Map: The states in favor of daylight saving time all year long | Hacker News Reader

Map: The states in favor of daylight saving time all year long

nbcnews.com

The problem with permanent DST in northern states is that it means for much of winter the morning commute is in darkness. Yes, it means more light during the evening commute, but the morning commute needs light more than does the evening commute.

That's because generally road conditions are more likely to be worse in the morning than in the evening. It's generally colder in the mornings meaning more chances of ice on the roads. There's also more likely to be snow on the roads--by the evening you've had a day's traffic helping clear the roads.

Also in the morning you've got significant overlap between the morning adult commute and children walking or biking to school, so by making the morning commute happen in darkness you are combining the time when road conditions are worst, the time when you've got the most pedestrians and cyclists, and the time you've got the worst lighting.

Schools generally get out well before the adult evening commute starts, so if that has to take place in the dark at least you don't have nearly as many pedestrians and cyclists to deal with.

Seems like changing school start time would be a simple fix for that.

That might fix the problem of kids walking and biking in the dark, but it still leaves the issue of the morning being the time when driving is the most difficult.

Also I'm not sure you can push school start time back far enough to matter. School hours are generally shorter than adult work hours (especially for elementary school), so in a family where both parents work away from home you are going to have some time where the kids are out of school but the parents aren't home. I suspect that "kids get home a couple hours before the parents do" works out better than "kids leave home an hour after the parents".

And you have basically undone the effect of permanent DST.

Some commute related downside that isn't preference based, increases deer strikes:

https://twitter.com/ndrewhahn/status/1721537278672036085?t=j...

My morning commute is gonna be in darkness either way. Sunrise tomorrow is at 7:30.

With DST, I would have more light after my evening commute.

Exactly. EST means we get door to door darkness on both commutes in the winter. It's awful.

I see it as their time and my time. I get paid to be in the dark, but having light after work to do my things is great. Come December, without DST, it's dark 1/2 after work but 1.5hrs would be very useful.

No, the problem is that DST is the incorrect time. If you want to stop changing the clocks, you set them all to the correct time and leave them alone. You do not declare "We shall be wrong from now on!"

Isn't the actual problem that geographic regions within time zones have wildly different natural times? E.G. Bangor Maine and Detroit Michigan are in the same time zone. The sun rises and sets almost an hour earlier in Bangor than it does in Detroit. Which time is correct?

DST isn't "incorrect", but it is a convention that is no good. Standard time is a better convention.

DST should just be amortized along the duration.

While people complain about whether or not they'd prefer to have light in the morning or evening, the real problem is trying to adjust your sleep schedule by an hour in one fell swoop. That made sense when you had to remember manually adjust any time-keeping devices, but digital clocks can mostly adjust themselves these days, so it would be fairly trivial to just have it move with the light, which would make the sleep adjustment much less painful.

The US actually did experiment with year-round DST during the oil embargo in the 70s. Popular support for year-round DST cratered when people actually experienced what DST is like in winter. I fully expect the same thing to open nowadays if permanent DST ever becomes a thing... DST in winter just isn't fun.

> DST in winter just isn't fun

Says the people who get up earlier in the morning and don't like a dark start to their day.

On the other hand, plenty of people don't want it getting dark by 4 pm in the winter, and vastly prefer their extra hour of sunlight in the late afernoon. That extra hour is fun for them (including me).

From my viewpoint, 4 pm darkness is just depressing and crushes the soul, in a way that morning darkness doesn't (you get to watch the sunrise!).

This is 100% an opinion. The worst part of this debate is that the only indicator of which side you’ll support is whether you’re a morning person or not.

As a morning person myself, give me standard time year round or give me death.

Let’s compromise at 30 minutes between standard time and DST. Everyone would be happy to drop the time changes and neither side is happy with the new time, but at least it’s a less severe outcome for people during their off season.

If you’re stuck in an office until 6 it doesn’t matter if dusk is at 4 or 5 pm anyway.

If you have windows it sure does. It makes all the difference the world.

