I'm in BC. The astro-nerd in me would have preferred to see permanent Standard Time instead of a permanent +1 offset. Instinctively, I think morning light is important to our biology for a daily reset and the solar cue of "high noon" is also a real thing. I'm sure I've read that sleep health experts have historically supported a change to permanent Standard Time, not DST.
I respect there are economic arguments for permanent DST. But I question the road safety stat I hear with announcements like this. Kids walking, biking, and being driven to school in mornings in darkness ... that's also what permanent DST gives us.
Oh well, I am in the minority it seems. So R.I.P. "high noon" ... I'll never see you again here. And, yes, I understand that depending on where one is within a time zone, a true "high noon" is only in theory. But it's a nice ideal. :-)
> Instinctively, I think morning light is important to our biology for a daily reset
I'd bet people would happily trade away the inkling of light they get during their winter commute before locking themselves into their office for some extra daylight when they leave that office.
Daylight is most enjoyable if you can actually make use of it.
That's what everyone says. But it turns out people hate spending their morning in darkness for more light at night. Which makes perfect sense:
https://washingtonian.com/2022/03/15/the-us-tried-permanent-...
> the inkling of light they get during their winter commute
It's not an inkling. Unless you roll out of bed and instantly onto your commute, you're getting natural sunlight through all your windows for hours every morning. That's exactly when you need it.
Yeah I don't agree with this at all. I want the light when I'm getting up in the morning. When I'm coming home from work it's the end of the day: I'm tired, I'm hustling home to do errands or chores or make dinner, I'm probably going to spend that time inside anyway because that's where the things that I need to get done are, and if it it's going to be cold and windy, it's going to be cold and windy in the evening. I much much prefer daylight in the morning and I like when noon is actually noon (+/- depending on longitude). I'm not looking forward to the time change and I'm not looking forward to the sun setting at 9 PM.
If it wasn't for that damn 9 AM Monday meeting (ugh) I would just keep my clocks sent to standard time and start work an hour late in the summer.
> I want the light when I'm getting up in the morning
I apologize society is inconveniencing you.
Well, I'm not one of those people. I like waking up with the sun and driving to work in the daylight. The idea that DST solves anything absolutely blows my mind. If you want the ability to start your work day earlier and end it earlier, that seems like a worker protection bill that needs to be passed. DST is the kludgiest kludge that ever kludged.
> If you want the ability to start your work day earlier and end it earlier, that seems like a worker protection bill that needs to be passed.
I don't think that's very realistic though is it? School times are fixed and that anchors a lot of families to those specific times, and businesses tend to have set hours.
Changing the time to give people more light in the evening frees up a bunch of people to enjoy some sunlight without making it a whole fight to have different hours at work.
Where I live June sunrise (with DST) is 5:11am and sunset is 8:21pm (a city on the American east coast). I just can’t imagine a majority of people would want 4:11 rising and 7:21 setting.
>If you want the ability to start your work day earlier and end it earlier, that seems like a worker protection bill that needs to be passed.
If that's what passes for aspiration these days then the labour movement truly is dead.
yeah im curious if people will end up liking it. sucks from my perspective.
The problem of offices is not when we spend time in them but rather that we spend time in them at all. What a banal hell it is we have consented to endure compared to the comforts of our homes or of any space actually designed for the wellness of human beings or even focused work.
Except for people like me who struggle to wake up before dawn. And whether people prefer light after work doesn't change the available scientific evidence which suggests there are significant negative health effects of waking up too early relative to sunrise, but no significant health benefits from having sunlight hours after work. People's preferences in this case are generally only mildly held and typically are not well informed by the science. I suspect if more people were aware of the deleterious health effects, their stated preferences would change.
I've seen arguments about kids going to school in the darkness being thrown around a lot, but I've never understood why that (against fresh drivers) is always taken to be worse than kids coming home in the darkness (against exhausted drivers).
Average school start/end times in BC are 8:30 AM and 3 PM. Standard time in Vancouver puts sunrise/sunset at 8AM/415PM at winter solstice for standard time. That's 30 minutes of daylight before school and 75 minutes after school. IOW, kids are more likely to be walking in the dark in the morning, even with standard time.
