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?
“but then things would be different from when i was a child and that makes me scared and angry.”
I read that some senator was working on a bill to permanently switch to half-DST, which is where we set our clocks to halfway between regular time and DST. I’ve been advocating for that forever so I hope it will at least get people thinking/talking about it. It should solve the argument between whether to permanently stay on one time or the other. Split the difference and just get it done already!
As a software developer, that idea can fuck right off. India being on a half hour is enough of a pain in the ass. 6 more half-off time zones is just too much.
We keep DST for more months than ST so I think more people like it more.
I kinda think it runs backwards, making the sun set even earlier in the clock day during winter. So much more dispiriting to come home in the dark than to go to work in the dark.
My argument for ending it is that you can’t make days longer or shorter by moving the clock around, but I think we should just keep adding weeks onto DST and taking them away from ST until eventually it’s just DST. But settling on either scheme would be ok, better than switching back and forth.
We already tried year-round DST in the 70s. It didn’t last through the first year because kids were getting hit by cars on the way to school in the early morning darkness.
So we issue Little Johnny a retroreflective PT belt, and/or start the school day 30 minutes later on the west end of each time zone. Problem solved.
It’s not the 1970’s anymore. The fact that a bunch of idiot boomers hated change is no reason to keep this idiot system.
Yeah but it’s dark in the morning anyway. Elementary school here starts at like 7am, that is a bigger problem than the DST. I thought they hated it because they switched it back in January? If it just never changed I’m sure it would not feel so shocking.
Already we do 8 months of DST and only 4 of EST here.
Why the fuck do schools start so early and let out so early? It’s like everything is engineered by some asshole trying to make everyone miserable.
People already complain about seeing the sun at 9pm or not seeing the sun at 9am. Not having DST would just exasperate that.
exacerbate
*ducks*
Why must you always exacerbate the ducks?!
I’m saying it’ll be really annoying hearing the complaints.
BC/Vancouver just removed it but made it DST year round. My only worry against that is that mornings would be hella dark. For where I live, sunrise in the winter (standard time) is around 7:55AM, meaning that’s crack of dawn first light. Spring forward, so 7:55 becomes 8:55, meaning our first sunlight of the day won’t be until about 9am. Now, our evenings will be a bit longer (sunset is around 4-4:30, so now 5-5:30, but still most people won’t even see sunrise.
You morning people already have the world scheduled around you. At least let us night owls get to enjoy a sunset in the winter.
Why did this turn into an us vs them?
Because night people hate daylight savings changes for different reasons than morning people, especially in northern latitudes.
A lot of people, schoolchildren included, are up way before sunrise anyway, regardless of where we put the clocks.
Personally, I’m just sick of moving back and forth. I don’t care what we change it to, just stop changing it. Where I live, we get 8 hours of daylight in the winter. Someone is always going to be in the dark sometime, no matter what we set our clocks to.
I live basically on the border on the US side and pray that BC changing will allow WA to change.
Full DST is better imo. Having light after work/school/the day makes the dark months so much more tolerable. Helps alleviate my SAD partially, personally.
The problem is that if you’re far enough North, the days are so short that if you work full time, no amount of clock-adjusting will keep you from either going to work or going home in the dark.
I used to be in the make-DST-permanent camp because I enjoy it being lighter later. Then I saw a set of US maps illustrating sunrises before 7am and sunsets after 5pm. Permanent DST completely hoses the western areas of the time zones. I can’t in good conscience support that option anymore. Ditch DST altogether, and just make standard time permanent.
Yeah I saw a map like that illustrating how which side of your time zone you’re on makes a big difference. I wonder if adding another time zone so they’re all a bit skinnier would help with that aspect of it.
Yeah in my area standard time would be better. The summer would be a bit more sane, I think sunset can be as late as 10:30 at the peak of summer, so losing an hour isn’t horrible there
Personally, I’d rather have it dark on the way to work than night before I get home.
DST shifts make more sense for higher latitude than it does for southern ones. ironically.
When I was a kid if I had to be at school a full hour before the sun even rose I would be even fucking dumber.
I wake up between 6 and 7am most weekdays, so the sun coming up at 8 vs 9am makes little difference to me.
We tried it once, and quickly went back, is one.
Might be a case of greener grass. Virtually none of us has lived without it, apart from Arizona, so we just don’t know what we have.
We quickly went back because one news story which blew a completely unrelated traffic incident out of proportion, and the driver blamed the time change for it. Despite living somewhere like Florida which was barely affected by the difference in sunlight.
Unless that was a well organized and faithful attempt to switch, that shouldn’t prohibit us from trying again.
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.
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.
Morning accidents increased and schoolchildren were injured or killed.
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
pretty much.
the same issues all exist, they are just in the morning instead of in the evening.
if you are on DST in the winter in the north it will be dark at 6-8am when people going to school and work. instead of dark at 3-4pm when they come home.
I’m in AZ, I think y’all are so dumb for doing that(not that any of you have a choice). I don’t want to live anywhere that fakes the time. The days change throughout the year, they get shorter and longer , it’s natural, get over it.
