This seems like such a simple thing to me, and yet the US just can’t seem to get it done. What are the issues preventing this?
This seems like such a simple thing to me, and yet the US just can’t seem to get it done. What are the issues preventing this?
They last tried DST “year-round” starting in January 1974 and people quickly hated it, with support dropping from 79% before it started to 42% three months in. Morning accidents increased and schoolchildren were injured or killed.
I don’t necessarily love the idea of the sun starting to rise as early as 4am in the summer, but I think if we’re going to stay with one we might as well stick to standard time year-round. We’d still have light past 8 PM where I live and it would mean activities better for the dark could start earlier. I see places wanting to take advantage of the warm weather for things like outdoor movies but they can’t start until after 9.
That the boomers hated it is all the more reason to try again.
This is the most reasonable approach, and it meshes with medical studies about how DST affects our mental and physical health. We don’t need sunlight until 9 or 10 pm, and the sun is supposed to be approximately overhead at noon, not 1pm.
We took my in-laws back to my father-in-law’s hometown on the west coast of France last year and it was kind of wild to have it not be dark out until 10 pm. A lot of times we didn’t have dinner until 8:30 or 9 because it didn’t feel that late.
If you’re getting sunlight at 10PM, you live on the western end of your time zone. In your location during winter, the sun is overhead closer to 1pm than noon.
Your particular jurisdiction might be better served by joining the timezone to your west.
Or more likely, you live in the northern US, or Canada. The further north, the more extreme the length of the long and short days are, which explains much of the split in whether people want to go with standard or DST when debating this.
The idea of having narrower time zones, say by adding a new one, is an interesting idea to mitigate the large difference in how people experience the time zone based on if they are at the east or west edge. Shifting the existing ones around would only change who is affected but not how many.
With car culture as it is now, that’ll just be seen as business as usual.
Its not like dead children has ever stopped the US before