Switching to daylight time will switch sunrise/sunset to 9AM/515PM, guaranteeing kids will be walking in the dark in the morning.
yeah the 4:15 PM sunset actually means it's getting dark at 3:30 PM. Pretty ridiculous. For everyone like "the kids have to walk to school in the dark!" it seems like they aren't considering that kids generally don't care at all what the morning is like because their day is about to be consumed by an obligation they never agreed to (school). When they're finally free for the day, it's effectively dark outside. The perspective among my peer group when I was a kid was that daylight savings system is totally clueless, has never made sense, and we should permanently switch to the schedule that allows more daylight after school (aka DST).
But we care about the kids. It's not about whether or not the kids are having a good time, but whether or not groggy people on their way to work can see them.
P.S.
Switching to daylight time makes more sense in Eastern BC than it does in Western BC. But Eastern BC is relatively unpopulated. The population of Penticton is 40,000 vs 3,000,000 in metro Vancouver. Second largest metro (Victoria) is west of Vancouver.
Penticton experiences sunrise/sunset about 25 minutes before Vancouver, so their kids experience approximately equal amounts of sun before & after school on the winter solstice.
Some places already don’t do spring and fall time changes. Creston BC is one and I imagine there are others.
I know exactly what you mean with your comment, but interesting fact, Vancouver is in the East of BC! BC is huge in both directions.
Even more so when you consider that most of metro Vancouver lives east of Vancouver city.
if it ends up being an issue, then the schools could just change start time?
But that's the whole thing.
Why change the clocks when we could change the definition of school time, business hours, liquor/gambling licensing hours, construction noise hours, etc? Just use standard time and then base our society around the physics of the sun.
* https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/canada/vancouver?month=12&ye...
I agree with you. I also need to shout at the clouds on this because the experts who make the argument for time changes drive me crazy.
I live in Calgary. At a previous grade school my daughter went to, school started early enough that she left in pitch black conditions in winter, regardless of "experts" and their precious daylight savings time.
'You need sunshine when you wake up' is really a ridiculous argument, there is no sunshine even with DST.
Get rid of it. Maybe egg the houses of the "experts" too.
(As for my kids, thankfully, they did remote school during Covid (hence late mornings) and then I moved to a place where the school starting time was later than 8.)
Yes, a lot of griping about "standard time" is really griping about winter. There are fewer hours of daylight in the winter. That's just the way it is. You can't fool time.
You can also just change the hours when things start without changing the clock for the entire country.
Anyone in the north has seen “winter hours” and “summer hours”.
In addition to the reason already given (kids get home before the evening traffic picks up), another reason is that generally driving conditions are worse in the morning than they are in the evening so if there isn't enough light for both the morning and evening drives to be in light it is safer to give the light to the morning drive.
> another reason is that generally driving conditions are worse in the morning than they are in the evening
Wait, why? Where? I've never heard this. Which driving conditions are you talking about? Rain? Snow?
> kids get home before the evening traffic picks up
When we change the general time, this applies to school days as well as office hours, so the kids go home to evening traffic relation will stay constant.
> kids coming home in the darkness (against exhausted drivers).
If you’re exhausted you shouldn’t be driving. Period. You’re the danger to kids, not light or darkness. (Your headlights are in working order, right?)
Nice sentiment, sadly we live in the real world
> (against fresh drivers)
How many people roll out of bed, rush out the door and jump in the car before they're actually awake? In my circles, that would be a larger percentage that of those that get up with plenty of time to wake up. I'm not sure any time of the day is safer regarding attentive drivers. Especially if we're going to consider idiots on their phones while driving.
There is still a typical morning routine of an hour. How long do people need to wake up? If they are chronically tired is this going to get better through out the day?
Personally, I need multiple hours. I'm not the type to open my eyes, jump out of bed, and hit the floor running. I'm more the type of "fuck, why am I awake?" but then at the end of the day if there's stuff to do, I can be up for a while. So I'm much better at night than in the morning. Even if I'm my keyboard at 10am, I'm still not up to speed. My best comes later in the day. I think part of that is I've worked for places for so long that I was in meetings all day, and never got to do my actual job until late in the day when everyone else was winding down.
I grew up in an area outside the US, and quite a bit more to the north. I still remember how for several weeks each year I had to walk to school in the dark, sometimes having issues with seeing where I was walking.
The DST changes abruptly made everything visible again. Around that time we were also getting a permanent snow cover. And the whiteness of the snow significantly improved visibility for the rest of the winter.
