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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Why now? From the Govt of BC press release: "The Interpretation Amendment Act, which is the legal framework that enables the Province to adopt permanent DST, became law in 2019. At the time, government chose not to bring it into force in order to co-ordinate timing with neighbouring U.S. states in the same time zone.
Recent actions from the U.S. have shifted how B.C. approaches decisions that merit alignment, including on time zones. Making this change now reflects the current preferences and needs of British Columbians, and helps ensure the province is well-positioned to thrive, even when circumstances across the border evolve."
Notably Washington state legislated the same change to DST years ago (instead of standard time, the morons!) but the federal government never approved the switch. AFAIK it's still pending. I remain unclear what authority the federal government has over such a matter and why Washington (or any other) state has opted to respect it. What are they going to do if a state just ignores them and switches their clocks?
Sometimes I get the impression that the spirit of states rights in the US has died.
You're saying the federal government granted blanket authorization to switch to the one? So the only reason states wait on authorization is merely obtusely insisting on the wrong choice? (In addition to being impotent.) The more I learn about this issue the more things I find to be angry about.
Yes. States are allowed to ignore "summer time" and remain on "standard time" all year round. Arizona is the usual example cited, they do not change the clocks, and remain on standard time year round.
The special auth. from the Fed's is needed to switch to "permanent summer time" (and, possibly advocating for year round "summer time" gives the state politicians cover to do nothing, because "their hands are tied...").
It is crazy, because there is actually a law that allows us to switch to year round PST if we want (but no one wants that), while we need congressional approval to switch to PDT year round (which is what everyone wants) and the house voted for it, but the senate simply didn't make it a priority.
I read elsewhere this may be partial reason why BC forged ahead. As Canada/US relationship is on the rocks and BC stopped waiting for the US to change.
Ultimately the arguments between whether one should pick daylight or standard times are a red herring.
The benefits of one over the other usually balance out and in either case are insignificant compared to the problems caused by changing time zones twice a year.
Changing time zones is directly linked with all sorts of health issues, deaths, car crashes, etc.
I would have preferred permanent standard time to permanent daylight time. But I accept I'm in the minority, and even permanent daylight time is far superior to changing clocks twice a year.
It's "standard" for a reason. Humanity settled on these numbers long ago because they work best. It boggles my mind why anyone would choose otherwise since what we do at any given hour is arbitrary.
A lot of people hate standard time in winter because the sun sets at 4 or 5, and they want the sun to instead set at 8 or 9 like it does in summer. DST in winter doesn't actually give you the 8 or 9 sunset, it gives you a 5 or 6 sunset (which doesn't get you all that much) combined with moving your sunrise to 8 or 9, which causes its own set of issues most people don't think about.
The last time we went to year-round DST, we stopped almost immediately because people experienced what winter DST was actually like and went "wait, this sucks."
Obviously(/s) the solution is to change to a sunset centered day. new day starts at sunset so people can get up late and enjoy the maxim number of daylight hours.
I always find it strange how particular people are about the numbers attached a purely astronomical phenomena(myself included, but I am pretty hard in the "let the sun figure it out camp"). If they want more "daylight" hours then get up at a time to enjoy them. But people would rather bend over backwards fiddling with the numbers as if that is going to change how long a day is.
They worked best when everybody were farmers and had to get up early and go to bed early. Now most people don't live their lives centered around noon, our free time comes after our work is done at around 17:00, so having more light in the evening instead of worthless light in the night makes sense.
Farmers have to wake up early because their animals wake up at sunrise and some tasks are best performed at that time. So they wake up before sunrise regardless of the clock time.
Human, like farm animals, are better off if they wake up at sunrise and go to sleep in full dark. At the equator that's easy, wake at 6, bed at 10PM. And standard work hours are 7-3 or 8-4.
So, it sounds like you're actually arguing that the numbers are just a construct and that we should all just use UTC and set appropriate work hours to the times that most correlate to the solar day in our region rather than adjust the clock approximately 1 hour per 15 degrees around the equator and have an International Date Line.
I think this would make way more sense, when they say the Olympic Opening Ceremony start at 18:00, its 18:00 for everyone around the world. No one as to work out which TZ Italy is in or scheduling meetings with Tech Support in far flung locales does not require knowing IST is how far ahead or behind.
> He promoted worldwide standard time zones, a prime meridian, and use of the 24-hour clock as key elements to communicating the accurate time, all of which influenced the creation of Coordinated Universal Time.
The one bit where this would be problematic would be "what day is it?" When does today become tomorrow?
There are a lot of systems that we've built that depend on that distinction. Things like business days and running end of day so that everything that happens on March 2nd is logged as March 2nd. I've encountered fun with Black Friday sales where the store is open over the midnight boundary and the backend system really wants today to be today rather than yesterday (sometimes this has involved unplugging a register from the network so that it doesn't run end of day, running EOD on the store systems, and then plugging the register back in after it completes and then running a reconciliation.).
Other than that particular mess of banks and businesses... yea, running everything on UTC would be something nice in today's world.
Aside on the "changing clocks" and realizing my flexible schedule privilege at a company I worked at I switched my schedule from 8-4 to 9-5 with the change in daylight savings so that I maintained a consistent "this is the hour I wake up".
No. that does not follow. Abstraction is useful. Having commonly understood terms (in this case hours of the day) that share certain traits regardless of where you happen to be in the world facilitates communication.
Right, but where I live sunrise is in the middle of the night in the summer (around 03:30). Using standard time in the summer gives me one less hour of useful sunlight in the evening, and while it doesn't technically disappear it gets moved to where I can't use it because that's when I sleep. It's the same for people further south as well, another bright hour in the early morning before they wake up is a wasted bright hour that would make more sense in the evening, when most modern humans are awake. The argument "noon should coincide with solar noon" is nonsensical to me, the clock is a social construct and should make sense for how most of us live our lives.
But the social construct of work hours shifted later by more than that one hour during the last century, so this is not what people actually prefer by their actions.
People disagree on whether to prioritize mornings or afternoons in the winter. For the summer, only very few people care if the sun rises at four or five (or whatever), but most people like having long summer evenings. Therefore the summer tips the scales.
Then they are also social activities that you just need to wait for in summer, because they can only happen after sunset. Viewing a movie (outside), sitting around a fire, having a party all just really happen after sunset.