If you don't have windows, I'm sorry.

That's interesting, I didn't know about this.

Maybe it's time to implement Winter Hours, a 35 hour work week from December through February.

It’s also entirely possible if permanent DST passes and gets repealed (again) we’ll be back to where we are now 60 years later.

This is exactly how this will play out. Permanent standard time would have a much greater chance of sticking, also ... it's standard!

Perhaps we should modify our schedules rather than altering the time the clock shows. The time doesn’t really change.

We should abolish savings time and stick to standard time year round.

The real arguments for savings time are for economic (ie consumption) reasons. More daylight later means more spending after work.

If you look at who supports and lobbies for savings time it should be clear who the enemy is.

> Perhaps we should modify our schedules rather than altering the time the clock shows. The time doesn’t really change. We should abolish savings time and stick to standard time year round.

I agree with you. I think that permanent standard time would be better (although permanent daylight saving time would still be better than changing the clock twice every year, I think permanent standard time would be better than permanent daylight saving time), and that you do not need to do your schedules/stuffs only according to clocks.

Actually, I think that the way that it should be done is by time zones based on mean solar time.

> The real arguments for savings time are for economic (ie consumption) reasons. More daylight later means more spending after work. If you look at who supports and lobbies for savings time it should be clear who the enemy is.

I am not well aware of who supports and lobbies for savings time, although you may be right.

> If you look at who supports and lobbies for savings time it should be clear who the enemy is.

I honestly don't know who lobbies for this. Care to help me out?

Just eliminate DST. Are we in such post-truth era that we'll even lie to ourselves about the time? Tell ourselves it's an hour later when we know it's not, as if we embrace lies and lying so readily? Why add a layer of complexity; just make the time reflect the position of the Sun, and adjust your schedule as desired.

I know we've used DST for a long time, but at least it was a special (albiet annual) thing, not a permanent state.

> and adjust your schedule as desired

Because individuals can't. Society's schedule is ultimately set by schools, and employers mostly have hours that accomodate parents' kids' needs.

The reality is that it's easier to change the clock than shift school's schedules and get everyone else to shift their schedules too.

What the heck does "lying" have to do with anything? Solar noon is exactly 12:00 locally at only some vanishingly small slivers of the earth's surface. Clock time is a human convention, and we're free to fiddle with it however we like.

When I worked an office IT job, for a few years, I asked my boss if I could come in an hour early in the winter. In actual practice, I kept my watch on DST and woke up and commuted to work at the same time relative to the Sun. I watched my co-workers struggle for a week adjusting their bodies to their time change. I had no time change to deal with. I got to study (skills upgrade) in the quiet before anyone else came to work, and I got to leave an hour early every day compared to the others. I drove home in the daylight. Truly, there were no downsides for me.

Permanent daylight savings time---I recommend practicing it even when the society around you does not.

I'm glad to see DST is winning. I know it depends a lot on where you live, but living in NYC it feels absolutely crushing to suddenly lose afternoons to the darkness just as the winter weather is emerging. It's like a sick joke.

As for circadian rhythms, I'm sure there are many benefits to aligning our entire livelihoods to the annual fluctuations of the sun's rise and fall, but in practice everyone I know molds their schedule around their jobs, families and interests, not the sunrise.

> […] to suddenly lose afternoons to the darkness just as the winter weather is emerging.

The 'sudden'-ness may be because of the time jump. If clocks were left alone there would be a more natural, continuous/gradual shift between light and dark.

It’s depressing in Florida too. Just when the nice weather starts we lose our evenings.

Am I missing something or are discussions around DST frequently entirely missing the point? It exists because our work schedules are completely inflexible, so no matter whether you do permanent or not you're fundamentally running into issues that work start and end times are fixed, so it'll always be trading off against something. The real solution is instead to do something about our fixed schedules to make them more flexible.

Am I wrong (genuinely I may just be missing something here)?

