In EU it's currently stalled because some countries want to stay permanently on their DST time (south europe) and others (north europe) want to stay on their solar time.
It's better to make a common decison about this, so we are stalled.
It's better to make a common decison about this, so we are stalled.
Spain is already in the wrong time zone for standard time, and when DST hits, it's two hours off the time we really should have. It's unnatural for daylight to last until 22:00 or nearby in june and july in Spain's latitude. A bit more and we'd end up with some kind of midnight sun, like we were in the Arctic Circle. It's ridiculous.
I mean, it's usually so hot, and getting hotter every year, that you can only go outside somewhat comfortably after nightfall anyway, so I'd actually prefer if it got dark at 20:00 or earlier in the summer, as it should be. On the other hand, it's horribly demoralizing for me when it's almost 8:30 in the morning in mid-october and it's still so dark. Going back to standard time, like we did a few days ago, gives me a brief respite, but unfortunately dark mornings will soon return in a month or so.
That's probably even more of an issue for Spain, made even stranger by the fact that Portugal is in the "correct" timezone.
Even if it was a political decision, as answered on sibling comment, moving east at least makes some sense for the common person.
Much better than having sunset before 16:00.
Evidence-backed benefits of morning light exposure:
Advances the circadian clock, helping shift the body's biological night earlier. Randomized controlled study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24179293/
Promotes earlier sleep timing and may improve subjective sleep quality. Systematic review of 45 studies: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30670164/
Improves alertness, attention, and reaction times, although average effects are small. 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis of 150 studies involving 5,401 participants (daytime light, not exclusively morning): https://doi.org/10.1080/15502724.2025.2493669
Helps treat seasonal depression (SAD). Systematic review and network meta-analysis of 17 randomized trials involving 773 patients: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40629637/
Can improve outcomes in nonseasonal depression when bright-light therapy is added to treatment. 2024 meta-analysis of 11 randomized trials involving 858 patients: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39356500/
Natural daylight exposure helps synchronize the biological clock with the solar day. Experimental research found that exposure to natural light-dark cycles advanced circadian timing compared with modern indoor lighting environments: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23910656/
And only very few people are like leisure or outside sport activities in the morning before going to school or work. It is just not that relaxing when you have to watch the clock or take longer shower after.
You're spot on. Now change the problem, not the symptom.
I dont care when it goes up. What sux is that it goes down too soon. I would gladly take a shift where it goes up later if I get to have more sun afternoon.
We mostly have CET and there are minuscule +1 and -1 on both sides.
I'm quite north (but not the far north) but I'm strongly for DST. If we went for solar time, we'd loose long bright evenings in the summer but have sun at 3am. Spring/fall evenings would be much darker too. I hate time switching. But I'd rather switch then loose DST summer evenings. Otherwise we'd loose a lot of outdoorsy socialising on weekdays
But some people don't go outdoors after work. And they prefer brighter mornings for couple extra weeks. During the winter the mornings are dark with or without DST.
And Scotland has to have GMT in the winter so that school children don't have to walk to school in the dark. (Suffering and deaths were caused when they experimentally tried UTC+1 in the Scottish winter.)
Therefore, if you want to get rid of clock changes it really has to be GMT for the whole of the British Isles. I think that would work for me. But I'd rather stick with the current system than make any other change, like UTC+1 all year or Britain different from Ireland.
This gets brought up every time the discussion happens, yet we manage perfectly well even further north here in Norway.
Also why should people need government permission to vary the time at which they do things?
As far as I'm concerned I just want the clock to not change every spring and autumn. Institutions can surely be left to decide for themselves what working hours they have? After all shops, cafes, restaurants, bars, etc., already do that.
Yeah, try going to school in Lapland. If school starts at 09:00, you're walking to school in the dark. If school ends at 14:00, you're walking home in the dark.
Closer to their solar time, for quite a few. As an extreme example, most of Spain lies West of the prime meridian (some parts of it even west of Great Britain, the island), but its time zone is an hour ahead of that of London.
This traditionally has been solved in two ways:
1. do the split and accept that you will have costs associated with different time zones and sleep/wake cycles in your population (e.g.: USA / Soviet Russia)
2. don't do the split, and have the cost by putting a time/light adjustment burden on the population (e.g.: PRC, European Union)
My preferred solution would be to abandon all time zones and use something like UTC, or yet better: .beat / Biel Mean Time [1], which does not come with a 'oh, 12 means midday' penalty.
