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.