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?
“but then things would be different from when i was a child and that makes me scared and angry.”
DST is the time in the summer. I favor year-round DST so that the sun doesn’t set at 4pm.
Congress would actually have to do their jobs and pass legislation without throwing 500 riders onto it.
They literally have it completely approved, it’s just that they’re waiting to use it as the base for whatever else they want to get passed.
In theory, individual states could choose to not do daylight savings time. Two states already don’t use it and there was a proposal for Florida to get rid of it and move to the Atlantic Time Zone.
Yup. It’s switching to permanent DST (which is what most people want) that requires Congressional approval. A state can switch to permanent standard time on their own.
We keep DST for more months than ST so I think more people like it more.
I kinda think it runs backwards, making the sun set even earlier in the clock day during winter. So much more dispiriting to come home in the dark than to go to work in the dark.
My argument for ending it is that you can’t make days longer or shorter by moving the clock around, but I think we should just keep adding weeks onto DST and taking them away from ST until eventually it’s just DST. But settling on either scheme would be ok, better than switching back and forth.
We already tried year-round DST in the 70s. It didn’t last through the first year because kids were getting hit by cars on the way to school in the early morning darkness.
This has got to be bullshit. Or Americans are morons. There are so many places in the world where kids go to school in the dark anyways that I can’t even wrap my head around how this causes kids to be hit by cars.
Oh well, kids don’t walk to school in america anymore anyways so whatever.
For starters, those places have sidewalks, and street lamps, and generally care about pedestrians.
Some kids are straight walking on the side of a 4 lane highway to school right now.
But to be clear: the solution is not changing the time but adding pedestrian infrastructure. It would solve many more problems than kids getting hit.
/agree
Even with ST, my youngest goes to school in the dark all winter. Just now, as it’s light when he goes out, they’re about to swap it to DST and he’ll be in the dark again for a couple of weeks.
“Losing” that short window of morning sunlight is nothing to me. Gaining the ability to have normal sleep patterns and not changing the clocks is infinitely better.
I do not care what the time is, as long as it stays consistent. My sleep is fucked up for 2x2 weeks every fucking year for no good reason.
Or Americans are morons
You must be new here
Yeah but it’s dark in the morning anyway. Elementary school here starts at like 7am, that is a bigger problem than the DST. I thought they hated it because they switched it back in January? If it just never changed I’m sure it would not feel so shocking.
Already we do 8 months of DST and only 4 of EST here.
Why the fuck do schools start so early and let out so early? It’s like everything is engineered by some asshole trying to make everyone miserable.
Agreed. I am so glad my kids are grown, but I can still remember personally walking to school so early. It’s nonsense. Also here if they were sensible they’d run school through the summer (when it’s too hot to do much) and give the kids long winter and spring breaks instead (when there is more going on here). But nobody can accuse the last 20 years of Florida’s government of being sensible. Not since Lawton Chiles have we had an actual good governor. Locally it’s more hit & miss but state level it’s been a string of misses.
So we issue Little Johnny a retroreflective PT belt, and/or start the school day 30 minutes later on the west end of each time zone. Problem solved.
It’s not the 1970’s anymore. The fact that a bunch of idiot boomers hated change is no reason to keep this idiot system.
People didn’t like the fact that it was still nearly dark when they got their lunch break at work either.
Except haven’t we delayed school start times significantly compared to the 70s now?
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.
That the boomers hated it is all the more reason to try again.
This is the most reasonable approach, and it meshes with medical studies about how DST affects our mental and physical health. We don’t need sunlight until 9 or 10 pm, and the sun is supposed to be approximately overhead at noon, not 1pm.
We took my in-laws back to my father-in-law’s hometown on the west coast of France last year and it was kind of wild to have it not be dark out until 10 pm. A lot of times we didn’t have dinner until 8:30 or 9 because it didn’t feel that late.
If you’re getting sunlight at 10PM, you live on the western end of your time zone. In your location during winter, the sun is overhead closer to 1pm than noon.
Your particular jurisdiction might be better served by joining the timezone to your west.
Or more likely, you live in the northern US, or Canada. The further north, the more extreme the length of the long and short days are, which explains much of the split in whether people want to go with standard or DST when debating this.
The idea of having narrower time zones, say by adding a new one, is an interesting idea to mitigate the large difference in how people experience the time zone based on if they are at the east or west edge. Shifting the existing ones around would only change who is affected but not how many.
Morning accidents increased and schoolchildren were injured or killed.
