They think the increased risk is from circadian misalignment.
> observed that spring DST significantly increased fatal MVA risk by 6%, which was more pronounced in the morning and in locations further west within a time zone. DST-associated MVA risk increased even in the afternoon hours, despite longer daylight hours. The MVA risk increase waned in the week subsequent to DST, and there were no effects of the fall-back transition to Standard Time (ST) on MVA risk, further supporting the hypothesis that DST-transition-associated, preventable circadian misalignment and sleep deprivation might underlie MVA risk increases.
I thought that as well, but this study appears not to have found that
> and there were no effects of the fall-back transition to Standard Time (ST) on MVA risk
EDIT: It seems our assumption was correct, at least for the UK:
> There is substantial evidence that fewer people would be killed and seriously injured on Great Britain’s roads if this country were to put the clocks forward by one hour throughout the year. The Department should take the lead in re- examining the practice of changing clocks at the end of British Summer Time with other central Government departments.
I wonder why the OP study (using US data) found something different?
First thought without even trying to compare the DST shift directly to guess a reason: Comparing sunrise and sunset across the year, London to Chicago, London is slightly more extreme across the year.
If there's anything to learn from reports like this, it would be that people should be allowed to live on more flexible schedules. Not just around DST changes, but in general. The obsession modern society has with clocks, schedules and calendars bothers me anyway, it assumes every person is equally capable of adapting to what is considered a 'normal' (ie: majority) schedule, which is provably false. But no report will ever investigate e.g. how many traffic accidents would be prevented by not forcing everyone to do the school run at the exact same time and be in the office before 9:00.
Restricting the topic to just DST changes: considering modern society sadly is obsessed with clocks, DST is IMO the best way to maximize how much of the waking hours of people are during sunlight. DST itself isn't the problem, the problem is that apparently people don't get enough time to adjust. So why not introduce a national holiday twice a year, call it 'DST day', so everyone gets an extra day to adjust. I guess that would go a long way to alleviate the negative effects. Obviously then all of a sudden it's not about fatal traffic accidents anymore, but about economic effects and money... :-(
Georgia is putting DST on the ballot this November. Voters will have a choice to stay with DST, going to standard time year around, or asking Congress for permission to stay on DST year around. My guess is none of the options will receive a majority vote but year around DST will get the plurality. Since that requires Congressional approval and the ballot referendum is non-binding, nothing will change as a result. Having discussed the issue over the years, it's also a bit sad realizing how people don't understand that this doesn't actually create an extra hour of sunlight, it just shifts an hour of pre-noon sunlight to be afternoon sunlight. A surprisingly large number of people are quite insistent that it creates more sunlight per day, citing longer daylight hours during the summer months as proof.
Vote for no more adjustments, I don't care if that's UTC, nation wide 'Eastern', DST or not DST... just leave things the same all year. I've got a slight preference for everyone going UTC with no DST so that meetings and events are easier to schedule across the world.
UTC would be great if it weren't for how everyone wants to think of E.G. 8AM or 9AM or whatever as a common start time and then uses DST to try and adjust the clocks rather than the times people do things.
The current time isn't particularly useful either, noon isn't even directly tied to the solar apex in most places (due to the timezones and more complex orbit / tilt interactions).
They already do this in China. They have one time zone, but people in Western China don't actually shift their schedules. That means that a 9:00 AM start time for work is actually more like 6:00 AM Solar Time. All of China's timezone is keyed to Beijing time.
Do they really not change their schedules? and how much of that is similar to the fact that someone on the west coast may need to operate on east coast time due to financial markets, customers, etc?
Right now, if I want to schedule a meeting with London, I have two steps: figure out a good time for me, check if it's reasonable in London, adjust if necessary.
If London was in the same time zone, I'd have to ascertain, somehow, what 0800 actually means in terms of the workday, and multiply that across every time zone I have to confer with (and there are a lot).
No thanks. I like knowing that 5 pm means more-or-less the same thing everywhere except Western China, which happily enough doesn't really come up in my day-to-day life.
You have to look it up either way, so I don't really understand why it would really be too much harder. For an example, if you are on the west coast you'd learn that 17 to 2 are good hours for you. Suppose on the day in question you know that 1 is the best time for you. Then you'd look at London and note that 9 to 18 are probably good for them. So you'll have to adjust. I don't see what new steps are introduced.
You are right that it is nice to now what 5 pm means pretty much everywhere but Western China, but that same sentiment can be expressed by saying early evening everywhere including Western China.
Even in the best case, you don't really manage simplify anything, you apply the same offsets, except now everyone on the west coast wakes up on one weekday and goes to sleep on the next, not just the ones who get to bed after midnight. The change happens right at the end of the business day, rather than outside business hours. Every day.
No one would be confused by the meaning of Tuesday night as night is defined by the sun and if it is paired with the word Tuesday then you automatically know what they are talking about.
There could be some confusion if you are talking with people far away, but that already exists. The sort of confusion that would come up would just be slightly different.