We don't use standard time because it works best, we use it because it's "correct" relative to the position of the sun.
Now, standard business hours (9-5 or whatever) were probably chosen for working well in the circumstances where they became standard, and it might be interesting to watch for whether tweaking the clocks leads to tweaking the nominal time of things...
The reason is that with standard time, solar noon coincides with local noon, so the day is approximately symmetric about noon, not regarding atmospheric refraction lengthening the day. It wasn't done on a whim.
The US decided (and Canada followed) that daylight time was more correct for the larger portion of the year, presumably it's easier to transition the remaining 4mo to daylight than it is to move 8mo to standard.
But also, all the opinion polling (business and individual) was like over 90% in favour of year-round daylight time, so here we are.
> The US decided (and Canada followed) that daylight time was more correct for the larger portion of the year, presumably it's easier to transition the remaining 4mo to daylight than it is to move 8mo to standard.
How is transitioning permanently to one easier than transitioning permanently to the other?
How to transition to permanent DST: wait until we are in DST and then stop switching.
How to transition to permanent Standard time: wait until we are in standard time and then stop switching.
Sadly, this isn't really right. Humanity settled on solar time. For somewhat obvious reasons.
Alas, I don't see my preferred method of changing the clock by 10 minutes every month taking hold. Basically ever. :D
I also don't think this is nearly as important for places that are not further away from the equator. If you are on the equator, you are almost certainly fine with no change throughout the year.
That method wont work, that is a too large change that happens to seldom. What you want is a leap second every hour for five months to switch between standard and daylight savings time and back, with a month of constant time around each solstice. That gives you a smooth transition without perceptible discontinuities.
I’d guess that there is less of a need for light at the beginning of the day since most people don’t farm. Personally I prefer more light at the end of the day.
I don't get that argument. The numeric time is just a measure for the state of the sun in the sky. When you choose your day to have ended is completely independent. There is already a high enough variance of people deciding when they go to sleep, that DST is hardly relevant. Some people have dinner at half past 5, some do at half past 8, the hour daylight saving time can't possibly make that difference.
Exactly, here in Spain we have lunch between half past 2 and half past 3 on workdays, which can extend up to 5pm in the weekend and I usually finish dinner at half past ten.
Why? because they decided to be on the same timezone as our eastern neighbors in Europe.
The eastern part of Polonia is on the same timezone and probably have probably the opposite with much much earlier lunch and dinner than we do.
The timezone centered across Görlitz made a lot of sense for the German empire, because it was nearly in half longitude wise and 15° away from Greenwich. It is still somewhat centered in Europe. If you wanted to divide it again, you would need to decide whether the border should be between Germany and France or France and Spain. If you place it between Germany and France, which side will the BeNeLux countries be on? France still has some parts that are nominally in +1 and we don't want to disturb the German-French "friendship", so maybe place it between Spain and France, where there is at least a mountain border? Would that be acceptable? Railways connections between Spain and France are also much less and concentrated than between Germany and France.
It's not just a measure for the state of sun in the sky, it's also a measure for the state of society on the ground. It's an arbitrary number in a sense, but it also strongly influences my schedule.
And yes, we could have all the schools and everything else open later in the winter than the rest of the year, but it turns out it's easier to change the clocks.
But the school schedule does already shift and it shifts later, so in the opposite direction. The policy trend is going in the opposite of what you want to achieve with year-long DST, you could instead vote for the status quo and have the same effect.
Do BC schools have a different winter schedule? That's not how it is where I live, at least. It seems like it would be pretty annoying to have to reschedule activities around getting to/from school twice a year.
I can only comment on some parts in Germany, and no I don't know of different seasonal schedules. I meant that the general trend is for the school day to start later, so that the teenagers get more of their precious sleep. Year-long DST would get them to get up earlier again compared to the sun. This trend is the same for office hours and working shifts, they become later, since people just want to sleep longer. (Which is obviously bullocks.)
Farmers don't care about clocks, they do the work whenever needed. Roosters crow whenever they want. There's literally no point in talking about farmers in this debate.
Yeah they started work at 6. So the working schedule shifted later by three hours, but with year-long DST it will shift back only one hour. Sounds like people don't actually want what they now vote for. My bet is that the work hours will just move later yet another hour in the future.
And that reason was that it was the standard before the standard was rethought. There's no deeper meaning to it.
And we rethought it yet again, should we go on the time standard (DST) that we're already on for ~65% of the year, or the one we're on for ~35% the year.
It should be pretty obvious why DST is the new winner, it's the current standard.
Not that long ago, and we keep fiddling with them. The US time zones were adopted just over a century ago. The dates for daylight saving time were changed less than 20 years ago. Much of Western Europe changed time zones (much of it rather violently) in the 1940s, as did China. The tz database often requires updates for changes.
If you want to go with what was settled long ago, that would probably be a return to each town observing its own time based on local solar noon, which would be pretty annoying.
> I would have preferred permanent standard time to permanent daylight time.
Do you have children?
In past HN threads, the preference largely comes down to whether you have children (and want more early morning light for safer trips to school) or not.
As far north as BC is winter just doesn't have enough daylight to think you can get everything done with sunlight. Maybe Arizona has enough - but they don't do daylight savings time (one of two us states)
> winter just doesn't have enough daylight to think you can get everything done with sunlight
That's the perfect way to say it.
The other piece that a lot of people are missing is the whole larks (early risers) vs owls (late risers) divide. I think the best illustration of that is to ask, if you got your pick, which shift you'd take, based solely on your own body and habits: 8-4, 9-5, or 10-6 (or perhaps even further in one direction)? My guess is that the answer to that question predicts your desire for Standard or Daylight time pretty well.
My guess is that both owls & larks get their preference logically backwards.
My guess is that owls will say they prefer permanent daylight time and larks will say they prefer permanent standard time.
But their revealed preference is the opposite -- owls wake up well after sunrise and go to bed well after sunset. Yet permanent daylight time will shift it so they'll be waking up closer to sunrise and going to bed closer to sunset.
Larks revealed preference is more like permanent daylight time yet I think they're more likely to say they want permanent standard time.
I'm definitely in the night owl camp and I'd much rather have sunlight in the mornings because I already am going to have trouble waking up each morning, making it so I can't even set my circadian rhythm properly is just adding insult to injury.
