This seems like such a simple thing to me, and yet the US just can’t seem to get it done. What are the issues preventing this?
BC/Vancouver just removed it but made it DST year round. My only worry against that is that mornings would be hella dark. For where I live, sunrise in the winter (standard time) is around 7:55AM, meaning that’s crack of dawn first light. Spring forward, so 7:55 becomes 8:55, meaning our first sunlight of the day won’t be until about 9am. Now, our evenings will be a bit longer (sunset is around 4-4:30, so now 5-5:30, but still most people won’t even see sunrise.
A lot of people, schoolchildren included, are up way before sunrise anyway, regardless of where we put the clocks.
Personally, I’m just sick of moving back and forth. I don’t care what we change it to, just stop changing it. Where I live, we get 8 hours of daylight in the winter. Someone is always going to be in the dark sometime, no matter what we set our clocks to.
I used to be in the make-DST-permanent camp because I enjoy it being lighter later. Then I saw a set of US maps illustrating sunrises before 7am and sunsets after 5pm. Permanent DST completely hoses the western areas of the time zones. I can’t in good conscience support that option anymore. Ditch DST altogether, and just make standard time permanent.
Yeah in my area standard time would be better. The summer would be a bit more sane, I think sunset can be as late as 10:30 at the peak of summer, so losing an hour isn’t horrible there
Personally, I’d rather have it dark on the way to work than night before I get home.
DST shifts make more sense for higher latitude than it does for southern ones. ironically.
I lived in BC. It did suck to only have like 6 hours of full daylight. All of which were during the workday when you were inside anyway.
I wake up between 6 and 7am most weekdays, so the sun coming up at 8 vs 9am makes little difference to me.
We tried it once, and quickly went back, is one.
Might be a case of greener grass. Virtually none of us has lived without it, apart from Arizona, so we just don’t know what we have.
Unless that was a well organized and faithful attempt to switch, that shouldn’t prohibit us from trying again.
They last tried DST “year-round” starting in January 1974 and people quickly hated it, with support dropping from 79% before it started to 42% three months in. Morning accidents increased and schoolchildren were injured or killed.
I don’t necessarily love the idea of the sun starting to rise as early as 4am in the summer, but I think if we’re going to stay with one we might as well stick to standard time year-round. We’d still have light past 8 PM where I live and it would mean activities better for the dark could start earlier. I see places wanting to take advantage of the warm weather for things like outdoor movies but they can’t start until after 9.
pretty much.
the same issues all exist, they are just in the morning instead of in the evening.
if you are on DST in the winter in the north it will be dark at 6-8am when people going to school and work. instead of dark at 3-4pm when they come home. Everyone thinks they will be ‘happier’ that way, but once they experience they will be lamenting that it’s dark in the morning when they wake up and we should switch back.
Arizona is in the south, the daylight time shift isn’t as extreme. there is only 4 hour daylight difference, where as in NYC it’s 6 hours. And in Seattle it’s 8. In Miami it’s 3. DST shift doesn’t have much of an impact for Southern states as it does for northern ones.
But timezones are longitudinal and it would be bad for business, etc for Miami to be an hour off from NYC.
I personally would rather have more daylight in the mornings than in the evenings during winter. Makes it way easier to wake up. Maybe lots of other people feel the same way.
That only works at a certain latitude. Further north it remains dark in the morning anyway
Just hypothesizing here, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there was some union/club/cabal of industrial clock adjusters (you know, someone has to adjust the clocks of city halls etc) that spend a lot of money on ensuring that their members have a predictable income. I just made it up, and I have no reason for this claim beyond it being in line with how everything else works in the US. And Epstein was of course a high-ranking member of that too. And Bush somehow wasn’t.
Hey we only have about half the Clockwinder files, Bush could absolutely still show up
How big is the actual effect on most of the US anyway?
I mean, most of the US is located surprisingly far to the south (e.g. Washington lying on a same latitude as the southern tip of Italy, Los Angeles as Northern Africa), so I would assume it to be not that big a deal, as seasonal changes of daylight are limited?
I think we should just use sidereal and let the hours of the day rotate smoothly over the year.
Just shift it 30 mins instead of an hour to appease everyone.
The shift kills people tho…
Literally, a shit ton of heart attacks happen because people’s schedule changes all of a sudden. No, those would likely happen in the following months anyways, but them all happening at the same time overloads our medical system even when staffing is adjusted for it.
Just change it once and leave it.
This is the clear solution and I can’t believe it doesn’t get brought up more often.
[Citation greatly needed]
https://googlethatforyou.com/?q=heart+attack+daylight+savings
Take your pick.
I don’t get why we would want to stop doing it? You lose a single hour on one night of the year, and in exchange you get more sunlight for the entire winter. Like ???
There are some indications that those one hour switches can be dangerous because of the impact in those two days. I’m not saying it is clear, but there is impact. Both because the driving conditions improve with respect to lighting, but conversely because driver alertness is lower due to sleep troubles for the time change.
Personally I’ve never really bought the whole “more sunlight” thing. We get precisely the same amount. Of course, you mean during business hours but I just don’t feel that is very relevant to a broader society with more diverse schedules.
But that’s not how time works… You don’t ever get more sunlight, timeshifts just shift by an hour when that time is. Your 4pm sunset in the winter will now be 5pm. You’re not getting evening sun with a time shift. Similarly without the shift summer sunsets are well past 7pm during the summer. (I might have the winter times backwards.)
From what I understand, traffic collisions dramatically increase whenever there’s a time change. Any benefit that we ever got from having Daylight Savings Time died out around 70 years ago, so what’s the point in continuing something that no longer benefits us and is proven to be a safety issue to the general population? That we’re even debating this in 2026 really confuses me.
https://x.com/KOCOdamonlane/status/1868130056104513675/photo/1
That we’re even debating this in 2026 really confuses me.
You brought it up. Just look at the chart. Getting rid of Daylight Savings just makes things worse. With our current system, we get sunrises at a reasonable time and sunsets at a reasonable time. It’s not a positive change.
Is that chart hosted anywhere else?
