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?
I think we should just use sidereal and let the hours of the day rotate smoothly over the year.
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 ???
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. (I might have the winter times backwards.)
We did year round DST in the 70s and it resulted in kids being hit by cars on the way to school in the winter.
Heart attacks and strokes are more frequent after DST starts
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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 it.
Daylight-saving time fucks with our daily schedule twice a year for no reason.
Who fucking cares? Get blackout curtains if that matters.
I personally have the opposite problem during DST. Because night doesn’t start until 11pm or later where I live from DST, I can’t fall asleep until 12am or later. This is because light blocks the production of melatonin in the body. To fix the problem, I would have to set up blackout curtains all through my house (instead of just my bedroom) and close them all at 9pm just so I can go to bed at 10pm.
Also, removing DST gets rid of the stupid time change without increasing the risk of kids getting run over while walking to school, which is what we’d get if DST was year round.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
That the boomers hated it is all the more reason to try again.
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.
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.
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. Everyone thinks they will be ‘happier’ that way, but once they experience they will be lamenting that it’s dark in the morning when they wake up and we should switch back.
Arizona is in the south, the daylight time shift isn’t as extreme. there is only 4 hour daylight difference, where as in NYC it’s 6 hours. And in Seattle it’s 8. In Miami it’s 3. DST shift doesn’t have much of an impact for Southern states as it does for northern ones.
But timezones are longitudinal and it would be bad for business, etc for Miami to be an hour off from NYC.
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.
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.
Congress once voted to end it, the backlash from
constituentsbusinesses was severe and they could not reimplement it fast enough.Ftfy. Fuck those greedy pricks
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 🥲
But they changed it suddenly in January, instead of just not changing back in the fall. That was dumb.
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?
DST is the time in the summer. I favor year-round DST so that the sun doesn’t set at 4pm.
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
There kinda is. Stores get more customers when there’s daylight in the evenings, specifically when most people are off work. So they tend to like daylight savings time because it maximizes that time window. These stores tend to lobby against bills for removing DST to keep their sales and profits high
Is it something we need to do? I’ve never felt like it’s a big deal. I like the sunrise/sunset times in the summer and it would effect my life if that changed. I don’t like them in the winter but there’s no great alternative.
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.
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.
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.
I lived in BC. It did suck to only have like 6 hours of full daylight. All of which were during the workday when you were inside anyway.
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.
Going to work while the sun comes up, and going home after it has gone down feels a hell of a lot worse than the opposite.
Literally “working the day away”.
Want to enjoy sunlight? ~~Go fuck yourself. ~~Use your 2 appointed days of the week
Yeah given a choice, I’d rather have light after work instead of before. Unfortunately when I lived in Montana, the winter days were so short that I went to work in the dark and came home in the dark. The only light I saw was going outside during lunch break.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
As a fellow night owl, I don’t need a sunset. Just let me enjoy the peaceful darkness.
I just get up later. I don’t get it. The day is the same, just shift when you do things.
I know in some places in the world they do just that: stores have summer and winter hours. It’s that simple. The clock doesn’t change, your schedule does.
That’s how it should be of course. Problem is businesses and companies still follow standard business hours and make their employees show up at the same time no matter if DST is in effect or not.
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.
Yeah, I regularly deal with logs and its frustrating enough with them in UTC or local and trying to figure out which is being used. "This log is UTC and needs to be local? What’s 13:28 minus my offset which includes a half hour. " or vice versa and having to add the offset. A half hour time zone can fuck right off.
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.
There are also fewer heart attacks and car accidents when we gain an hour though, so it cancels out in the end.
[Citation greatly needed]
https://googlethatforyou.com/?q=heart+attack+daylight+savings
Take your pick.
Literally the title of the second link:
Daylight Saving Time May Not Trigger Heart Attacks After All, Study …
Questions work better at getting answers…
But here’s one for the road:
Duke, along with colleagues, compared heart attack rates during the week of DST — both spring and fall — with the weeks immediately before and after. In the spring, 28,678 patients (17.0%) were treated for AMI during the DST week, compared to 28,596 (16.9%) the week before and 28,169 (16.7%) the week after.
If the change happens the first day, including days before and after would dilute the effect
Which is why this is the one study that didnt find it. Except they did find it, it was just diluted by looking at a longer time than necessary…
If you have more questions, you won’t get answers from me tho, be happy you got that one.
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.
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
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.
Where I live, in December it’s dark when I go to work and dark when I get out. That’s just how it is, so who cares?
Meanwhile in June I can’t get to sleep due to they sky still being bright and blocking melatonin production until about 11pm. If we got rid of DST it’d get dark at 10pm.
And I don’t care if sunrise would end up 4:30am. It’s easy to set up blackout curtains in the bedroom to stay asleep.
Yep. A lot easier to have blackout curtain in just your bedroom to stay asleep than it is to have them all over your house to build up melatonin in the evenings during summer
Congress would actually have to do their jobs and pass legislation without throwing 500 riders onto it.
They literally have it completely approved, it’s just that they’re waiting to use it as the base for whatever else they want to get passed.
In theory, individual states could choose to not do daylight savings time. Two states already don’t use it and there was a proposal for Florida to get rid of it and move to the Atlantic Time Zone.
Yup. It’s switching to permanent DST (which is what most people want) that requires Congressional approval. A state can switch to permanent standard time on their own.
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?!
Howard knows
Because the hour of light in the evening is nicer than the hour in the morning.
Much rather have the hour later than in the morning.
I prefer the hour of light in the morning, hands down. Helps me get out of bed and start my day.
Now, if we could somehow just make it so sunrise was like 645am in perpetuity, I’m on board with that, but the stupid sun keeps moving!
Wasted light. People get off work and can’t do anything outside. If you want light to wake up but a lamp.
Buy a head lamp. Same logic, no?
Nope.
Oh, good point!
The only point I’m making is it’s personal preference and I’m not sure we will ever find a solution where everyone is happy.
You need sunlight to do things outside like jog safely, hike, fly RC planes or yardwork. You don’t need sunlight to get ready for work in the morning. Moving the work day so that there are no daylight hours after work is one step down from slavery.
Those are fair points, but the workday and my kids’ schooldays exist, and my workday and other parents’ workdays all coexist with this school day, and it probably does come at the expense of RC planing and hiking a couple months a year (except weekends), which also happen to be the months folks are most likely to not want to spend time outside because it sucks, although that’s just my opinion from Jersey, and I’m sure there’s places that are more temperate and allowing for outdoor activities in December through February.
Well, here in Florida, the winter is the only time to go outside, the rest of the year is so hot and humid you can’t breathe. We are at least fortunate enough to not be so far north so our days are still longer. However, it is especially frustrating as everyone voted to have permanent daylight savings time year round years ago and the politicians have found a way to not enact it. That also highlights how fake the whole “Democracy” thing is.
That is crazy, especially considering we’ve got places in the US that do permanent time.