It amazes me that we actually argue about this based on vibes. We know that people are better off the closer the time between waking up and sunrise.
I don’t have children, but I was a child once. I didn’t mind going to school in darkness (in winter) and enjoy 1h more of daylight in the evening. Having that extra hour of daylight in the morning always seemed a waste for me because I wasn’t doing something I wanted (I was doing something I had to do, this is, going to school)
I don't have children and I prefer permanent Standard Time because I have the apparently weird belief that noon should be at noon.
(i.e. the time 12:00PM should be when the sun is overhead)
I'm not a "capitalism gives you brain worms" kind of person, but the idea that it is somehow better to literally change the location of the sun in the sky because the holy hours of 9-5 are sacrosanct is so strange to me.
I lived once in Ecuador. Pretty much the whole year the sun rises at 6am and sets at 6pm. I very much prefer Spain: in summer the sun sets at almost 10 pm at its peak… best summers of my life.
I lived in Poland once too, where in winter the sun sets at 3pm: I wanted to kill myself
9-5 aren't sacrosanct. When the 9-5 song came out approximately nobody worked from 9-5. Standard working hours were 8-5 with an hour for lunch. Starting at 7 was far more common than starting at 9.
The song is about a secretary who didn't get a lunch hour, so started an hour later than her boss.
Tech workers generally start at 9, but that started decades after the song came out.
Where I live, in winter it's dark in the morning (and also the evening depending on the length of the school day) with and without DST, and in summer the sun is also up either way.
Conversely, I'd rather my kids have more daylight after school so they can explore outside.
Selfishly, I just want as much daylight as possible, which has very little to do with how a government selects a time range for legal reasons. The rotation of the globe has not been yet controlled, as far as I'm tracking.
As a child, there was nothing worse than getting out of school at 3pm and then having the sun set at 4:21pm. I barely got home before it got dark, forget about playing outside. Morning time was useless, since school prep ate that up.
Right? I literally never once cared if I have to walk/ride to school in the relative dark. But I did care pretty much every afternoon how much time I have to enjoy the rest of my free time. Being able to go out with my friends and enjoy the daylight made a huge difference. It's soooo long overdue to put this stupid system in the past.
BC (and PST) is actually quite reasonable in this regard, with Vancouver and LA being fairly close to "on the money." Contrast that with China and Russia, where clock time can be 2h+ off from solar time.
As a further note, this is one reason it's miserable to be in Boston/Maine during the winter if you're an SAD sufferer: sunset times of 4pm or sooner feel like "insult to injury."
"Pacific time" is going to be so confusing though. Should have just called it Yukon Standard Time, since that's already a thing, at least informally. Cause that would not be confusing at all...
Everyone else is throwing in there 2¢, so here's my pet proposal.
Here's the undeniable fact: everyone (ok, almost everyone, but it's a rounding error) hates the switchover in spring, when you have to get up an hour earlier. Conversely, everyone (or a rough approximation) likes the switchover in the fall, when we get to sleep in an extra hour. So why don't we just get rid of the switchover in the spring and get rid of the one in the fall?
I hate both. The time jump in fall means sunset starts happening depressingly early (almost exactly 5pm where I am, which means no sunlight after work).
A few years ago I was against changing the time but now I tend to even suggest a full two hour change! In the developed northern hemisphere the summer/winter daylight difference is huge (about 2 hours in the morning and 2 in the night) with a short time of equal length. Maximizing sunlight exposure while the people are outside is vital, mainly for psychological purposes. That means let the light begin at about 7-8 all year long and let summer afternoon extend as much as possible. No kid leaves home before 8 and the 6-in-the-morning drivers will pay attention all year long and not only during the winter. But all types of people will enjoy the long summer afternoons.
Not all of British Columbia can make the change. BC's northeast and much of the Columbia-Kootenays are presently on Mountain time, which means that the Province of Alberta holds the choice of when/whether their own and those BC areas go to a permanent time. Then AB would have to sync with Saskatchewan along their borders, but SK is already on a permanent time zone system. Decisions, decisions.
Uncle Steve is the same number of hours ahead that he has always been, and that's a thing that could be looked up just as easily as finding his time zone. I think the author is greatly exaggerating the degree to which time zones solve any of the problems mentioned. Uncle Steve might be on a different sleep schedule from me, regardless of whether or not he's in a different time zone.
Days of the week definitely become interesting in a global UTC system, but noon used to literally mean "the sun is at it's highest point". I suspect that people would grumble for a year or two and then forget that another system ever existed.
I'll correct myself: it sounds good for about 5 seconds before you think about it and realize it's an unworkable idea which creates more problems than it solves.
I also did that for some time, I just don't perceived clocks to have a single point that is up and mentally rotated clocks all the time. The hours just lost their meaning beyond their numerical value.
This question IMO reveals how the abstraction of numbers can imprison our minds.
It literally makes no sense to say, "I prefer to have an extra hour in the evening" (the morning and evening will always have equal numbers of hours). Or "I hate it when it's dark at 5pm" (translation: "I hate when it's dark at 5 arbitrary periods after an arbitrary moment that may be hours either side of solar noon").
My solution: pick the time peg closest to the "correct" one (i.e. standard time) and stick to it. People who want year-round "summer" evenings can continue to have them by the simple expedient of doing what DST forces them (and everyone else) to do already: get up earlier.
Sure. But this argument is surely less powerful than it was back in the era of church bells and big clocks on factory walls and so on. We now have electronics that add a whole new layer of abstraction to our schedules, to the point that you can now miss a DST change if you're not paying attention. For many people (I'm one) this change is now just a useless irritation.
It makes sense when schedules are fixed and time is the only thing we can change. I wouldn't mind switching to standard time if I can change my work schedule to have more light after work. I work from home, I don't care about not having light in the morning
> This question IMO reveals how the abstraction of numbers can imprison our minds.
Is it the abstraction of number that imprison our mind or just the reality of having a job and other social constraint based on all of us agreeing on a time?
When most people can’t leave their job before 5pm, wether it’s dark at 5 or 6 makes a huge difference.
The social construct is moving later though. I guess this is because people's desire to sleep longer is making them move the social constraint of being at work later, while they stay up "partying" regardless of the social constraint.