If a country does any no-adjustment approach nationwide,
people may want a single common day of the month to do daylight
sensitive schedule adjustments, such as outdoor sports practices.
I propose overnight on the first Sunday of a month. For example,
the week before, in spring (Northern hemisphere) soccer (or whatever activity) practice
is at 16:00, the week after at 16:30 or 17:00 or whatever.
In fall, the reverse, but the schedules all change on the same day.
(Outliers will happen - this is a 90:10 suggestion, not 100:0.)
Think of all the families with 2 or 3 kids who
have 2, 3, or 4 different activities each week, all at different times.
Do we really want their schedules to potentially change in every week
of the month? Yes, super-soccer mom or dad could cope, but why not
try to keep it simpler?
> UTC would be great if it weren't for how everyone wants to think of E.G. 8AM or 9AM or whatever as a common start time
You mean people want to think about hours in a way that is useful to them where they live? Doesn't sound crazy.
If everyone moved to UTC you wouldn't solve any real problems. Sure, everyone in New York could get used to their day starting at noon or whatever (to what benefit?) but if you wanted to schedule a meeting with someone in spain (or california) you would still have to figure out the time change to make it a reasonable time for you both.
Any way you slice it, you're just pushing the problem around to different places.
Everyone moving to UTC could make people start thinking about what time is actually appropriate to start the day instead of defaulting to 8 or 9 am. A lot of people might not want to think about that, but it could end up quite a bit better for public health.
> Any way you slice it, you're just pushing the problem around to different places.
There isn't a problem. There are many problems. Changes in strategy don't have to solve them all. It is entirely reasonable to prioritize which problem(s) get more attention when there are more than one. That's what this is about, prioritization, and an implicit recognition that one size does not fit all.
Your day "starting" at 00:00 sounds a lot easier to reason about than the day starting at 08:00.
We did get used to the day starting at a weird time for no particular reason, and whenever you change jobs you'll get used to a slightly different time anyway.
I don't see how it's more useful the way it is now than any other way. This is like trying to justify that moving summer holidays by one day would disrupt everyone's way of thinking.
Honestly, this comment is spot on. I think people don't realize that the fact that we are so accustomed to the 8 or 9 am meaning the start of the school or work day is not good for public health. If we had UTC or some nation wide time like China there might be more thought about when to actually start things and where the sun is actually at.
The article points out that western edges of time zones are hit harder by clock changes. Other research also shows that they are in general sleeping less on western edges because the sun goes down later and they still have to get up at the same time as eastern edges.
Because of this, while all-year DST would be better than what we have, it is still worse for public health than all-year standard time which is maybe worse than UTC (as people will start thinking more about the sun and maybe in 30 minute chunks instead of hours).
I wouldn't be quite so fatalist - if there is a strong push for getting rid of seasonal time shifts then, if congress refuses this request, there will probably be a pretty big stink.
Non-binding resolutions are non-binding... but they also represent the will of the people and politicians that gleefully ignore non-binding resolutions do so with a risk of failing to be re-elected.
Are you absolutely sure people aren't having a lend of you?
Or that there's a translation problem -- that they're insisting that it 'creates' an hour of sunlight during the part of the day that's most useful for them? (Implicitly acknowledging they lose that at the other end.)
If it's not these, then I weep. People's view of how the world (and moon) fits within the solar system must be severely broken.
The most intelligent person I know refused to believe me when I said that there would be fewer daylight hours in the winter when he visited me in the north. Of course, he was smart enough to research it on his own and come to the correct conclusion, but it was an entirely foreign concept to him.
That being said, I also know plenty of people who understand the concept perfectly, but also insist they will "gain" an hour of sunlight in their day if we use DST year-round. Why? Because they're right! Where I live, in the winter, the sun rises before many people wake up, but sets in the early afternoon. Keep DST year-round, and you experience an extra hour of sunlight--even if you're not technically gaining it.
One could argue that we should simply be waking up earlier and going to bed earlier, but that's a hard pattern to follow when nothing is open early in the morning.
I've actually adopted the Japanese Buddhist clock. There are 12 hours: 6 during daylight hours and 6 during night time hours. The actual time of each hour depends on the season and the latitude. Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_clock#The_traditional...
I really like it. There is actually an Android app on Fdroid: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.aragaer.jtt/ although it unfortunately doesn't have alarms -- I really need to get off my butt and contribute that feature. I set my alarm so that I get up in time to go for a walk at sunrise.
unfortunately, I'm sure. Really dumb things like the Earth is flat are catching on and one member of my extended social circle is absolutely sure that the Earth is bigger than the Sun. She's a holistic healer but has a psychology degree from a flagship state university.
These are people who don't build facts from bottom up but rather support their version of facts based on intuition and desire. Though we all do this to a degree, some will change if confronted with solid evidence but many simply will forever stick with what they feel is true, including that changing the clocks creates an additional hour of sunlight. Even pointing out that it is not as light when they get up Sunday morning after the clock change as it was at the same time the day before, they don't care because they know in the summer it is bright at that time in the morning. The tilt of the Earth on its axis is as fantasy to them as the flat Earth is to the rest of us.