Our work schedules are largely inflexible because of the need to coordinate with others. A teacher cannot shift their hours unless the students do so as well. The students cannot shift their hours if their parents can't provide care under the new schedule. The parents can't shift their hours if they have scheduled responsibilities such opening stores, making deliveries, etc. In short, a great many jobs require that others maintain fixed schedules in order to operate efficiently, so flexible hours is not a general solution.

It seems to me that the biggest issue are the start and end times though - we could surely structure work to have more flexible start and end times while keeping most of the day fixed. As for school hours, there have been plenty of proposals and good reasons to change them, and it tends to meet the fate of 'too hard', but I don't see why that's actually true other than people being unwilling to make meaningful change to how we do things (status quo bias).

Option 1: Change the time on the clocks.

Option 2: Fundamentally change the structure of employment throughout the entire economy.

One of these is easier.

We've done option two multiple times in the past couple centuries, so I don't buy it. Hell, massive changes happened in the past three years. For example, why can't we move to a 7 hour work day and get off work an hour sooner (or start an hour later)? That'd solve most of the problems DST attempts to solve.

My idea:

First, eliminate DST completely. The time should reflect the position of the Sun, and forget the complexity and IMHO bizarre self-delusion, a bad habit.

Second, use a time half-way between Mountain and Central Time (i.e., on the half-hour), and create a North American Time. Give the entire US a single time zone. Imagine all the headaches simplified away for coordinating; communicating; scheduling; conceptualizing all time across current time zones, like the duration of your plane flight, etc. etc. -- all that conversion and complexity will vanish. 'I'll call at 4' means something crystal clear; if you're in Denver, 'be at the SF office for the 5pm meeting' is transparently comprehendable - you know how long your day will be, how long you have to get there.

Yes, people in NY will have sunny early mornings - they like to get up early and can enjoy the more city lights. People in LA will have beautiful late sunsets - they can have a late dinner and watch it set even in December. (Yes, I'm snidely dismissing their concerns; I'm having some fun with it.) It's only half an hour worse than prior distortions.

Best if Canada and Mexico will join in - notice I called it North American Time. The line of current the Central-Mountain time zone border goes right through the center of Mexico; it might work very well there (but someone from Mexico will know more). The challenge is outlying lands, such as New Foundland, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii. They may prefer special time zones because of the larger distortions. Nothing is perfect.

China, which is very roughly the same distance east-west as the US, has one time zone. Where is it accurate - central China or Beijing? And how has it worked out?

(Or use Mountain or Central Time, if the half-hour will cause too many problems.)

A single time zone seems like it creates a lot of problems. Like if I'm on the east coast scheduling a meeting with someone on the west coast what's the fastest way to convey to me I'm about to schedule a meeting that's way to early. Right now I can see that the meeting will be at 5am for them and I can intuit that's to early.

How do people in Western China feel about this situation, which they live right now?

It's not too early, because it won't be 5am. It will be 8am there just as it is for you. If they don't want to do 8am, they can tell you they get to work at 9 or whenever. You'll never have to think about time differences again, at least in North America. You can write back and thank me when my plan comes to fruition. :)

> First, eliminate DST completely. The time should reflect the position of the Sun, and forget the complexity and IMHO bizarre self-delusion, a bad habit.

I agree. However, while sundials will use apparent solar time (and should not be disregarded), the time zones and clocks should be based on mean solar time, in my opinion.

> Second, use a time half-way between Mountain and Central Time (i.e., on the half-hour), and create a North American Time. Give the entire US a single time zone.

I disagree. If you need to coordinate time between different places, you can use UTC instead of mean solar time. That is what UTC is for, and UTC can be useful for other purposes too. When specifying the time you can write "Z" on the end to indicate UTC.

> If you need to coordinate time between different places, you can use UTC instead of mean solar time. That is what UTC is for, and UTC can be useful for other purposes too. When specifying the time you can write "Z" on the end to indicate UTC.

You can, but 1) it requires translating two local time zones to UTC, then translating them back, and 2) Nobody does it; the only time I see people use UTC are in logs (a good place to use it); I doubt many outside certain technical fields even knows what it is.