So I don't think that the concerns are completely unfounded, but they are probably not as dire either.
> I've seen arguments about kids going to school in the darkness being thrown around a lot
I’m sure there’s some correlation with the time zone, but it feels like a “think of the children!” argument that ignores much more significant factors (e.g. traffic speed and volume).
Everytime people extoll the virtues of high noon, I ask the same question: why does it matter if the sun reaches it highest point near 12 o' clock? You're awake for 4-6 hours before 12, and you remain awake for 10-12 hours after it. Noon isn't the middle of the day for nearly anyone in the western world.
I understand the argument for having an early sunset, clearly having sunlight when you're awake has an effect. But who cares about having an early high noon, when there's still two thirds of the day left at best?
About 50% of people want permanent standard time, 50% want permanent DST, 50% want to keep time changes. Doesn't add up? That's the point.
Everyone finds arguments that suits them. Some will quote "sleep experts", others will mention economic reasons, others will talk about road safety, each one with studies proving their point, peer-reviewed for the most sophisticated.
My take is that we are all different, and whatever you choose, some people will be better off, others will be worse off. There is a high chance that that variety is an evolutionary advantage, at least it was for our ancestors, as a group where everyone is sleeping at the same time is more vulnerable. Not great for office hours though.
I'm a relatively early riser, but: if you steal an hour of my summer evening time, I think that would call for civil unrest.
What time the clock says shouldn't affect this
> I'm in BC. The astro-nerd in me would have preferred to see permanent Standard Time instead of a permanent +1 offset.
So would the folks who study circadian rhythms:
> Over much of the highly-populated areas of Canada, the sun would not rise until about 9 am in winter under DST, and the daylight will linger an hour later in summer evenings than under Standard Time. As a Northern country, Canada includes higher latitudes where the effects of late winter dawns and late summer dusks under DST would be felt more profoundly. What long-term effects on health can we expect from year-round DST? As predicted from our understanding of the human biological clock, our brain clock will try to synchronize to dawn and push us to go to bed later. However, our social clock will force us to wake an hour earlier in the morning. Will this have any health effects?
> We have good evidence for the negative impact of being an hour off of biological time, and this comes from studies on the health of populations living on the edges of time zones. We have arbitrarily divided the earth into one-hour time zones, so that people on the east side of a time zone see the sun rise an hour earlier (according to their social clocks) than people on the west side of the same time zone. Researchers have analyzed the health records and economic status of those two populations, and have found poorer health outcomes on the west side: increased rates of obesity and diabetes, heart disease, and cancer (Gu et al., 2017). Moreover, people on the west sides of time zones earned 3% less in per capita income (Giuntella and Mazzonna, 2019). What could account for this? As predicted, people on the west sides of time zones go to bed later than people on the east sides, but then have to get up at the same time in the morning because of fixed work and school schedules. Therefore they lose sleep: about 20 minutes per weeknight, which adds up to a significant sleep debt over the week. We know from other research that sleep deprivation negatively impacts health and workplace performance. We can already see the negative impacts of a one-hour difference across a time zone, and year-round DST would put our social clocks another hour out of alignment with our biological clocks.
* https://www.chronobiocanada.com/official-statements
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronobiology
I live in the Yukon so will now be in sync with BC time again after this change. The concerns about commuting to school in the dark seem almost comical, given the experiences of everybody here with the winter darkness.
For other reasons, I also wish we were closer to solar noon though. High noon is actually closer to 2pm here and seems to push the whole day back in the summer. The best (warmest) parts of the day get pushed too late into the afternoon.
In the winter I can see arguments both ways (though I'm personally in the evening light is better camp). But in the summer, it already gets light earlier than almost anyone would want to be awake. An extra hour of sunlight at 4am is little benefit to anyone, and likely just makes it harder to sleep. Light evenings in the summer are wonderful though. I think part of the health argument against DST is that those light evenings make it harder to get to sleep at night, which is fair, but I still wouldn't want to give them up!
> Oh well, I am in the minority it seems.
Given it one winter season across the solstice and I'd bet a lot of your fellow residents will come around to your viewpoint.
I'm really curious how people will feel about it after experiencing a year of continuous PDT. I expect I'll personally like it, but the polling will be interesting for sure.