DST doesn't create more sunlight, but it absolutely creates more opportunities to get sunlight, allowing more time to enjoy outside activities after work. e.g. physical exercise.
I commute to work everyday on my bicycle through a large city park, all year long, rain or shine, night or day. It's about 3.5 miles one way. I've been doing this for roughly 5 years. I personally look forward to DST just for warmer commute home and not having to night ride with bike lights.
It's astonishing the difference in outside activity I've seen when DST is observed or not.
When DST is not observed, outside activity in the park on my commute effectively evaporates at 5PM except for headlamp runners (which, curiously, are mostly groups of older folks).
When DST is observed, outside activity flourishes well until 8PM.
I have not observed any difference in morning outside activity on my commutes with or without DST. I think people are just more likely to do outside activities in the evening as opposed to the morning, most likely because mornings are colder (far colder in the winter), and on weekdays most start work in the morning and/or have to drop their kids off at school, leaving little time in the morning for outdoor activities.
Are you saying you see this difference between the week before and the week after the DST transition? Because obviously there will be more activity outside in the evening in general when DST is observed, because that is in the summer. That would be the case even if there was no DST transition.
> Georgia is putting DST on the ballot this November. Voters will have a choice to stay with DST, going to standard time year around, or asking Congress for permission to stay on DST year around.
At least Georgia is far enough south that year around DST might not have any serious negatives. There are people trying to do that here in Washington which is far enough north that it has serious negatives.
Year around DST would put sunrise in the middle of winter at nearly 9 AM at Seattle's latitude, putting nearly everyone's morning commute deep in the dark.
Without DST in the winter, of course, the commute home is in the dark, but I'd argue that this is better for three reasons.
1. Evening dark is generally warmer than morning dark. There is less chance of ice on the roads. It will have been melted by sun or rain during the day, and won't reform until it gets cold again in the early morning.
2. The evening commute tends to be more spread out than the morning commute. Putting the morning commute in the dark combines the worst conditions with the highest density. Putting the evening commute in the dark instead combines the worst lighting with lower density so is probably safer.
3. The morning commute overlaps with children going to school. The evening commute is mostly after children are home.
Sunrise at 9 AM is also bad for our sleep cycles. Our cycles sync to sunrise. The earlier we have to get up relative to sunrise the less healthy it is. (This could be fixed under year round DST by having businesses open/close later in winter, so our commutes happen later, but then we are essentially where we are now except we do it by changing schedules twice a year instead of changing clocks).
Furthermore, in the middle of winter here DST would not really actually get you much, if any, extra usable daylight after work. By the time you get home and have dinner, it is still going to be getting dark. Feb 1 sunset this year was at 5:10 PM, for example. Year around DST would make that 6:10 PM.
They literally can't stay on DST. Florida already basically passed this, but it's held up in Congress as is tradition. Check out the Sunshine Protection Act.
So, right now states can't stay on DST because federal law doesn't currently allow it. It does however allow permanent standard time, and petitioning for change of time zone. So, I wish Georgia, Florida, et al would just give Congress a big middle finger by switching to permanent Atlantic Standard Time. Maybe then they'd realize how silly this all is.
> So, I wish Georgia, Florida, et al would just give Congress a big middle finger by switching to permanent Atlantic Standard Time. Maybe then they'd realize how silly this all is.
States can't unilaterally adopt a different time zone. The boundaries are regulated by the feds.
Correct, but they can actually petition the feds to change their time zone. Whether or not that is likely, I don't know. It seems like something that would be very rare.
Illinois already passed a bill to do the same just this year, but I don’t know what the deal is with Congress. I think only Arizona currently has permission.
>If we stayed on Standard Time throughout the year, sunrise here in the Chicago area would be between 4:15 and 4:30 am from the middle of May through the middle of July. And if you check the times for civil twilight, which is when it’s bright enough to see without artificial light, you’ll find that that starts half an hour earlier. This is insane and a complete waste of sunlight.
>If, by the way, you think the solution is to stay on DST throughout the year, I can only tell you that we tried that back in the 70s and it didn’t turn out well. Sunrise here in Chicago was after 8:00 am, which put school children out on the street at bus stops before dawn in the dead of winter. It was the same on the East Coast. Nobody liked that.
Changing clocks is a hassle but the alternatives are worse.
If you shift school an hour later and subsequently office schedules an hour later as well, aren't you reinventing standard time but calling it something else?
Don't DST in practice make school start an hour later parts of the year? Where I live it don't get dark for 2-3 months during the summer and it was never easy to get up in the mornings. The same at the middle of winter there is no sunrise so not possible for schools to start after dawn.
I think I did read some place that it was more connected to that our sleep pattern isn't accurate with 24h, so if we get up later we would go to be later and be back to square one.
> Don't DST in practice make school start an hour later parts of the year?