The vast majority of people live in eastern China so that’s an apples to oranges comparison.

I’m all for getting rid of DST but definitely not for getting rid of timezones in North America. Not only is that too much distance to cover in 1 timezone, would South America just get screwed over given that part of South America overlaps in longitude? Should we cover both continents with one timezone or does South America have to suffer with the annoyance of having just some countries in the same timezone as North America? Both of those options sound terrible.

South American people are not required to align time zones with North American people. Also, most of S America is east of N America.

Or just use GMT and adjust scheduling local things based on local daylight. Phrases like working 9-5 wouldn’t make sense for most anymore, but who cares. Having the date change in the middle of the day might be odd, but people working night shifts deal with that already.

I think we need to match solar time approximately. The words 'today' and 'tomorrow' and 'noon', for example, have both clock and solar meanings that need to be roughly aligned.

Not going to work, same reason https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time didn’t catch on.

Wasn’t Swatch Internet Time just a marketing gimmick? Did anyone seriously think it would be adopted by any standards body or government?

DST is also a marketing gimmick and look at global adoption, even in tropical countries where it’s entirely useless.

It is a way to pretend to do something without doing it and thus point fingers. If politicians really wanted to do something standard time year round is legal and could be done anytime. But daylight savings time year round isn't legal so they pass that so they don't have to stand for anything.

I live in East Tennessee, where a permanent DST situation would be the worst case for us, but are seat of government is in Central Time.

*our seat

DST is torture for night owls.

How so?

Most of the daytime activities are regulated by the "business day", starting at 9am. One day that's 9am, the next day and most the summer that's now an hour earlier

Oh, you mean the delta between DST and standard time is torture for night owls.

If we stick with one though... I, as night owl, prefer standard over DST.

I mean the absolute. If 9:00 a.m. came up later in the daylight time every single day I would be happier

So the study of how light and biology interact is called chronobiology:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronobiology

AFAICT, all national (US, CA) and international (EU) chronobiology societies, as well as many sleep researchers, state that from a health perspective, we should (a) get rid of the twice-yearly DST switching, and (b) stay on Standard ("winter") Time year-round.

> As experts in biological clocks and sleep, we have been following the initiatives of the European Commission and California Proposition 7 to abandon the annual clock-time changes in spring and autumn. Although we recognize that there are advantages/disadvantages associated with any choice, we emphasize that the scientific evidence presently available indicates that installing perennial Standard Time (ST, or ‘wintertime’) is the best and safest option for public health. The negative effects of maintaining Daylight Saving Time (DST) will be higher.

* https://srbr.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/SRBR-Statement-o...

> The Canadian Society for Chronobiology is advocating for the elimination of twice-yearly time changes. These changes, particularly in the spring, are not only inconvenient and socially disruptive, but also are responsible for short-term negative impacts such as increases in acute health events and accidents. In place of the time changes, we advocate for year-round Standard Time (ST, winter time) rather than Daylight Saving Time (DST, summer time). ST puts the social clock closer to our intrinsic body clock, our circadian rhythm, which is set by the dawn. DST moves dawn later, and creates social jet-lag due to the mismatch between our biological drive to wake up near dawn and the social demands for us to stay up later. Year-round DST is predicted to increase rates of chronic diseases, decrease economic performance, and increase inequities in society. Putative advantages of year-round DST, such as energy savings and benefits for farmers, are not supported by evidence. Previous experiments with year-round DST have proven to be unpopular. Therefore, year-round ST should be adopted as a public health measure.

* http://www.chronobiocanada.com/official-statements

> Daylight saving time (DST) refers to the practice of advancing clock time by 1 h each spring, with a return (setting back) to standard time (ST) each fall. Numerous sleep and circadian societies other than the Sleep Research Society have published statements in support of permanent ST, and permanent ST has also received support from multiple medical societies and organizations. This perspective dis- cusses the positive and negative health and economic consequences of permanent DST, permanent ST, and maintaining the status quo (DST for part of the year). After a thorough review of the existing literature, the SRS advocates the adoption of permanent ST.