> Kids walking, biking, and being driven to school in mornings in darkness.
It's not 1900s anymore. Cars have fancy headlights and sensor suites for AEB. And generally street lighting is available around schools.
Can't you just get up at a different time if you prefer different sunlight?
Will all jobs, schools, stores, etc also change their working hours?
Usually there are several hours of reasonable buffer in the morning. We're only talking about moving wakeup time by one hour here.
That massively depends on where you live. The northern most city of British Columbia is Atlin and during some parts of the year the sun doesn't rise until 9:54 AM.
If you take into account places further north than British Columbia it gets even more extreme. Barrows Alaska has the sunrise after 1 PM some days. Do you think businesses, schools, etc are going to start at 1 PM on those days?
I don't get why we just don't cut it down the middle. Go +0.5 offset and get a little bit of both. Love the idea of no one being able to do the math when talking to people outside the province. I can't tell you what time it is in mountain time, NFLD, or Saskatchewan. Nothing bad comes of it.
Or just have schools change their hours as needed.
Time changes are just a hack to make every business change their effective office hours back when the sign on the door - and coordination - mattered. Today brick and mortar is way less relevant. Way more people are working from home or going to work at random hours. The time change doesn't affect going to grocery store or restaurants or the gym. It's basically just schools, banks, and the DMV.
Why not have a given entity change its hours through the year, if the relation to the sun actually matters?
(And no, I don't buy that there needs to be time coordination between schools, since they are all already slightly different anyway. Different kids have different after school programs different days. Different parents are already going to work different hours. There's no way to coordinate for everyone to be happy, ever.)
No one wants another Indian time zone in the world - one is already enough of a hassle to deal with.
Thankfully, this is a situation we don't need to speculate about without evidence. Spain is on de facto permanent DST, serving as a natural experiment. I bet the results support you.
That's partly because it's in the same timezone as Poland. Madrid is further west that London, but London is an hour behind. Moving Spain to permanent DST puts it on the same effective timezone as London.
http://blog.poormansmath.net/images/SolarTimeVsStandardTime....
Without the DST offset, Spain much more "red" than England.
It's not so much a "permeant DST" but rather a "we want to change to GMT without moving out of the CET timezone."
That map is interesting, so most of the world prefers "red" to "green"? Why is that?
Most of the world tends to prefer to not be too far from the center of the timezone (where solar noon matches solar time in standard time). Geographic and political boundaries make it so that often it's more red. The extremes of north and south tend not to care as much because it doesn't matter as much.
https://andywoodruff.com/blog/where-to-hate-daylight-saving-...
I don't think that explains it. The "red" offenders are basically Russia, China?, Sudan, Argentina and Alaska. The only "green" offender is Greenland, which is still large enough to enough red to justify it. I get China, it aligns with the population density. Sudan likely wants to have the same time as Somalia and Ethiopia. Why Argentina? Why Alaska? And why does Russia basically have zones that range from +2 to the +1 offset? They don't even have the excuse of avoiding 2 hour jumps like between Alaska and Canada, because they still have that.
I'd have to dig to try to find out what the date on this would be.
Russia is telling since they changed their timezones in 2016. I'm going to note that timezones are also a political identity too. https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/russia-new-time-zones.... For a map https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Difference_between_l... and the Wiki article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Russia#Russian_Federat...
China is aligned with Beijing and the rest of the country follows from when noon in Beijing is.
Sudan's history is in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Sudan
Argentina is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Argentina - My speculation would be that Argentina (the east coast especially) wanted to be economically synchronized with the coastal cities of eastern Brazil. Buenos Aires and São Paulo being on the same timezone makes it easier for the two of them to do business.
Alaska used to have four timezones. In 1983, they were consolidated into two timezones - Aleutian and Alaska. Being in -9 rather than -10 brings Anchorage closer to the Pacific west coast in its business day with the note that it doesn't matter too much when solar noon is if sun is up for 22 hours or 5 hours.
In Poland in winter it gets dark around 3 PM. Awful. In Spain in winter it gets dark around 5:45 pm. And people wonder why spaniards live longer.
Spain instead adjusted it's entire country around the time.
And they still do DST. They're just on a different time zone than they should be because during WWII, they changed to the same time zone as Germany.
If you have a problem with school start times, you could also just change school start times.