It's about half and half, when you consider the school year starts in daylight saving time, switches to standard, and then switches back. I don't see how changing the time kids go to school twice in the year is beneficial. And I certainly don't see how sleep-deprived bus drivers in the spring are an acceptable risk.
It's funny how the majority of people can't get politicians to undo DST for decades now. Makes the tiny change in healthcare for some look like a major miracle.
I think they just altered the DST start/end days, I remember it used to end before Halloween until too many kids got hit or killed by cars in the dark.
In the US the dates of DST were changed during the Bush administration as a cheap political gimmick to make it look like he was doing something about energy prices. It didn't help much in that regard but caused plenty of chaos in the IT sector where a significant amount of systems were designed to adjust twice a year for DST but weren't designed for the date span of DST to change.
From what I understand there are still a lot of hospitals that have to switch to paper twice a year because of DST issues. If I remember right it is mainly Epic.
I recognize that my position is uncommon, but I am in favor of what I call "2-DST" (two minus DST), a position which recognizes that DST is fundamentally backwards. Fewer daylight hours in the winter means we should turn the clocks forward in the winter, not the summer!
"2-DST" is permanent daylight savings, except we additionally set the clocks an hour forward for the winter (just like we do now, in March).
More opportunity for sunlight. More outdoor activity in the evenings. Less electricity. Less crime. Better for most businesses and most people.
I always find these arguments kind of weird. Whether we turn or stop turning the clocks forwards/backwards doesn't mean we have to keep business hours the exact same, or even keep them static.
Must be a US thing, what with all its timezones. China has a single timezone, and doesn't observe DST. Do you think that means people in the extreme west of china have to wake up at the exact same time as people in Beijing?
In fact, according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Time), the Xinjiang region of China has two timezones used concurrently. I guess people just wake up twice: Once at 7am, and again at 7am two hours later :)
Anyway my point is, you could have the US go on a single timezone and stop observing DST. Ok, well, you don't have to open your business at 8am across the country… if your new TZ is based on Austin TX, you just open at 8am in Austin, 7am in NYC and 10am in LA.
Want to give your employees more daylight in winter? Shift business hours by an hour.
Yes, I agree. Keep the clock time all the same all year round; but businesses & government offices should change timings like 8-5 in Winter & 7-4 in Summer (Numbers just an example). When I was a kid in Punjab India, our schools used to shift the timings by one hour in April & September; means duration of school stays same, but it is more aligned to Solar Time twice a year. Summers like 7am-2pm; Winters 8am-3pm.
> the Xinjiang region of China has two timezones used concurrently
And it's a complete mess. If you think daylight savings is complicated, wait until two geographically distant regions are on the same time but a different time.
> Want to give your employees more daylight in winter?
Rarely is it the employers wanting this, it is the employees.
I agree in principle, but if the goal really is to give working people more daylight to enjoy, it's not really practical for something like this to happen bottom up.
Businesses' open hours more often than not depend on the open hours of their suppliers and their customers. Not really possible to make a local change and expect everyone to follow. Much easier if everyone changes simultaneously.
I’m a big fan of everyone in the world just using UTC and calling it a day. A meeting at 0700 is exactly what you think it means. But I also never expect it to happen.
Okay, it's "1700Z" and you're at work: are the folks at the Singapore office in yet? If New York's business hours are 14-22Z, what are Berlin's? Bangalore's? Tokyo's? Seattle's?
At least with timezones you can do some simple +/- math and see if you end up in the typical '9-5L' range:
Keeping track of the buisness hours of a specific office is way easier than keeping track of their timezone, business hours and then convert your local time to their time to see if they're actually open.
You can. But especially if you don't have frequent contact with other timezones it is very hard to keep track about how far they are ahead or behind your local time. This gets even harder with DST.
While this might be easy if you're just in different US timezones, but it gets increasingly harder with larger distances.
You still have to know exactly the same amount of information to know if someone is working or not, but you only have to know one piece of information per moment, because "what time is it now?" is the same for everyone.
If everyone has the same frame of reference, you don't get coordinate translation errors.
Going to work on Tuesday and coming home on Wednesday will be the new norm for about a third of the world.
> I always find these arguments kind of weird. Whether we turn or stop turning the clocks forwards/backwards doesn't mean we have to keep business hours the exact same, or even keep them static.
The entire reason we have summer/winter time is that changing the time is easier than changing business hours.
Uh, changing business hours is pretty simple, you know. Over here business hours routinely change during holidays for examples (various businesses open/close later or earlier depending on their client and employee needs). If it's easy for two weeks I don't see why it'd be harder for six months.
You'll also have more car accidents, heart attacks, sleep deprivation, etc. People, especially adolescents, should be able to sleep in more and given societies current 9-5 scheduling, the sooner the sun goes down (by the clock) the more sleep that people generally get.
Anecdotally: in places like Michigan where it's dark by 6pm in the winters, darkness really has no correlation with sleeping hours.
"2-DST" would actually make it easier for working people to align their sleep schedule with the daylight.