I fully support removing DST (as a parent at least, it's a PITA twice a year).
However, clocks should show noon correctly, as best as they can within your chosen timezone. Also, I really like long evenings in the summer to get outdoors and go biking or hiking. It follows that we should abolish DST, stick to the correct time, and move regular school and business hours back one hour.
School and business hours are already fairly arbitrary where I live. The only places observing "standard" hours seem to be banks and even many of those stay open later in the evening these days. Meanwhile the schools do everything based on juggling a limited number of busses meaning that start and end times are staggered over a period of 3+ hours. You see evidence of this in traffic patterns as well. It starts early with the trades and runs well into the late morning due (AFAIK) to tech.
Another falsehood programmers believe about time. A stopped clock is only right twice a day if it is a 12 hour clock and only if it’s not set at a leap second or at a skipped time during the shift from standard to daylight time.
The biggest unreasonability is switching at all. I admit other points of view, but switching back and forth is a compromise that seems far worse than just sticking with one. Either one.
In germany the terms are Sommerzeit (summer time) and Winterzeit (winter time). Of course everybody would chose the former as summer sound better than winter but the latter is "better" as it corresponds more to "wake up when there is light" which is favorable to health, performance etc.
The report linked in the article has BC support _massively_ in favour of "more light in the evenings" instead of "wake up when there is light", citing health and wellness concerns. "Better" seems a matter of opinion.
Im very healthy and performant during sommerzeit. It’s in winterzeit when I get depressed bc there isn’t enough daylight in the evenings (it gets dark around 3pm-4pm in winter… that sucks big time)
That's a very dishonest take, as I'm sure you know that Sommerzeit proponents have reasons other than "summer sounds better than winter".
For example most people just wake up and go to work in the morning, but in the evening they meet friends, BBQ, hike/run through nature, do sports etc., and prefer doing those activities while it's bright outside.
What stops you from going to work one hour early, so you get off earlier as well? Most employers these days allow flexible working hours.
And if we are permanently moving our clocks to advance by an hour, why stop at just one hour? Why not have +2h or +3h so we get even more brighter evenings.
Because most people don’t have that degree of flexibility. When I was commuting I’d have been happy to have double DST or whatever you want to call it.
As someone else pointed everyone is already on DST for approximately 65% of the year. This just removes the remaining 35%. Picking standard time would have been a much bigger change.
Ultimately, it's entirely arbitrary anyway. The only issue is that American states cannot pick DST without a federal law change.
> As someone else pointed everyone is already on DST for approximately 65% of the year. This just removes the remaining 35%. Picking standard time would have been a much bigger change.
This 65% started during the Dubya presidency (source: I was there updating tzdata on systems), and previous to that it was a 50/50 split.
Reminder that a few hundred years ago when clocks were oddities we didn't have to deal with any of this madness because everybody used True Solar Time as a sundial would read it. What time do kids go to school? After the sun rises. Simple. Now that we have clocks it suddenly becomes difficult to schedule simple things like sending kids to school in sunlight.
While true, I'm not sure what your point is? Centuries ago, everyone got up at sunrise to tend to the farm because the farm needed tending at sunrise. These days, organizations like schools and grocery stores need to coordinate with hundreds to thousands of people daily, and "angle of sun in the sky" is nowhere near precise enough. Let alone phone calls and instant messages that travel across many timezones.
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.
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.
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.
if it ends up being an issue, then the schools could just change start time?
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.
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.
* 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.
> 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?
> 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?
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
> 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 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.
> 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
As a kid I liked walking to school in the dark a lot, it was somehow cozy. Maybe I’m just weird.
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?
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."
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.
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.
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.
Why now? From the Govt of BC press release: "The Interpretation Amendment Act, which is the legal framework that enables the Province to adopt permanent DST, became law in 2019. At the time, government chose not to bring it into force in order to co-ordinate timing with neighbouring U.S. states in the same time zone.
Recent actions from the U.S. have shifted how B.C. approaches decisions that merit alignment, including on time zones. Making this change now reflects the current preferences and needs of British Columbians, and helps ensure the province is well-positioned to thrive, even when circumstances across the border evolve."
https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2026AG0013-000209
Notably Washington state legislated the same change to DST years ago (instead of standard time, the morons!) but the federal government never approved the switch. AFAIK it's still pending. I remain unclear what authority the federal government has over such a matter and why Washington (or any other) state has opted to respect it. What are they going to do if a state just ignores them and switches their clocks?
Sometimes I get the impression that the spirit of states rights in the US has died.
> I remain unclear what authority the federal government has over such a matter
It's actually an enumerated power under Article I, Section 8, Clause 5:
> [The Congress shall have Power...] To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures; ...
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C5-1/...
If US states want to get rid of time switches they are free to go to year-round Standard Time (like Arizona).
You're saying the federal government granted blanket authorization to switch to the one? So the only reason states wait on authorization is merely obtusely insisting on the wrong choice? (In addition to being impotent.) The more I learn about this issue the more things I find to be angry about.
Yes. States are allowed to ignore "summer time" and remain on "standard time" all year round. Arizona is the usual example cited, they do not change the clocks, and remain on standard time year round.
The special auth. from the Fed's is needed to switch to "permanent summer time" (and, possibly advocating for year round "summer time" gives the state politicians cover to do nothing, because "their hands are tied...").
It is crazy, because there is actually a law that allows us to switch to year round PST if we want (but no one wants that), while we need congressional approval to switch to PDT year round (which is what everyone wants) and the house voted for it, but the senate simply didn't make it a priority.
Nobody wants to switch to west-coast anything at all. Pretty hard to balance a west-coast budget.
I read elsewhere this may be partial reason why BC forged ahead. As Canada/US relationship is on the rocks and BC stopped waiting for the US to change.
Ultimately the arguments between whether one should pick daylight or standard times are a red herring.
The benefits of one over the other usually balance out and in either case are insignificant compared to the problems caused by changing time zones twice a year.
Changing time zones is directly linked with all sorts of health issues, deaths, car crashes, etc.
I would have preferred permanent standard time to permanent daylight time. But I accept I'm in the minority, and even permanent daylight time is far superior to changing clocks twice a year.
