Daylight Saving Time seems kind of bassackwards. It gives us an extra hour of daylight in the summer, when the days are longer anyway. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_savings_time: “This is intended to provide a better match between the hours of daylight and the active hours of work and school. The “saved” daylight is spent on evening activities which get more daylight, rather than being “wasted” while people sleep past dawn.” Yeah, well, maybe that made sense when most people were farmers, but what relevance does it have now?
I think most people get out of bed sometime after 6AM, so it make sense to set our clocks so that dawn is roughly that time of day. Without DST, dawn would be about 5AM in the summertime where I live, which is about mid-latitude for the US. And with evening outdoor activities at their peak in the summer, it seems reasonbable to have more daylight then than in the winter.
Makes all the sense in the world to me.
Actually it seems to me that farmers are the people who need daylight savings time the least. If you’re a farmer you have to get up at dawn regardless of what the clock says. It’s urban/suburban people, who work by clock-time rather than nature-time, who benefit from the extra daylight they’d otherwise sleep through.
Because golf course owners have a better lobby than drive-in movie owners.
(Farmers have nothing to do with the issue–except that they often oppose DST. When everyone sets their clocks ahead, shipments that are scheduled for x:00 move up one hour, but the cattle that can’t read clocks continue with the same milking schedule, putting a bind on the farmer to accomplish more sooner, each day.)
And that cattle that CAN read clocks are also smart enough to unionize, causing further headache for the farmer.
But in winter, if you get up between 6 and 7, it’s still dark outside. I don’t like driving to work in the dark, do you? Wouldn’t it make more sense to set our clocks an hour ahead in winter?
If anything, I have to wonder why we go off daylight savings time in the winter. Almost everyone I know is overjoyed when DST comes around in the spring, and then bitches like crazy when we go off it in the winter (even though swithing back to standard time supports my ~6:00 dawn hypothesis above). DST is wildly popular, so why wouldn’t we still stick with it?
This is so odd to me – I absolutely loathe DST. I grew up in NJ and so didn’t even realize there were places that didn’t “do” DST until I moved to Hawaii. Then, on moving to IN, I was pleased to find that there was no DST there either. Which, of course, changed for the first time today as mandated by new state laws. And if my understanding of the news was correct, it was most assuredly not wildly popular – it had to be pushed through by “your man Mitch” (that’s the governor and his election catch-phrase; I refuse to subscribe to the idea that he’s “my man”).
Bleah. I think DST should be abolished. Period. Perhaps when I get my degree I’ll look for jobs in AZ…
I agree that it makes less sense the further south you go-- and probably the further north you go, too. But most of the US is comfortably in the middle.
Setting clocks forward makes it darker in the morning, not lighter. DST doesn’t give us an “extra hour of daylight”, it just shifts an hour of daylight from early morning to evening.
Livestock farmers don’t like it because it means that they have to get their stuff together an hour earlier, their milk production etc., whether the cows like it or not. If their customers are suddenly turning up an hour earlier with their milk tankers (which they will be, because their customers are getting up an hour earlier), the farmers just have to deal with it.
Here in the mid-latitudes of Illinois, we have 9 hours of daylight in winter and 15 in summer, with a bracketing of twilight on each end. What is the best way to arrange the clocks around these hours?
Most office jobs run from roughly 8 to 5, with a commute on each end. Most schools start the day between 8 and 9 and run until about 3, with a (typically) shorter commute for the kids on each end. Call these the “core” activity hours.
In addition, most of us stay awake for several hours after work and do other things–shopping, eating out, golfing, whatever. Call these the “secondary” activity hours.
Your hours may differ–you may be an early or late riser, or work nights, or whatever. But these are the most typical hours.
We’d like, if at all possible, to conduct our core activites during daylight. If there are hours left over, we’d prefer to use them for secondary activities.
But in winter, we can’t even light up the core. Given the choice of lighting up one end of the commute or the other, most people would prefer to light up the morning, which has the secondary benefit of allowing the kids a lighted commute both ways. In Chicago, sunrise in December is at 7:20 and sunset at 4:20, and that’s about the best way to distribute nine meager hours of daylight.
If you leave the clocks alone, sunrise in June would be at 4:20 and sunset at about 7:20. This would make no sense at all. Almost nobody is awake between 4 and 5 a.m., and by taking that hour in the evening you can light up an additional hour of secondary activity.