"2-DST" would make it so that people have to get up much earlier in the day though, right? From my experience, in places up north people find it harder to wake up early in the winter because the morning darkness (I'm sure the cold doesn't help either).
At high latitudes, it doesn't get light until so late that you will reasonably never wake up in daylight in the winter. But moving the light later would make it more likely that you can get out and actually see some light as opposed to going to work when it's dark and getting out when it's dark again.
It's not about waking up in daylight. It's about a large chuck of the population waking up earlier than is healthy.
When you have research showing that the western edge of a timezone is worse off health- and sleep-wise, it is clear that a policy pushing people to get up earlier is not good.
Additionally, the OP seems to indicate the increased accidents are due to issues we have adjusting to the time change. You can certainly argue we should get rid of the time change altogether, but 2-DST would have the same time changes as our current system. Maybe there's an increased risk of traffic accidents as a result of increased evening activity. But I'd argue that's a problem with our society's unhealthy dependence on cars, rather than with 2-DST.
While the article is specifically looking at the effects of the transition to DST, it references the fact that there are adverse effects of time zones besides just the transition or the use of cars. Here is one of their references: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mikhail_Borisenkov/publ...
Others have also attempted to estimate the amount of sleep of people in eastern vs western edges of time zones and they have found it to be some 20 minutes.
Suppose you're running a business that requires physical presense for 8 hours/day, but the hours don't have to align with anyone else's. Can you propose a formula that, given sunrise & sunset times, gives optimum work hours?
I've been proposing this for ages, under the name "Nighttime Savings", which doesn't make sense, but doesn't make any less sense than "Daylight Savings".
I, for one, would like to wake up when the sun is up, and go to sleep when the sun is down. Isn't this this the same website where everyone is familiar with Why We Sleep? Standard Time forever
Standard time isn't perfect though. The more west someone is in a time zone, the less sleep they often get because the sun goes down later in the evening. Some have estimated it to be as much as 20 minutes of sleep less, which is very significant over time.
What we really need is for schools and work to start later in the day for a larger number of people so that the morning can be a time to sleep in, or if you are a morning person do your morning things.
I almost think that getting rid of time zones in the US might make it so that people are more cognizant of where the sun is and so that society runs on a more local time.
In the age of smartphones, there is no reason two dozen 2D time zones couldn’t exist in the US, with small shifts in time every day at 3 am to keep seven am as the dawn. Humans were meant to rise with the sun.
It does have something to do with the light though because you have a natural circadian rhythm that is disturbed if you are forced to get up earlier than your body should and for a lot of people that would mean that driving early in the morning, even if they have been doing it all year round is going to be more dangerous.
Genuine question to the experts: What are the chances that this effect is caused by how we attribute the accidents to time intervals? I haven't read the whole paper, but when they say accident rate is increased by 6%, is that counted by 24-hour intervals? Or by calendar days?
DST is a very sensitive topic, so better use a throwaway ;) Here are examples what would happen if DST were abolished:
If DST ('+1') is adopted permanently, the main effects will be during winter in that sunrise is now an hour later (bad) and sunset as well (which is ok). An example for Berlin, in December: if sunrise used to be at 8:00 (8 a.m.) normal time it is now an hour later at 9:00 (a.m.) (spend some time further north and you will know how much this would suck). Sunset that used to be around 16:15 (4:15 p.m.) is now at 17:15 o'clock (5:15 p.m.) (good/ok).
If normal time ('+0') is adopted, the interesting effects are during summer: sunrise is now an hour earlier than it used to be with DST and the same of course with sunset.
Example for Berlin, in July again: sunrise that used to be at 5:00 o'clock (a.m.) in DST is now at 4:00 (a.m.) (bad), sunset that used to be at 21:30 o'clock (9:30 p.m.) is now at 20:30 o'clock (8:30 p.m.) (bad if you like spending long summer evenings outside).
From my experience most people do not actually hate either, they just do not like the sudden transition. Shifting the daily routing to later hours, especially the sleeping time, is not that bad in autumn.
Changing it forward in the spring is harder but not really a problem if you gradually change your sleeping and meal times in advance. I'm currently at it by going to bed a bit earlier, getting up earlier and (trying to) change eating times. Lunch is a bit problematic but breakfast and dinner do not affect others so much, so it's easier to shift them.
My work schedule on one side and the additional effort on the other (coordinating with my wife, changing alarm regularly, matching that with public transport.
This is specific to the latitude of Berlin, though. I grew up in northern Sweden and in the winter there is no amount of clock adjustment that will make you avoid your morning activities being in the dark. But if you did use DST permanently, you'd at least have a slightly better chance of seeing some light when you get out of school or work.
Now that we have so much digital we should experiment with a gradual shifting clock that spreads the time change out over the entire year. Clock that follows the tilt of the Earth. It sounds crazy and traditional clocks and watches and cars would all suffer but someone will come up with something like this, even if just conceptual, and it will be cool. Just wait!
And so the semiannual discourse about DST begins, only to be forgotten a week after the clocks are changed. See you all again in November where we discuss, and again fail to implement any change in policy.