It's "standard" for a reason. Humanity settled on these numbers long ago because they work best. It boggles my mind why anyone would choose otherwise since what we do at any given hour is arbitrary.
A lot of people hate standard time in winter because the sun sets at 4 or 5, and they want the sun to instead set at 8 or 9 like it does in summer. DST in winter doesn't actually give you the 8 or 9 sunset, it gives you a 5 or 6 sunset (which doesn't get you all that much) combined with moving your sunrise to 8 or 9, which causes its own set of issues most people don't think about.
The last time we went to year-round DST, we stopped almost immediately because people experienced what winter DST was actually like and went "wait, this sucks."
Obviously(/s) the solution is to change to a sunset centered day. new day starts at sunset so people can get up late and enjoy the maxim number of daylight hours.
I always find it strange how particular people are about the numbers attached a purely astronomical phenomena(myself included, but I am pretty hard in the "let the sun figure it out camp"). If they want more "daylight" hours then get up at a time to enjoy them. But people would rather bend over backwards fiddling with the numbers as if that is going to change how long a day is.
No, I hate standard time, because in winter the sun sets at 4 or 5, when it could set at 5 or 6, i.e. daylight when leaving work.
I do not care if the sun is up as I shuffle groggily into the building. I don't think I'm alone.
They worked best when everybody were farmers and had to get up early and go to bed early. Now most people don't live their lives centered around noon, our free time comes after our work is done at around 17:00, so having more light in the evening instead of worthless light in the night makes sense.
That's a myth.
Farmers have to wake up early because their animals wake up at sunrise and some tasks are best performed at that time. So they wake up before sunrise regardless of the clock time.
Human, like farm animals, are better off if they wake up at sunrise and go to sleep in full dark. At the equator that's easy, wake at 6, bed at 10PM. And standard work hours are 7-3 or 8-4.
So, it sounds like you're actually arguing that the numbers are just a construct and that we should all just use UTC and set appropriate work hours to the times that most correlate to the solar day in our region rather than adjust the clock approximately 1 hour per 15 degrees around the equator and have an International Date Line.
I think this would make way more sense, when they say the Olympic Opening Ceremony start at 18:00, its 18:00 for everyone around the world. No one as to work out which TZ Italy is in or scheduling meetings with Tech Support in far flung locales does not require knowing IST is how far ahead or behind.
Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandford_Fleming ( https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/sandf... )
> He promoted worldwide standard time zones, a prime meridian, and use of the 24-hour clock as key elements to communicating the accurate time, all of which influenced the creation of Coordinated Universal Time.
The one bit where this would be problematic would be "what day is it?" When does today become tomorrow?
There are a lot of systems that we've built that depend on that distinction. Things like business days and running end of day so that everything that happens on March 2nd is logged as March 2nd. I've encountered fun with Black Friday sales where the store is open over the midnight boundary and the backend system really wants today to be today rather than yesterday (sometimes this has involved unplugging a register from the network so that it doesn't run end of day, running EOD on the store systems, and then plugging the register back in after it completes and then running a reconciliation.).
Other than that particular mess of banks and businesses... yea, running everything on UTC would be something nice in today's world.
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This is also kind of what happens in China (with a complicated history). https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/main/asia#L272
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China UTC+08:00 is observed throughout the country even though it spans about 60° of longitude.
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Aside on the "changing clocks" and realizing my flexible schedule privilege at a company I worked at I switched my schedule from 8-4 to 9-5 with the change in daylight savings so that I maintained a consistent "this is the hour I wake up".
> arguing that the numbers are just a construct
Yes.
> and that we should all just use UTC and ...
No. that does not follow. Abstraction is useful. Having commonly understood terms (in this case hours of the day) that share certain traits regardless of where you happen to be in the world facilitates communication.
Right, but where I live sunrise is in the middle of the night in the summer (around 03:30). Using standard time in the summer gives me one less hour of useful sunlight in the evening, and while it doesn't technically disappear it gets moved to where I can't use it because that's when I sleep. It's the same for people further south as well, another bright hour in the early morning before they wake up is a wasted bright hour that would make more sense in the evening, when most modern humans are awake. The argument "noon should coincide with solar noon" is nonsensical to me, the clock is a social construct and should make sense for how most of us live our lives.
But the social construct of work hours shifted later by more than that one hour during the last century, so this is not what people actually prefer by their actions.
Optimizing for summer is silly. Summer gets lots of daylight already. We need to optimize for winter.
People disagree on whether to prioritize mornings or afternoons in the winter. For the summer, only very few people care if the sun rises at four or five (or whatever), but most people like having long summer evenings. Therefore the summer tips the scales.
Then they are also social activities that you just need to wait for in summer, because they can only happen after sunset. Viewing a movie (outside), sitting around a fire, having a party all just really happen after sunset.
We don't use standard time because it works best, we use it because it's "correct" relative to the position of the sun.
Now, standard business hours (9-5 or whatever) were probably chosen for working well in the circumstances where they became standard, and it might be interesting to watch for whether tweaking the clocks leads to tweaking the nominal time of things...
The article, however, says 93% wanted daylight savings in the linked public engagement report.
> It's "standard" for a reason
The reason is that with standard time, solar noon coincides with local noon, so the day is approximately symmetric about noon, not regarding atmospheric refraction lengthening the day. It wasn't done on a whim.
The US decided (and Canada followed) that daylight time was more correct for the larger portion of the year, presumably it's easier to transition the remaining 4mo to daylight than it is to move 8mo to standard.
But also, all the opinion polling (business and individual) was like over 90% in favour of year-round daylight time, so here we are.
> The US decided (and Canada followed) that daylight time was more correct for the larger portion of the year, presumably it's easier to transition the remaining 4mo to daylight than it is to move 8mo to standard.
How is transitioning permanently to one easier than transitioning permanently to the other?
How to transition to permanent DST: wait until we are in DST and then stop switching.
How to transition to permanent Standard time: wait until we are in standard time and then stop switching.
Sadly, this isn't really right. Humanity settled on solar time. For somewhat obvious reasons.
Alas, I don't see my preferred method of changing the clock by 10 minutes every month taking hold. Basically ever. :D
I also don't think this is nearly as important for places that are not further away from the equator. If you are on the equator, you are almost certainly fine with no change throughout the year.