* https://sleepresearchsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/...

> […] Although chronic effects of remaining in daylight saving time year-round have not been well studied, daylight saving time is less aligned with human circadian biology—which, due to the impacts of the delayed natural light/dark cycle on human activity, could result in circadian misalignment, which has been associated in some studies with increased cardiovascular disease risk, metabolic syndrome and other health risks. It is, therefore, the position of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine that these seasonal time changes should be abolished in favor of a fixed, national, year-round standard time.

* https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/10.5664/jcsm.8780

And this does take into account different chronotypes (e.g., "night owls"):

* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...

Of course a lot of the general public seems to lean towards year-round DST (e.g., "so I can do stuff after work"):

> The chronobiology community advocates ending the biannual practice in many countries of adjusting their clocks to observe Daylight Saving Time (DST). Many governments are actively considering abandoning this practice. While sleep and circadian experts advocate the adoption of year-round standard time, most jurisdictions are instead considering permanent DST. In guiding advocacy, it is useful to understand the factors that lead governments and citizens to prefer the various options. […]

* https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35382618/

I would agree that permanent standard time would be better (or, in my opinion, would be better to do time zones based on mean solar time).

Of course the schedules and clocks together are based on the arbitrary conventions anyways, and permanent time (standard or DST) would at least make it consistent. So the reasons they give here according to sleeping, biology, etc are merely making it consistent, and improved according to existing conventions, which of course does make it better , but nevertheless I had considered the other reason too according to the solar noon/midnight by the natural time keeping (although "0" instead of "12" might perhaps be more logical).

> Of course a lot of the general public seems to lean towards year-round DST (e.g., "so I can do stuff after work")

This is the problem due to bad work schedules, and due to the civilization and the society, and love of money, etc, independently of the clock. The clock just adds another problem by trying to correct an existing problem.

Isn't the real issue the general start times of jobs, classes and other activities? We could all wake up at Noon and go to sleep at 8am if that's what it took to match the biologically ideal scenario. All that matters is the difference between the biologically ideal wake time and a socially required wake time. Not what the clock says.

If you personally lean toward year-round ST, you may be interested in:

* https://savestandardtime.com

Why not meet in the middle?

This is backwards. In the age of pervasive digital assistants, there is no reason not to have two dimensional time zones (perhaps state level) where seven a.m. is sunrise every single day. That’s how humans evolved. To rise with the sun. Waking up with the sun in a different spot in the sky every day is disruptive to sleep cycles. This can be accomplished by skewing the time every day at 3 am for a few dozen seconds. Zoom can take care of aligning video conferences to UTC slots.

If you wish to rise with the sun, then that is what you should do, rather than relying on clocks so much.

Clocks are useful to measure the time, not to wake up and sleep and do other stuff.

Abolishing daylight saving time would be better, and then use time zones based on mean solar time for local time keeping, and UTC for any other kind of time keeping.

What you describe is what I’m proposing.

That does not seem to be the case.

What you proposed seems to be a clock based on the sunrise time (similar than Babylonian hours), using that to decide when to wake up.

What I proposed is that the time shown on the clock shouldn't affect your waking up, sleeping, etc, and for local time to be based on mean solar time according to noon/midnight, rather than sunrise.

However, the intention seems to be similar.

“A few dozen seconds” is more like 120 or even 180 per day at more distant latitudes. And then there’s the whole “the sun doesn’t rise for a long time” at extreme latitudes. So that would be pretty comical when 7:00 just doesn’t happen. Do we stop the clocks?

To be frank, I don’t see your point.

A few minutes per day is well within the natural variance of human sleep.

Proper circadian functioning is even more important in extreme or alien environments. Solar time won’t work on the dark side of the moon, either. Likely the solution here is a completely artificial cycle based on indoor lighting, as exists on submarines. There will be some kind of time zone divorced from the sun in any scheme chosen here. Solar time works best where when the sun works.

Ah, that's a more extreme version of the 10 minutes a month approach that I have been advocating for.

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