Now that we have so many digital devices with GPS, why not go with continuous time zones? In the sense that if I move a certain distance to the east the time will change by a certain number of minutes, rather than chunking everything into hours. Seems much more accurate and useful.
101 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadIn any case, the solution is to pick one timeframe and stop changing it.
> observed that spring DST significantly increased fatal MVA risk by 6%, which was more pronounced in the morning and in locations further west within a time zone. DST-associated MVA risk increased even in the afternoon hours, despite longer daylight hours. The MVA risk increase waned in the week subsequent to DST, and there were no effects of the fall-back transition to Standard Time (ST) on MVA risk, further supporting the hypothesis that DST-transition-associated, preventable circadian misalignment and sleep deprivation might underlie MVA risk increases.
> and there were no effects of the fall-back transition to Standard Time (ST) on MVA risk
EDIT: It seems our assumption was correct, at least for the UK:
> There is substantial evidence that fewer people would be killed and seriously injured on Great Britain’s roads if this country were to put the clocks forward by one hour throughout the year. The Department should take the lead in re- examining the practice of changing clocks at the end of British Summer Time with other central Government departments.
I wonder why the OP study (using US data) found something different?
Source: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmpu...
London: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/uk/london
Chicago: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/chicago
Assuming my co-workers are typical, workday also seems to end more like 5:30pm in London vs 5pm in the US.
Restricting the topic to just DST changes: considering modern society sadly is obsessed with clocks, DST is IMO the best way to maximize how much of the waking hours of people are during sunlight. DST itself isn't the problem, the problem is that apparently people don't get enough time to adjust. So why not introduce a national holiday twice a year, call it 'DST day', so everyone gets an extra day to adjust. I guess that would go a long way to alleviate the negative effects. Obviously then all of a sudden it's not about fatal traffic accidents anymore, but about economic effects and money... :-(
UTC would be great if it weren't for how everyone wants to think of E.G. 8AM or 9AM or whatever as a common start time and then uses DST to try and adjust the clocks rather than the times people do things.
The current time isn't particularly useful either, noon isn't even directly tied to the solar apex in most places (due to the timezones and more complex orbit / tilt interactions).
If London was in the same time zone, I'd have to ascertain, somehow, what 0800 actually means in terms of the workday, and multiply that across every time zone I have to confer with (and there are a lot).
No thanks. I like knowing that 5 pm means more-or-less the same thing everywhere except Western China, which happily enough doesn't really come up in my day-to-day life.
You are right that it is nice to now what 5 pm means pretty much everywhere but Western China, but that same sentiment can be expressed by saying early evening everywhere including Western China.
Even in the best case, you don't really manage simplify anything, you apply the same offsets, except now everyone on the west coast wakes up on one weekday and goes to sleep on the next, not just the ones who get to bed after midnight. The change happens right at the end of the business day, rather than outside business hours. Every day.
"Uh do you mean... calendar Tuesday, or uh Tuesday Tuesday?"
Repeated over half of the globe, forever.
I do a lot of remote meetings with people all over the globe, I work for a remote company, and I do. not. want. this.
There could be some confusion if you are talking with people far away, but that already exists. The sort of confusion that would come up would just be slightly different.
I propose overnight on the first Sunday of a month. For example, the week before, in spring (Northern hemisphere) soccer (or whatever activity) practice is at 16:00, the week after at 16:30 or 17:00 or whatever. In fall, the reverse, but the schedules all change on the same day. (Outliers will happen - this is a 90:10 suggestion, not 100:0.)
Think of all the families with 2 or 3 kids who have 2, 3, or 4 different activities each week, all at different times. Do we really want their schedules to potentially change in every week of the month? Yes, super-soccer mom or dad could cope, but why not try to keep it simpler?
You mean people want to think about hours in a way that is useful to them where they live? Doesn't sound crazy.
If everyone moved to UTC you wouldn't solve any real problems. Sure, everyone in New York could get used to their day starting at noon or whatever (to what benefit?) but if you wanted to schedule a meeting with someone in spain (or california) you would still have to figure out the time change to make it a reasonable time for you both.
Any way you slice it, you're just pushing the problem around to different places.
There isn't a problem. There are many problems. Changes in strategy don't have to solve them all. It is entirely reasonable to prioritize which problem(s) get more attention when there are more than one. That's what this is about, prioritization, and an implicit recognition that one size does not fit all.
At least people will be less inclined to use local time for non-local schedule, and will be able to tell time unambiguously.
We did get used to the day starting at a weird time for no particular reason, and whenever you change jobs you'll get used to a slightly different time anyway.
I don't see how it's more useful the way it is now than any other way. This is like trying to justify that moving summer holidays by one day would disrupt everyone's way of thinking.
The article points out that western edges of time zones are hit harder by clock changes. Other research also shows that they are in general sleeping less on western edges because the sun goes down later and they still have to get up at the same time as eastern edges.