With car culture as it is now, that’ll just be seen as business as usual.
Its not like dead children has ever stopped the US before
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’m in AZ, I think y’all are so dumb for doing that(not that any of you have a choice). I don’t want to live anywhere that fakes the time. The days change throughout the year, they get shorter and longer , it’s natural, get over it.
The further north you are, the bigger the discrepancy between hours of light and hours of darkness becomes.
Because the hour of light in the evening is nicer than the hour in the morning.
Much rather have the hour later than in the morning.
I prefer the hour of light in the morning, hands down. Helps me get out of bed and start my day.
Now, if we could somehow just make it so sunrise was like 645am in perpetuity, I’m on board with that, but the stupid sun keeps moving!
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Buy a head lamp. Same logic, no?
Nope.
Oh, good point!
The only point I’m making is it’s personal preference and I’m not sure we will ever find a solution where everyone is happy.
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Those are fair points, but the workday and my kids’ schooldays exist, and my workday and other parents’ workdays all coexist with this school day, and it probably does come at the expense of RC planing and hiking a couple months a year (except weekends), which also happen to be the months folks are most likely to not want to spend time outside because it sucks, although that’s just my opinion from Jersey, and I’m sure there’s places that are more temperate and allowing for outdoor activities in December through February.
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That is crazy, especially considering we’ve got places in the US that do permanent time.
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
Where I live, in December it’s dark when I go to work and dark when I get out. That’s just how it is, so who cares?
Meanwhile in June I can’t get to sleep due to they sky still being bright and blocking melatonin production until about 11pm. If we got rid of DST it’d get dark at 10pm.
And I don’t care if sunrise would end up 4:30am. It’s easy to set up blackout curtains in the bedroom to stay asleep.
It still helps, it’s just not as big a difference as further south.
I’d rather have sunlight when I get home off of work to be able to do stuff outside before it gets way too cold and dark. In the mornings before work I typically don’t go outside so it can be dark
Yep. A lot easier to have blackout curtain in just your bedroom to stay asleep than it is to have them all over your house to build up melatonin in the evenings during summer
I’ve found people would either like change or not mind it.
But like you said, they can’t agree on which way so thus it is.
I honestly dgaf about any of it. I’m fine with the current system.
I read that some senator was working on a bill to permanently switch to half-DST, which is where we set our clocks to halfway between regular time and DST. I’ve been advocating for that forever so I hope it will at least get people thinking/talking about it. It should solve the argument between whether to permanently stay on one time or the other. Split the difference and just get it done already!
As a software developer, that idea can fuck right off. India being on a half hour is enough of a pain in the ass. 6 more half-off time zones is just too much.
I didn’t care until I had to take care of my niece. During half of the school year it’s dark outside going to the bus. And why are we fighting what nature intended our body clocks to be? I have to get up for work at 4:30AM, it’s hard even with blackout curtains to get the room dark at 8-9PM.
So why not keep time as a constant and if individual places want to change times they can do that
Even just single states can have vastly different sunrise and sunset times and changing 300m people’s schedules so that a few people can have a few extra minutes of sun in the morning for part of the year seems absolutely ridiculous
A local school district could very easily do a 1 hour shift as the sunrise gets later so that it properly aligns with their local school pickup times
Exactly! Why does no one ever consider changing the time they do something instead of making the whole country adjust to time change? I know with schools, maybe their starting times are geared to when parents have to be a work or something, but surely they can figure out how to adjust their particular schedules around their particular needs and leave the rest of us alone.
Is it something we need to do? I’ve never felt like it’s a big deal. I like the sunrise/sunset times in the summer and it would effect my life if that changed. I don’t like them in the winter but there’s no great alternative.
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.
I’ll give you the only argument I ever give for this.
Congress once voted to end it, the backlash from constituents was severe and they could not reimplement it fast enough.
But they changed it suddenly in January, instead of just not changing back in the fall. That was dumb.
No they enacted permanent DST in the 70s. OP is asking for arguments against ending DST. The backlash against permanent DST in the 70s was because kids going to school in the early morning darkness were being hit y cars.
They went about it in a stupid way and now we’re doomed for all time because it gets pointed to as proof we can never end DST 🥲
Congress once voted to end it, the backlash from
constituentsbusinesses was severe and they could not reimplement it fast enough.Ftfy. Fuck those greedy pricks
I think we should just use sidereal and let the hours of the day rotate smoothly over the year.
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?
Someone like RFK would be given the job of co-ordinating it.
