End Daylight Savings Time Changes

[beth_leonard]

We the people petition the Obama Administration to:
End Daylight Savings Time Changes.

Click here to sign the Whitehouse.gov petition. It needs 150 signatures to become public, and 25,000 signatures by April 13th, 2012 to get an official response. You will need to create an account if you do not already have one.

If you don't like changing the clocks twice a year, please pass it on!

Comments

[steuard.livejournal.com]

Regarding the choice between "always standard time" vs. "always daylight time", I've been quite surprised to hear people advocating the latter. I don't know about other regions, but if "always daylight time" were instituted where I live, even at 8am it would still be too dark to see the horizon for several weeks of the year. My first class would begin while it was still too dark to clearly distinguish everyday objects outside. That just seems crazy to me: it's already hard enough to get my students out of bed. :) What is the argument for sticking with daylight time rather than standard time?

[zathrus.livejournal.com]

I also would prefer to stick with standard time, although that would mean it would get light rediculously early in the summer. But I have signed and publicized the petition because I'd rather get this topic under serious discussion first and then bring up the "Which should we stick with?" question.

Newt

[beth_leonard]

Replied extensively to steuard's post. For some reason I can't find the e-mail with your address to see when your daylight is, but you can look it up at weather.com

--Beth

[beth_leonard]

Mostly it's about when would I like the extra dark in winter, and the extra light in summer. I tend to do the same things in the morning indoors, regardless of whether there is darkness or daylight, but in the evenings, the activities I choose vary quite a bit based on the amount of light, and I like the daylight-focused activities better than the "it's dark outside ALREADY?!?" activities.

Currently standard time is roughly a noon midpoint (depending on how far east or west you are with respect to your timezone), and daylight savings time to a 1pm midpoint. Here's my preferences/hours of daylight, with the midpoints.

8 hrs daylight/day: 9am-5pm, 1pm midpoint
9 hrs daylight/day: 9am-6pm, 1:30pm midpoint
10 hrs daylight/day: 8am-6pm, 1pm midpoint
11 hrs daylight/day: 8am-7pm, 1:30pm midpoint
12 hrs daylight/day: 7am-7pm, 1pm midpoint
13 hrs daylight/day: 7am-8pm, 1:30pm midpoint
14 hrs daylight/day: 6am-8pm, 1pm midpoint
15 hrs daylight/day: 6am-9pm, 1:30pm midpoint
16 hrs daylight/day: 5am-9pm, 1pm midpoint

So if we stayed on DST (summertime) it's closer to keeping the afternoons and evenings lit, which is when children want to play, and families want to be outside. (My preference, which may differ from yours.)

When there's an odd number of hours of daylight in the day, they're centered about half an hour earlier than my preferences, but I was just rounding for simplicity. I suppose I could just delete those lines from the table for simplicity too, but I already typed them so I won't.

If we switch to standard time (wintertime) year round, it moves all those hours of daylight earlier by one hour, meaning with 8 hours daily of sunlight, it is centered 8am to 4pm (kids still go to school in the dark, and if they have after school activities, they come home in the dark too.) and with 16 hours daily of sunlight, it's light 4am to 8pm.

Right now we get about 12 hrs, 7:19am-7:16pm, a week ago it was roughly 6:19am-6:16pm. Looks like you get 7:50am-7:46pm, which means you must be farther east in your timezone and may relate to your preferences vs. mine. I don't have extremely strong preferences either way, but I think changing the clocks causes too much disruption relative to the benefits of moving sunrise earlier by an hour for those 8-11 hrs/sunlight/day months.
--Beth

[beth_leonard]

Just had time to look at a timezone map, and I correct myself, you're at the farthest Western edge of your timezone, not eastern. I thought we were the farthest west, so a difference of half an hour would have had to be more easterly than I.

The other edge of your timezone currently has their 12 hours of daylight from 6:55am-6:51pm.

--Beth

[ricevermicelli.livejournal.com]

Without the time change, it would stay dark until nine-ish on winter mornings here too. I'm already having trouble getting the kids out of bed at 6:30, as they argue (correctly) that it's *dark*. On the other end of the year, without the change to summer time (sorry, I can never keep track of which is which), we'd hit sunrise at 3:30 in the morning, and the cooler part of the day would be thoroughly burned off by the time most people get up.

[robszewczyk.livejournal.com]

The time change in itself is easy; the problem is that the rules around it have gotten so incredibly complex. it seems to me that the time zone issue is largely a product of there being not ENOUGH government. It is totally crazy that Arizona is able to not observe something, it just makes it more confusing to everyone. Then you have a similar situation on an international scale, when different people adjust the clock on different days. MORE consistency!

Clocks

[singerji.livejournal.com]

I've often thought that clocks should stay just the same -- but government business and schools (and perhaps most big business) should change their "working hours" appropriately according to the seasons and hours of daylight. So some days you'd start school at 7:30a, some days you'd start at 9:00a, etc.

Silly, perhaps. But no sillier than the current situation...