Because of this, while all-year DST would be better than what we have, it is still worse for public health than all-year standard time which is maybe worse than UTC (as people will start thinking more about the sun and maybe in 30 minute chunks instead of hours).
Non-binding resolutions are non-binding... but they also represent the will of the people and politicians that gleefully ignore non-binding resolutions do so with a risk of failing to be re-elected.
Or that there's a translation problem -- that they're insisting that it 'creates' an hour of sunlight during the part of the day that's most useful for them? (Implicitly acknowledging they lose that at the other end.)
If it's not these, then I weep. People's view of how the world (and moon) fits within the solar system must be severely broken.
That being said, I also know plenty of people who understand the concept perfectly, but also insist they will "gain" an hour of sunlight in their day if we use DST year-round. Why? Because they're right! Where I live, in the winter, the sun rises before many people wake up, but sets in the early afternoon. Keep DST year-round, and you experience an extra hour of sunlight--even if you're not technically gaining it.
One could argue that we should simply be waking up earlier and going to bed earlier, but that's a hard pattern to follow when nothing is open early in the morning.
I really like it. There is actually an Android app on Fdroid: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.aragaer.jtt/ although it unfortunately doesn't have alarms -- I really need to get off my butt and contribute that feature. I set my alarm so that I get up in time to go for a walk at sunrise.
These are people who don't build facts from bottom up but rather support their version of facts based on intuition and desire. Though we all do this to a degree, some will change if confronted with solid evidence but many simply will forever stick with what they feel is true, including that changing the clocks creates an additional hour of sunlight. Even pointing out that it is not as light when they get up Sunday morning after the clock change as it was at the same time the day before, they don't care because they know in the summer it is bright at that time in the morning. The tilt of the Earth on its axis is as fantasy to them as the flat Earth is to the rest of us.
I commute to work everyday on my bicycle through a large city park, all year long, rain or shine, night or day. It's about 3.5 miles one way. I've been doing this for roughly 5 years. I personally look forward to DST just for warmer commute home and not having to night ride with bike lights.
It's astonishing the difference in outside activity I've seen when DST is observed or not.
When DST is not observed, outside activity in the park on my commute effectively evaporates at 5PM except for headlamp runners (which, curiously, are mostly groups of older folks).
When DST is observed, outside activity flourishes well until 8PM.
I have not observed any difference in morning outside activity on my commutes with or without DST. I think people are just more likely to do outside activities in the evening as opposed to the morning, most likely because mornings are colder (far colder in the winter), and on weekdays most start work in the morning and/or have to drop their kids off at school, leaving little time in the morning for outdoor activities.
At least Georgia is far enough south that year around DST might not have any serious negatives. There are people trying to do that here in Washington which is far enough north that it has serious negatives.
Year around DST would put sunrise in the middle of winter at nearly 9 AM at Seattle's latitude, putting nearly everyone's morning commute deep in the dark.
Without DST in the winter, of course, the commute home is in the dark, but I'd argue that this is better for three reasons.
1. Evening dark is generally warmer than morning dark. There is less chance of ice on the roads. It will have been melted by sun or rain during the day, and won't reform until it gets cold again in the early morning.
2. The evening commute tends to be more spread out than the morning commute. Putting the morning commute in the dark combines the worst conditions with the highest density. Putting the evening commute in the dark instead combines the worst lighting with lower density so is probably safer.
3. The morning commute overlaps with children going to school. The evening commute is mostly after children are home.
Sunrise at 9 AM is also bad for our sleep cycles. Our cycles sync to sunrise. The earlier we have to get up relative to sunrise the less healthy it is. (This could be fixed under year round DST by having businesses open/close later in winter, so our commutes happen later, but then we are essentially where we are now except we do it by changing schedules twice a year instead of changing clocks).
Furthermore, in the middle of winter here DST would not really actually get you much, if any, extra usable daylight after work. By the time you get home and have dinner, it is still going to be getting dark. Feb 1 sunset this year was at 5:10 PM, for example. Year around DST would make that 6:10 PM.
So, right now states can't stay on DST because federal law doesn't currently allow it. It does however allow permanent standard time, and petitioning for change of time zone. So, I wish Georgia, Florida, et al would just give Congress a big middle finger by switching to permanent Atlantic Standard Time. Maybe then they'd realize how silly this all is.
States can't unilaterally adopt a different time zone. The boundaries are regulated by the feds.
>If we stayed on Standard Time throughout the year, sunrise here in the Chicago area would be between 4:15 and 4:30 am from the middle of May through the middle of July. And if you check the times for civil twilight, which is when it’s bright enough to see without artificial light, you’ll find that that starts half an hour earlier. This is insane and a complete waste of sunlight.
>If, by the way, you think the solution is to stay on DST throughout the year, I can only tell you that we tried that back in the 70s and it didn’t turn out well. Sunrise here in Chicago was after 8:00 am, which put school children out on the street at bus stops before dawn in the dead of winter. It was the same on the East Coast. Nobody liked that.
