France has year round DST and an hour on top during summer since 1940 and far less car accidents than the USA both in the morning and in the evening. So does Spain and Portugal but I'm too lazy to check since when. I don't think automobile accidents is a very good metric to evaluate the interest.
It's basically a trade off between light in the morning and the evening. When Britain tried, they saw that it was mainly impactless with regards to the total number of accidents. They still reverted.
> France has year round DST and an hour on top during summer since 1940 and far less car accidents than the USA both in the morning and in the evening.
In 2019, the European Sleep Research Society (ESRS), the European Biological Rhythms Society (EBRS), and the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) wrote a joint statement to the European Commission advocating for permanent establishment of a more natural time.
* https://esrs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/To_the_EU_Commiss...
This would mean France and Spain being in UTC/GMT, and (most of) Portugal being in UTC-1.
Actually, the document only argues for permanent CET and ending DST. It does not mention change of time zones.
The logic would be sound however. Social Jetlag is real. I for one loath DST and switching back to CET noticably improves my sleep and overall well being.
Everyone seems to be focusing on the school car accident. I was focusing more on "Over three months from December to March, public support dropped from 79% to 42%". People just don't like waking up super early in winter.
> France has year round DST and an hour on top during summer
That's a weird way of putting it, but sure. Spain is also famous for their absurdly "late" schedules (e.g. dinner at 11pm). People will naturally adjust if the baseline is offset like that. France does as well, but to a lesser degree. Importantly, both countries still observe the shift twice a year, because having a DST shift is actually popular (at high latitudes; obviously it makes no sense in the tropics).
> That's a weird way of putting it
France is offset by at least one hour from its actual time zone, Portugal by two. I don’t really see what’s weird here. It’s exactly the effect of year long DST. It goes all the way to two and three hours in summer.
Apparently people don’t really care about the winter mornings when they are used to it because approximately no one wants to get back to a normal time zone there. Some people are even arguing for keeping the even more extreme DST year long.
I will hazard that your stats from the 70s have everything to do with habits and very little to do with the actual effect of shifting time long term.