That method wont work, that is a too large change that happens to seldom. What you want is a leap second every hour for five months to switch between standard and daylight savings time and back, with a month of constant time around each solstice. That gives you a smooth transition without perceptible discontinuities.
I’d guess that there is less of a need for light at the beginning of the day since most people don’t farm. Personally I prefer more light at the end of the day.
I don't get that argument. The numeric time is just a measure for the state of the sun in the sky. When you choose your day to have ended is completely independent. There is already a high enough variance of people deciding when they go to sleep, that DST is hardly relevant. Some people have dinner at half past 5, some do at half past 8, the hour daylight saving time can't possibly make that difference.
Exactly, here in Spain we have lunch between half past 2 and half past 3 on workdays, which can extend up to 5pm in the weekend and I usually finish dinner at half past ten.
Why? because they decided to be on the same timezone as our eastern neighbors in Europe. The eastern part of Polonia is on the same timezone and probably have probably the opposite with much much earlier lunch and dinner than we do.
The timezone centered across Görlitz made a lot of sense for the German empire, because it was nearly in half longitude wise and 15° away from Greenwich. It is still somewhat centered in Europe. If you wanted to divide it again, you would need to decide whether the border should be between Germany and France or France and Spain. If you place it between Germany and France, which side will the BeNeLux countries be on? France still has some parts that are nominally in +1 and we don't want to disturb the German-French "friendship", so maybe place it between Spain and France, where there is at least a mountain border? Would that be acceptable? Railways connections between Spain and France are also much less and concentrated than between Germany and France.
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https://vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/time-zones-...
The old borders aligned with the sun a lot more, so we can blame that on WW2 as well.
It's not just a measure for the state of sun in the sky, it's also a measure for the state of society on the ground. It's an arbitrary number in a sense, but it also strongly influences my schedule.
And yes, we could have all the schools and everything else open later in the winter than the rest of the year, but it turns out it's easier to change the clocks.
But the school schedule does already shift and it shifts later, so in the opposite direction. The policy trend is going in the opposite of what you want to achieve with year-long DST, you could instead vote for the status quo and have the same effect.
Do BC schools have a different winter schedule? That's not how it is where I live, at least. It seems like it would be pretty annoying to have to reschedule activities around getting to/from school twice a year.
I can only comment on some parts in Germany, and no I don't know of different seasonal schedules. I meant that the general trend is for the school day to start later, so that the teenagers get more of their precious sleep. Year-long DST would get them to get up earlier again compared to the sun. This trend is the same for office hours and working shifts, they become later, since people just want to sleep longer. (Which is obviously bullocks.)
Farmers don't care about clocks, they do the work whenever needed. Roosters crow whenever they want. There's literally no point in talking about farmers in this debate.
the reason was valid 50 years ago when most people didn't work 9-5 in front of a computer.
Yeah they started work at 6. So the working schedule shifted later by three hours, but with year-long DST it will shift back only one hour. Sounds like people don't actually want what they now vote for. My bet is that the work hours will just move later yet another hour in the future.
> Humanity settled on these numbers long ago because they work best.
Absolutely not. It was a compromise tempered by practical and political considerations.
And that reason was that it was the standard before the standard was rethought. There's no deeper meaning to it.
And we rethought it yet again, should we go on the time standard (DST) that we're already on for ~65% of the year, or the one we're on for ~35% the year.
It should be pretty obvious why DST is the new winner, it's the current standard.
Not that long ago, and we keep fiddling with them. The US time zones were adopted just over a century ago. The dates for daylight saving time were changed less than 20 years ago. Much of Western Europe changed time zones (much of it rather violently) in the 1940s, as did China. The tz database often requires updates for changes.
If you want to go with what was settled long ago, that would probably be a return to each town observing its own time based on local solar noon, which would be pretty annoying.
> I would have preferred permanent standard time to permanent daylight time.
Do you have children?
In past HN threads, the preference largely comes down to whether you have children (and want more early morning light for safer trips to school) or not.
I have children and I’ve never heard any arguments for DLS that make any sense.
Most of the time people conflate longer summer days with DLS.
The situation with dark mornings is winter not standard time.
My children are already waking to school in daylight this time of year prior to the switch to DLS.
As others have said. I would rather permanent standard time but I’ll take permanent DLS. Moving the clocks twice a year is insanity.
As far north as BC is winter just doesn't have enough daylight to think you can get everything done with sunlight. Maybe Arizona has enough - but they don't do daylight savings time (one of two us states)
> winter just doesn't have enough daylight to think you can get everything done with sunlight
That's the perfect way to say it.
The other piece that a lot of people are missing is the whole larks (early risers) vs owls (late risers) divide. I think the best illustration of that is to ask, if you got your pick, which shift you'd take, based solely on your own body and habits: 8-4, 9-5, or 10-6 (or perhaps even further in one direction)? My guess is that the answer to that question predicts your desire for Standard or Daylight time pretty well.
My guess is that both owls & larks get their preference logically backwards.
My guess is that owls will say they prefer permanent daylight time and larks will say they prefer permanent standard time.
But their revealed preference is the opposite -- owls wake up well after sunrise and go to bed well after sunset. Yet permanent daylight time will shift it so they'll be waking up closer to sunrise and going to bed closer to sunset.
Larks revealed preference is more like permanent daylight time yet I think they're more likely to say they want permanent standard time.
I'm definitely in the night owl camp and I'd much rather have sunlight in the mornings because I already am going to have trouble waking up each morning, making it so I can't even set my circadian rhythm properly is just adding insult to injury.
It amazes me that we actually argue about this based on vibes. We know that people are better off the closer the time between waking up and sunrise.
10-4 obviously.
Okay, yes, but not helpful here: that's a different thread.
I don’t have children, but I was a child once. I didn’t mind going to school in darkness (in winter) and enjoy 1h more of daylight in the evening. Having that extra hour of daylight in the morning always seemed a waste for me because I wasn’t doing something I wanted (I was doing something I had to do, this is, going to school)
I don't have children and I prefer permanent Standard Time because I have the apparently weird belief that noon should be at noon.
(i.e. the time 12:00PM should be when the sun is overhead)
I'm not a "capitalism gives you brain worms" kind of person, but the idea that it is somehow better to literally change the location of the sun in the sky because the holy hours of 9-5 are sacrosanct is so strange to me.