Changing clocks is a hassle but the alternatives are worse.
I think I did read some place that it was more connected to that our sleep pattern isn't accurate with 24h, so if we get up later we would go to be later and be back to square one.
It's about half and half, when you consider the school year starts in daylight saving time, switches to standard, and then switches back. I don't see how changing the time kids go to school twice in the year is beneficial. And I certainly don't see how sleep-deprived bus drivers in the spring are an acceptable risk.
I think they just altered the DST start/end days, I remember it used to end before Halloween until too many kids got hit or killed by cars in the dark.
"2-DST" is permanent daylight savings, except we additionally set the clocks an hour forward for the winter (just like we do now, in March).
More opportunity for sunlight. More outdoor activity in the evenings. Less electricity. Less crime. Better for most businesses and most people.
Must be a US thing, what with all its timezones. China has a single timezone, and doesn't observe DST. Do you think that means people in the extreme west of china have to wake up at the exact same time as people in Beijing?
In fact, according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Time), the Xinjiang region of China has two timezones used concurrently. I guess people just wake up twice: Once at 7am, and again at 7am two hours later :)
Anyway my point is, you could have the US go on a single timezone and stop observing DST. Ok, well, you don't have to open your business at 8am across the country… if your new TZ is based on Austin TX, you just open at 8am in Austin, 7am in NYC and 10am in LA.
Want to give your employees more daylight in winter? Shift business hours by an hour.
And it's a complete mess. If you think daylight savings is complicated, wait until two geographically distant regions are on the same time but a different time.
> Want to give your employees more daylight in winter?
Rarely is it the employers wanting this, it is the employees.
Businesses' open hours more often than not depend on the open hours of their suppliers and their customers. Not really possible to make a local change and expect everyone to follow. Much easier if everyone changes simultaneously.
* https://qntm.org/abolish
Okay, it's "1700Z" and you're at work: are the folks at the Singapore office in yet? If New York's business hours are 14-22Z, what are Berlin's? Bangalore's? Tokyo's? Seattle's?
At least with timezones you can do some simple +/- math and see if you end up in the typical '9-5L' range:
* https://everytimezone.com
But with only-UTC (as much I set my servers to it), you still have to keep a table of business hours.
If everyone has the same frame of reference, you don't get coordinate translation errors.
Going to work on Tuesday and coming home on Wednesday will be the new norm for about a third of the world.
This has been debated before:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902765
The entire reason we have summer/winter time is that changing the time is easier than changing business hours.
When you have research showing that the western edge of a timezone is worse off health- and sleep-wise, it is clear that a policy pushing people to get up earlier is not good.
Others have also attempted to estimate the amount of sleep of people in eastern vs western edges of time zones and they have found it to be some 20 minutes.
What we really need is for schools and work to start later in the day for a larger number of people so that the morning can be a time to sleep in, or if you are a morning person do your morning things.
I almost think that getting rid of time zones in the US might make it so that people are more cognizant of where the sun is and so that society runs on a more local time.
isn't this even worst in DST? Maybe I'm thinking about it backwards...
Google time or Apple time?
I also think it would make it harder than it already is for people to coordinate multi-time zone activities such as VTC.
The chronobiologists say permanent Standard Time is the best thing for humans:
* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...
* https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-turn-back-th...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronobiology
Edit: down vote all you want, that won't change the peer-reviewed published papers.
If DST ('+1') is adopted permanently, the main effects will be during winter in that sunrise is now an hour later (bad) and sunset as well (which is ok). An example for Berlin, in December: if sunrise used to be at 8:00 (8 a.m.) normal time it is now an hour later at 9:00 (a.m.) (spend some time further north and you will know how much this would suck). Sunset that used to be around 16:15 (4:15 p.m.) is now at 17:15 o'clock (5:15 p.m.) (good/ok).
If normal time ('+0') is adopted, the interesting effects are during summer: sunrise is now an hour earlier than it used to be with DST and the same of course with sunset.
Example for Berlin, in July again: sunrise that used to be at 5:00 o'clock (a.m.) in DST is now at 4:00 (a.m.) (bad), sunset that used to be at 21:30 o'clock (9:30 p.m.) is now at 20:30 o'clock (8:30 p.m.) (bad if you like spending long summer evenings outside).
From my experience most people do not actually hate either, they just do not like the sudden transition. Shifting the daily routing to later hours, especially the sleeping time, is not that bad in autumn. Changing it forward in the spring is harder but not really a problem if you gradually change your sleeping and meal times in advance. I'm currently at it by going to bed a bit earlier, getting up earlier and (trying to) change eating times. Lunch is a bit problematic but breakfast and dinner do not affect others so much, so it's easier to shift them.
I remember, school classes were starting at 8 and I exited home at 7. Venus was beautiful.
As long as we are not just able to gradually transition I prefer to get rid of it and I'm quite happy that it's going to happen.
Nonetheless if sun goes down at 4 instead of 5 I wouldn't feel any issue with it. Winter is dark I leave in dark and go home at dark.