I didn’t care until I had to take care of my niece. During half of the school year it’s dark outside going to the bus. And why are we fighting what nature intended our body clocks to be? I have to get up for work at 4:30AM, it really sucks even with blackout curtains to get the room dark at 8-9PM.
So why not keep time as a constant and if individual places want to change times they can do that
Even just single states can have vastly different sunrise and sunset times and changing 300m people’s schedules so that a few people can have a few extra minutes of sun in the morning for part of the year seems absolutely ridiculous
A local school district could very easily do a 1 hour shift as the sunrise gets later so that it properly aligns with their local school pickup times
Exactly! Why does no one ever consider changing the time they do something instead of making the whole country adjust to time change? I know with schools, maybe their starting times are geared to when parents have to be a work or something, but surely they can figure out how to adjust their particular schedules around their particular needs and leave the rest of us alone.
I personally would rather have more daylight in the mornings than in the evenings during winter. Makes it way easier to wake up. Maybe lots of other people feel the same way.
I’d rather have sunlight when I get home off of work to be able to do stuff outside before it gets way too cold and dark. In the mornings before work I typically don’t go outside so it can be dark
I’ve found people would either like change or not mind it.
But like you said, they can’t agree on which way so thus it is.
I honestly dgaf about any of it. I’m fine with the current system.
That only works at a certain latitude. Further north it remains dark in the morning anyway
It still helps, it’s just not as big a difference as further south.
I’ll give you the only argument I ever give for this.
Congress once voted to end it, the backlash from constituents was severe and they could not reimplement it fast enough.
They went about it in a stupid way and now we’re doomed for all time because it gets pointed to as proof we can never end DST 🥲
No they enacted permanent DST in the 70s. OP is asking for arguments against ending DST. The backlash against permanent DST in the 70s was because kids going to school in the early morning darkness were being hit y cars.
But they changed it suddenly in January, instead of just not changing back in the fall. That was dumb.
Just shift it 30 mins instead of an hour to appease everyone.
The shift kills people tho…
Literally, a shit ton of heart attacks happen because people’s schedule changes all of a sudden. No, those would likely happen in the following months anyways, but them all happening at the same time overloads our medical system even when staffing is adjusted for it.
Just change it once and leave it.
This is the clear solution and I can’t believe it doesn’t get brought up more often.
[Citation greatly needed]
https://googlethatforyou.com/?q=heart+attack+daylight+savings
Take your pick.
I think we should just use sidereal and let the hours of the day rotate smoothly over the year.
Someone like RFK would be given the job of co-ordinating it.
Just hypothesizing here, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there was some union/club/cabal of industrial clock adjusters (you know, someone has to adjust the clocks of city halls etc) that spend a lot of money on ensuring that their members have a predictable income. I just made it up, and I have no reason for this claim beyond it being in line with how everything else works in the US. And Epstein was of course a high-ranking member of that too. And Bush somehow wasn’t.
Hey we only have about half the Clockwinder files, Bush could absolutely still show up
How big is the actual effect on most of the US anyway?
I mean, most of the US is located surprisingly far to the south (e.g. Washington lying on a same latitude as the southern tip of Italy, Los Angeles as Northern Africa), so I would assume it to be not that big a deal, as seasonal changes of daylight are limited?
I don’t get why we would want to stop doing it? You lose a single hour on one night of the year, and in exchange you get more sunlight for the entire winter. Like ???
There are some indications that those one hour switches can be dangerous because of the impact in those two days. I’m not saying it is clear, but there is impact. Both because the driving conditions improve with respect to lighting, but conversely because driver alertness is lower due to sleep troubles for the time change.
Personally I’ve never really bought the whole “more sunlight” thing. We get precisely the same amount. Of course, you mean during business hours but I just don’t feel that is very relevant to a broader society with more diverse schedules.
From what I understand, traffic collisions dramatically increase whenever there’s a time change. Any benefit that we ever got from having Daylight Savings Time died out around 70 years ago, so what’s the point in continuing something that no longer benefits us and is proven to be a safety issue to the general population? That we’re even debating this in 2026 really confuses me.
https://x.com/KOCOdamonlane/status/1868130056104513675/photo/1
That we’re even debating this in 2026 really confuses me.
You brought it up. Just look at the chart. Getting rid of Daylight Savings just makes things worse. With our current system, we get sunrises at a reasonable time and sunsets at a reasonable time. It’s not a positive change.
It seems fine to me. What’s the problem?
almost nobody is up at 4-5 AM, and almost everybody wants to stay out from 7-9 PM in the summer. it’s just worse.
About 8 hours before noon, and about 8 hours after. That’s… as it should be.
So your argument is “Oh, the math is pretty, so we should make our actual daily schedule worse” ???
This has zero impact on our daily schedule except for the numbers we assign to them.
Is that chart hosted anywhere else?
But that’s not how time works… You don’t ever get more sunlight, timeshifts just shift by an hour when that time is. Your 4pm sunset in the winter will now be 5pm. You’re not getting evening sun with a time shift. Similarly without the shift summer sunsets are well past 7pm during the summer.