Which means that
a) textual time references in stories would stop working unless also specifying a location, which would cause a lot of weirdness, especially in fiction
b) perhaps more importantly for day-to-day life, it causes a lot of weirdness around the change of the calendar day and the weekday. It's a rather useful property of the current system that the change of calendar day happens at a time when most people are asleep or otherwise not too fussed about the exact calendar date.
If you completely abolish time zones, that means that for everybody not lucky enough to live near wherever the meridian ends up (which would always be a significant fraction of the world's population, no matter where you'd place the meridian), the change of calendar date would happen during the middle of the waking hours, which causes a lot of weirdness (do public holidays now actually start and stop in the middle of the working day?) and makes date references vastly more cumbersome because a single calendar date can now refer to both solar n in the afternoon/evening and solar date n+1 in the morning.
So you'd have to start using rather awkward double dates for referring to a certain solar day ("the event will take place from the 22/23rd to the 24/25th", "see you on Thursday/Friday" [which isn't the same thing as "see you on Thursday or Friday" today, because that'd become "see you on Thursday/Friday or Friday/Saturday" under the new system properly]), or else develop some convention based on the local solar noon/midnight, which is basically reintroducing time zones through the back door.
You could easily have a 'multiple calendar days during one solarday' situation. In fact, many countries already do this for their TV programming, in which a show might screen on "Thursday at 23:55 until 03:15".
For common things, you could just refer to as 'tomorrow morning'. If you need more precision, you can fall back to .beats. "School starts @740" Incidentally, that's exactly why I liked .beats: no false associations.
Besides, even if you switched to some new, completely-blank-slate system of tracking time, those associations would quickly redevelop since presumably most people will predominantly deal with local events within their own time zone. Only now with added confusion when you do encounter a foreign time reference after all…
The thing is, those "global time" proposals don't change anything about the fact that you have to look up local time and/or local customs when scheduling events in foreign timezone – you have to do it today, and you still have to do it even with a single global wall clock time.
The only thing it does – resolve some potential (potential, not definite!) ambiguity around what (wall clock) time exactly cross-time zone events are taking place, but at the price of completely breaking any association between clock time and the solar day. Personally, I don't think that's worth it.
> "School starts @740"
Which precisely illustrates the problem – because you didn't mention a location, that sentence is now completely meaningless. If I encountered it in a random story – does it mean that it is in the morning (but early morning or late morning or what?), is it in the afternoon…?
Like I said, I posit that most people regard the association between clock time and solar time as an advantage, not as a drawback.
> You could easily have a 'multiple calendar days during one solarday' situation.
I didn't say that this doesn't already happen today, but today it affects far fewer people in mostly less important ways.
China is an interesting example as well. With unofficial local times in far-away provinces.
It is a misconception, that "noon" is the middle point of your awake time. That was never the case. Our day usage most of the time is asymmetric: start the day and especially the work with the sunlight, spend the evening time off after work after sun set.
Using the high point of the sun as the reference for the daytime is a very practical choice, as this is the one easily observable time point which doesn't move much over the course of the year (a few minutes, but that is symmetric).
In my whereabouts sun raises at 3am around midsummer (it would be 2am without DST) and at 9am around christmas. Nowdays I wake up at 7am around the year and somehow my biological rythm is fine. It used to be just fine when I waking up at 10am too. The core thing seems to be stable day rythm, not adhering to solar time.
What you're saying is sunrise matters, not solar time. Although even for sunrise, I'd say students' daily routine matters much more. Back in high school, when I spending my late evenings and nights on computer, I didn't care if it is bright or dark in the morning, i was sleepy anyway...
I'd also argue that in today's sedentary world luring people outside is very important. And bright spring/summar/fall evenings is very important at that. There's plenty of evidence for the benefits of exercise, socialising and so on. And with forever-non-DST time, we would loose that for couple weeks improvement in the morning.
Most people start and endworking at common time. If you want to spend time with other people for hobbies or socializing, you need to find a matching spot when people are done working.
Sure we can stick to solar time and adjust office hours instead. But then we're back at square 1...
But I'm pretty sure perma-non-DST people would not be happy with such solution.