I’d love to hear more about why this issue is more important to you than any other reason to vote. Is the time shift causing you serious problems, or do you have a business that is hurt by it, or anything like that?
Speaking for myself, having lived through summer time/winter time schedule around the year in the same location, I vastly prefer more light in the evenings. The effect on my well-being is so pronounced, that it overshadows most of the concerns and points against it.
Strong agreement - the clocks going forward in the spring pretty much marks the time here in Scotland where you can start doing things outdoors in the evenings during the week - also helps that the weather usually starts being less miserable about this time as well.
Unfortunately, here in England, there is no flexibility for adjusting our timetables in the winter: the length of the school day is roughly equal to the duration of daylight. There is therefore no point in changing the offset from UTC in the winter.
That's the theory, anyway. But perhaps some kind of magic happens if you change the time to UTC+1 in the winter? Unfortunately, no: they tried it around 1970 and it was a disaster just as rational people said it would be.
In Scotland the duration of winter daylight is shorter than the school day. Perhaps it's still better to have twilight for travelling in both directions rather than light in one direction and total darkness in the other? In any case, the Scots were not happy with the 1968-1971 experiment of having UTC+1 in the winter.
So let's just have UTC all year in England and Scotland, please.
That's not what I meant at all!
I want that extra hour of light in the evenings - which makes a big difference here in April. The fact that this happens to occur at the time when the weather starts improving adds to the desire to actually get outside more in the evenings. Nobody thinks that the change to BST causes the better weather :-|
Edit: And anyway - I actually prefer the system as it currently is.
If your problem is that your working day is too early or too late in the day, maybe thats what should be changed - not everybody's clocks.
Anyway, despite my early schedule, I STILL find that this only buys me barely an hour of daylight in the winter when I get home. Staying on DST year-round would give me an extra hour of time to play outside with the kids, go for a family walk, etc. in the winter months. Selfishly, I'd love it.
And I say selfishly, but I don't think it's entirely selfish. It's not like I'm the only person in this boat. As another commenter pointed out, most social activities tend to happen after work/school in the evenings. I'm imagining the majority of people having more time for outside socializing, exercising, etc. if you just started the school/work day in a couple of hours of darkness and then let them have the sunlight after it was over...
Midday should be the hour when the sun is highest in your timezone, and should stay there all year round.
For people who live on fixed schedules (AKA large swaths of society), changing the clock is how you campaign for schools/work/recreational organizations to start earlier. It is vastly more effective than solving the huge coordination problem of trying to get these independent organizations to each separately change their interlocking schedules.
On the flipside, it (1) seems vaguely annoying to a minority of people who have more flexibility in their schedules and don't need this (but that same flexibility should insulate them from any negative effects) and (2) has some random and irrelevant effect on the location of the sun in the sky at different clock times.
This is irrelevant, as I'd like to have more chance to enjoy the sunset in a park in a company, not just by myself. I also would like my children to have at least an hour of the sun light after school, not before, when it absolutely doesn't matter as they are still groggy and can't really enjoy it. What I was trying to convey in my other comments, this is not strictly a personal issue.
Effect on adults is less pronounced, but it still puts a strain on us to shift our schedule by an hour.
... yet for what? Original reasons why this practice was started barely apply today. Light bulbs are efficient and we waste much more electricity in other ways. Let alone that many offices are lit up all day anyway.
FWIW, my kids (~8yo, ~5yo) didn't even notice the time shift in the Netherlands let alone be affected by it. For adults, (me and my wife), it was a mild surprise. We first suspected that clock had gone bonkers only for me to realise the DST change. We were moving to a DST country from a non-DST one so the net effect for us was amusing, at best. Otherwise I don't remember any disruption to our schedule at all.
Maybe it's a big enough of disruption in the North America?
The problem is teenagers and up.
It's a huge disruption everywhere.
www.businessinsider.com/daylight-saving-time-is-deadly-2018-3
That is some serious overstatement. I have kids.
I now live in a country that doesn't honor DST, and I have to say, it is a convenient thing, and my only annoyance is coordinating with countries that do honor it. The idea of 'more /less' daylight is not the factor people make it out to be and it is adjusted to fast.
(The worst is when you are living in Australia and are trying to coordinate with someone in the norther hemisphere like Europe or the US, then you have to deal with double the DST shenanigans.)