I lived once in Ecuador. Pretty much the whole year the sun rises at 6am and sets at 6pm. I very much prefer Spain: in summer the sun sets at almost 10 pm at its peak… best summers of my life. I lived in Poland once too, where in winter the sun sets at 3pm: I wanted to kill myself
I miss sunset times from Spain. It makes days feel longer
9-5 aren't sacrosanct. When the 9-5 song came out approximately nobody worked from 9-5. Standard working hours were 8-5 with an hour for lunch. Starting at 7 was far more common than starting at 9.
The song is about a secretary who didn't get a lunch hour, so started an hour later than her boss.
Tech workers generally start at 9, but that started decades after the song came out.
Where I live, in winter it's dark in the morning (and also the evening depending on the length of the school day) with and without DST, and in summer the sun is also up either way.
Conversely, I'd rather my kids have more daylight after school so they can explore outside.
Selfishly, I just want as much daylight as possible, which has very little to do with how a government selects a time range for legal reasons. The rotation of the globe has not been yet controlled, as far as I'm tracking.
As a child, there was nothing worse than getting out of school at 3pm and then having the sun set at 4:21pm. I barely got home before it got dark, forget about playing outside. Morning time was useless, since school prep ate that up.
Right? I literally never once cared if I have to walk/ride to school in the relative dark. But I did care pretty much every afternoon how much time I have to enjoy the rest of my free time. Being able to go out with my friends and enjoy the daylight made a huge difference. It's soooo long overdue to put this stupid system in the past.
Almost nowhere do you see the sun directly overhead at noon, even during Standard Time. The differences can be quite stark: https://24timezones.com/cms-static/images/uploads/solartimev...
BC (and PST) is actually quite reasonable in this regard, with Vancouver and LA being fairly close to "on the money." Contrast that with China and Russia, where clock time can be 2h+ off from solar time.
As a further note, this is one reason it's miserable to be in Boston/Maine during the winter if you're an SAD sufferer: sunset times of 4pm or sooner feel like "insult to injury."
Maybe, but Standard time is still closer to "correct."
"Daylight Savings" time never made sense. Why are we "saving daylight" when there's more of it?
Save it in the evening, it was always dark in the morning.
Historically we were saving daylight for the morning
I went looking for a visualization tool to help get a sense of what this change means experientially. Found this:
https://savestandardtime.com/chart/?city=6173331&clock=pdst
"Pacific time" is going to be so confusing though. Should have just called it Yukon Standard Time, since that's already a thing, at least informally. Cause that would not be confusing at all...
Everyone else is throwing in there 2¢, so here's my pet proposal.
Here's the undeniable fact: everyone (ok, almost everyone, but it's a rounding error) hates the switchover in spring, when you have to get up an hour earlier. Conversely, everyone (or a rough approximation) likes the switchover in the fall, when we get to sleep in an extra hour. So why don't we just get rid of the switchover in the spring and get rid of the one in the fall?
I hate both. The time jump in fall means sunset starts happening depressingly early (almost exactly 5pm where I am, which means no sunlight after work).
that's a load of horseshit. everyone around me want's the daylight savings time, to have more light after work. nobody cares about mornings.
> when you have to get up an hour earlier
no you don't. it's weekend.
A few years ago I was against changing the time but now I tend to even suggest a full two hour change! In the developed northern hemisphere the summer/winter daylight difference is huge (about 2 hours in the morning and 2 in the night) with a short time of equal length. Maximizing sunlight exposure while the people are outside is vital, mainly for psychological purposes. That means let the light begin at about 7-8 all year long and let summer afternoon extend as much as possible. No kid leaves home before 8 and the 6-in-the-morning drivers will pay attention all year long and not only during the winter. But all types of people will enjoy the long summer afternoons.
Not all of British Columbia can make the change. BC's northeast and much of the Columbia-Kootenays are presently on Mountain time, which means that the Province of Alberta holds the choice of when/whether their own and those BC areas go to a permanent time. Then AB would have to sync with Saskatchewan along their borders, but SK is already on a permanent time zone system. Decisions, decisions.
The northeast is already on permanent PDT.
My dream world is everyone using 24 hour clocks set to UTC
My dream world would have 86400 time zones, one per arc-second of the globe, so we can all sync our clocks at high noon.
And then it's going to be so fun guessing at which time each country in the world starts working
My favorite depiction of your dream world: https://qntm.org/abolish
> Uncle Steve is zero hours ahead.
Uncle Steve is the same number of hours ahead that he has always been, and that's a thing that could be looked up just as easily as finding his time zone. I think the author is greatly exaggerating the degree to which time zones solve any of the problems mentioned. Uncle Steve might be on a different sleep schedule from me, regardless of whether or not he's in a different time zone.
Days of the week definitely become interesting in a global UTC system, but noon used to literally mean "the sun is at it's highest point". I suspect that people would grumble for a year or two and then forget that another system ever existed.
thank you for sharing, I was trying to find something similar that explains why UTC everywhere is such a bad idea!
My dream world is we apply time zone logic to every other unit of measurement.
1 metre can be 100cm or 200cm depending on the season and your location
My nightmare world would be one where we apply "everything else" logic to time.
1 kilosecond: about 17 minutes
1 megasecond: about 12 days
1 gigasecond: about 32 years
"Oh man, it's been a hot megasecond since we last spoke!" Said everyone, in my worst nightmares.
12 oz of alcohol would obviously be larger in the winter the closer you get to the poles. I think I like this idea.
Time zones are a pain, but it might be too much to fix.
Now, 13 month calendar with each month 4 weeks, on the other hand..
But if we abolish time zones how will we keep trains from hitting each other on the tracks?
Sounds good on paper, terrible idea in practice.
Nah, it also sounds terrible on paper.
I'll correct myself: it sounds good for about 5 seconds before you think about it and realize it's an unworkable idea which creates more problems than it solves.
I will readily admit that I'm an idiot, but I've thought about it for literally multiple minutes, and I still love it. It even still seems workable!
I have all my clocks set to UTC. Works for me
I also did that for some time, I just don't perceived clocks to have a single point that is up and mentally rotated clocks all the time. The hours just lost their meaning beyond their numerical value.
This question IMO reveals how the abstraction of numbers can imprison our minds.
