring (and end a month early in fall), effectively making them summer leagues only.
Second, the bit about synching the sun to sleep schedules is pertinent for a limited time of the year. Up in Oregon, it’s daylight at 5:00 am in summer. Making this instead 4:00 am certainly doesn’t fit my sleep schedule better.
I don’t think that’s accurate–can you give some details on this? I never thought sports leagues started and ended when they did because of daylight hours, but am willing to see evidence to change my mind.
My kids’ soccer league started at the beginning of April, after the time change. Practices were at 5:00 or 5:30, and would run until dark. Do I have evidence that happens everywhere? No, maybe southern states have enough sun without DST, or maybe rich towns have lighted fields. Is there some other alternative you’re thinking of, or do you not believe there are kids’ sports leagues that start at 5:00 pm?
As an adult, I play in sports leagues that start at 6:00 pm. A few of the rich private clubs get the lighted fields, everyone else is on fields without lights. I can confidently say that the start date for those leagues is dependent on having enough sun.
In the South?
Often until dark.
There’s also this nifty invention called ‘electric light’ that many towns, schools, and sports leagues have been using for a while, especially for football. Does cost more but, again especially for football, it is often seen as worth it.
Why not split the difference, reset 30 minutes to between Standard and DST, and LEAVE IT ALONE???
I really don’t care which arbitrarily-chosen “time zone” I’m in, I just don’t want the hassle of the switchover. Even with a lot of the timepieces in my home self-updating, there are still enough that don’t that it’s a pain and it’s really aggravating to sort pets out on a revised mealtime when their stomachs and the clocks haven’t yet gotten back in step.