If you adopt the June hours year round, you’ll have sunrise in December at 8:20 and sunset at 5:20. Now you’ve lit up the evening commute for adults, as opposed to lighting up the morning commute for everybody. It seems less optimal to me. The best situation is to have DST in summer and standard time in winter, and that’s exactly what we do.
I hate it. I don’t mind I guess once I acclimate, but I hate it. And I very much like it when we get the extra hour in the autumn.
If it were up to me, we would pick one and stick with it.
I understood a big part of the rationale for DST to be saving electricity.
If you did not use DST in the summer you can see from Freddy the Pig’s post that a lot of daylight would be wasted in the morning when most people are sleeping. Moving that hour to the evening means less electrical use as people get longer before turning on the lights.
All I can say is that I’m thrilled that DST has finally arrived.
I’m a new homeowner, and work most days until 6pm. Eat some dinner and I can get to work on the house sometime between 6:30 and 7pm. Without DST, that’s sunset, not the greatest time to do some gardening. It’s also more than a bit depressing to do DIY work when it’s dark out.
With DST, I get a full extra hour of sunlight in the evening to putter around the house or get errands done. That hour of sunlight is taken from the 5am - 6am hour, who gets anything worthwhile done at that hour?
Just to throw in a little mom and apple pie, DST allows an extra hour of little league playing time before dusk. How can a red blooded American be against that?
I like having the extra light in the evening to let me be able to mow the lawn after dinner. Other than that, it doesn’t matter a lot to me. Why not split the difference and make the permanent time 30 minutes ahead of standard time and 30 minutes behind daylight time?
That’s kind of the worst of both worlds. It’s still too dark in the winter AM and a bunch of daylight gets wasted in the summer.
Honestly, other than farmers, I can’t see why anyone’s objecting to DST. You trade a couple of days of the world’s mildest case of jet lag for months of late sunsets. What’s the problem?
I have no problem with DST in the summer, but in April and October (which they are now moving to 3 weeks in Mar and 1 in Nov) the sun doesn’t rise early enough to justify setting the clocks ahead an hour. Today sunrise at my Lat (maybe a little further south than average, but times should be close for most of US) was 0637 hrs. That means lights, heat, hot water were all used in the morning, when they weren’t Friday 3/31 (well except hot water, but I did use hotter water and the bathroom heater to make up for it being colder in the house).
Has anyone ever done a study of actual energy saved by DST? Especially for Apr and Oct? I’d really like to see how much (if any) energy is saved.
Changing away from DST sucks the big one up here in the nothern climes. When we change back to GMT during the wintertime it means that for a while it gets dark at 3.30pm.
Make it 4.30 at least, come on, powers-that-be. The excuse used to be about daylight in the mornings. First the farmers, now it’s supposedly kiddywinks walking to school - like any of them ever do that any more.
Hmm? When we “Fall back” an hour, I have to get up an hour earlier WRT to the sun and now all of a sudden it’s dark outside when my alarm clock goes off. That’s my experience, anyway. And “Spring forward” is the reverse.
I see this argument a lot, but it makes no sense. Back before DST was instituted, we were on the same schedule all year round. People collectively decided that 9-5 was the most convenient time to work, for whatever reasons they might have had. So, year-round, we started work three hours after the average sunrise time, and ended work one hour before the average sunset time. Now, though, folks are all of a sudden saying that it would be so much better if we started work two hours after the average sunrise time, and ended two hours before average sunset. In fact, we already spend less than half the year on “standard” time. To those pushing this, what circumstance has changed since the time when the 9-5 workday was established? Or alternately, why did our ancestors get it wrong?
BrainGlutton, suppose that sunrise is at 6:00 standard exactly, and that your alarm is set for 6:30 by the clock. Just before the spring change, you’re getting up a half hour after sunrise, so it’s light out when you get up. Then, the change comes, and you move your clock forward one hour. So at the moment the sun comes up, you move your clock ahead from the 6:00 it was saying, forward one hour to 7:00. You’re still getting up at 6:30 by the clock, but now sunrise is 7:00 by the clock, so you’re now getting up a half-hour before sunrise, and it’s now dark when you get up.
The reverse happens in the fall: When you forget to reset your alarm clock and it wakes you up at the same sun-time that Sunday morning, you tell it “Forget it, it’s really only 5:30. I’m going back to sleep for another hour”, and by the time you do get up, it’s now lighter out.