It literally makes no sense to say, "I prefer to have an extra hour in the evening" (the morning and evening will always have equal numbers of hours). Or "I hate it when it's dark at 5pm" (translation: "I hate when it's dark at 5 arbitrary periods after an arbitrary moment that may be hours either side of solar noon").
My solution: pick the time peg closest to the "correct" one (i.e. standard time) and stick to it. People who want year-round "summer" evenings can continue to have them by the simple expedient of doing what DST forces them (and everyone else) to do already: get up earlier.
In a world where there isn't work schedule and in general the whole of society's schedule which works around the arbitrary time, I agree with you.
So adjust the work schedule.
If people want more time in the evening, get up earlier and go to work and go home earlier.
You can even shift school/work schedules throughout the year.
The work schedule is adjusting all the time, and it moves in the opposite direction.
Sure. But this argument is surely less powerful than it was back in the era of church bells and big clocks on factory walls and so on. We now have electronics that add a whole new layer of abstraction to our schedules, to the point that you can now miss a DST change if you're not paying attention. For many people (I'm one) this change is now just a useless irritation.
It makes sense when schedules are fixed and time is the only thing we can change. I wouldn't mind switching to standard time if I can change my work schedule to have more light after work. I work from home, I don't care about not having light in the morning
> This question IMO reveals how the abstraction of numbers can imprison our minds.
Is it the abstraction of number that imprison our mind or just the reality of having a job and other social constraint based on all of us agreeing on a time?
When most people can’t leave their job before 5pm, wether it’s dark at 5 or 6 makes a huge difference.
The social construct is moving later though. I guess this is because people's desire to sleep longer is making them move the social constraint of being at work later, while they stay up "partying" regardless of the social constraint.
I fully support removing DST (as a parent at least, it's a PITA twice a year).
However, clocks should show noon correctly, as best as they can within your chosen timezone. Also, I really like long evenings in the summer to get outdoors and go biking or hiking. It follows that we should abolish DST, stick to the correct time, and move regular school and business hours back one hour.
Good luck coordinating that.
School and business hours are already fairly arbitrary where I live. The only places observing "standard" hours seem to be banks and even many of those stay open later in the evening these days. Meanwhile the schools do everything based on juggling a limited number of busses meaning that start and end times are staggered over a period of 3+ hours. You see evidence of this in traffic patterns as well. It starts early with the trades and runs well into the late morning due (AFAIK) to tech.
Wow we finally did it
I won't complain about the NDP for at least 3 days after this one. This is cause for celebration!
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day!
Another falsehood programmers believe about time. A stopped clock is only right twice a day if it is a 12 hour clock and only if it’s not set at a leap second or at a skipped time during the shift from standard to daylight time.
I was being generous. Which wasn't really justified considering Eby's track record.
It would be great to see Europe adopt it as well. Changing clocks twice a year feels outdated and more disruptive than beneficial.
Absolutely not. The time that would stay is the bad one.
With switch, we get reasonable half a years. Without it, it would be whole unreasonable year.
The biggest unreasonability is switching at all. I admit other points of view, but switching back and forth is a compromise that seems far worse than just sticking with one. Either one.
In germany the terms are Sommerzeit (summer time) and Winterzeit (winter time). Of course everybody would chose the former as summer sound better than winter but the latter is "better" as it corresponds more to "wake up when there is light" which is favorable to health, performance etc.
The report linked in the article has BC support _massively_ in favour of "more light in the evenings" instead of "wake up when there is light", citing health and wellness concerns. "Better" seems a matter of opinion.
Im very healthy and performant during sommerzeit. It’s in winterzeit when I get depressed bc there isn’t enough daylight in the evenings (it gets dark around 3pm-4pm in winter… that sucks big time)
That's a very dishonest take, as I'm sure you know that Sommerzeit proponents have reasons other than "summer sounds better than winter".
For example most people just wake up and go to work in the morning, but in the evening they meet friends, BBQ, hike/run through nature, do sports etc., and prefer doing those activities while it's bright outside.
What stops you from going to work one hour early, so you get off earlier as well? Most employers these days allow flexible working hours.
And if we are permanently moving our clocks to advance by an hour, why stop at just one hour? Why not have +2h or +3h so we get even more brighter evenings.
Because most people don’t have that degree of flexibility. When I was commuting I’d have been happy to have double DST or whatever you want to call it.
With flexible working hours it works in both directions, so @ndr42 can also wake up an hour later for his health and performance :)
I am so jealous. I hope the entire West Coast can follow this example.
I'll genuinely miss it getting dark at 4PM. Winter won't be the same.
They picked wrong.
They should have picked Standard Time.
As someone else pointed everyone is already on DST for approximately 65% of the year. This just removes the remaining 35%. Picking standard time would have been a much bigger change.
Ultimately, it's entirely arbitrary anyway. The only issue is that American states cannot pick DST without a federal law change.
> As someone else pointed everyone is already on DST for approximately 65% of the year. This just removes the remaining 35%. Picking standard time would have been a much bigger change.
This 65% started during the Dubya presidency (source: I was there updating tzdata on systems), and previous to that it was a 50/50 split.
So 65/35 or 50/50 is arbitrary.
Metric time would have been better.
what does "daylight time" mean?
is it summer time or winter time?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time
Probably, "summer time"; it means the +n hour change in offset (usually +1h) that some timezones jump into in the spring, and remove in the fall.
This zone is making DST "permanent" (subject to future legislation).
Reminder that a few hundred years ago when clocks were oddities we didn't have to deal with any of this madness because everybody used True Solar Time as a sundial would read it. What time do kids go to school? After the sun rises. Simple. Now that we have clocks it suddenly becomes difficult to schedule simple things like sending kids to school in sunlight.
While true, I'm not sure what your point is? Centuries ago, everyone got up at sunrise to tend to the farm because the farm needed tending at sunrise. These days, organizations like schools and grocery stores need to coordinate with hundreds to thousands of people daily, and "angle of sun in the sky" is nowhere near precise enough. Let alone phone calls and instant messages that travel across many timezones.
Once we invented the railway we quickly realised that Oxford Time and London Time being 6 minutes out was not helpful. That was 180 years ago.
So they chose the wrong way. Nice.
<Insert Archer WOOOOO video>
Seriously, woo!