The Waste of Daylight – William Willett's Original Daylight Saving Time Proposal (opens in new tab)

Yep, it makes no difference. I get up at 5:30 to go to work. Even during DST it's still dark in the morning, and it's not like I'm really getting any exposure to the light on the bus to work. But the consequence is that when I leave work at 4, it's pitch black outside where the sun would have been setting before.

DST is pointless and antiquated.

Good luck with changing the start working hours for most of the companies from an entire continent from around 8-9 in the morning to about 7 in the morning, so that people could have the chance of catching an hour of daylight in the winter by going home at around 3 or 4 in the afternoon. That's not going to happen anytime soon.

I don't know, there's certainly other ways but if you have the power to do it, changing the very measurement of time sounds like one of the better ways to me

Yes, Spain is in the "wrong" time zone geographically and should really go back an hour relative to CEST. This would put it in the same time zone as Portugal, Britain, Ireland and Morocco.

Personally, here in the UK I'd like to see daylight saving time abolished, but we should stay permanently in summer time. In winter the sun is usually up well before I am, but in the evening it gets dark far too early.

I used to strongly agree to this until someone pointed out that you don't have that option if you have children that are tied to the schedule decided on by their school or kindergarten.

There are countries where people have lunch at 12:00 and countries where they have it at 14:00 or later. Dinner and bed time are set in consequence. For the people in those first countries it makes sense to never have DST. For the others it would make sense to have double DST. We can argue that they could shift two hours backward with no consequences but cultural habits are hard to change (I live in one of those countries.) Having light late in the evening (22:00) is great if people are still out. Nobody use sunlight at 5:00 if they're sleeping.

There's no daylight "saved" or "wasted." It's merely forcing everyone to change their schedules according to someone else's arbitrary desire to have their schedule moved up an hour. It should be gotten rid of entirely, and those who want to change their schedules should do so.

I'm not sure if you were serious, but I actually think completely getting rid of timezones is not that crazy of an idea. It would take some getting used to, but naively I don't think it'd be any harder than say, switching to metric in the US.

That is, I like the idea in principle, but I know it'll never happen.

If you can convince everyone in the entire world to move their schedules earlier by one hour, I'm with you.

If not, I'm willing to live with midday and midnight being conceptually misaligned, as they have been for the half of my life I've spent on daylight savings time so far.

How are those times not arbitrary? Midday is not the middle of the day if you don't wake up at 4 o clock, 14:00 or 14:30 is about the middle of the day.

We could shift the hours for work and life, such that it'd be normal to wake up at 4:30, to have lunch at 10, the sun to reach its peak at 12, the middle of the day etc... But that would be a global, massive effort, requiring a rewrite of conventions that go back centuries. Or we could change the clock instead, making the connection between the number on the clock and the sun a little more arbitrary and giving us a few more hours sunlight at convenient times

If we can assume that clocks have decent computing power, and if we can assume that people that need to do time calculations across significant longitude differences have access to decent interactive computing power (smart phones, tablets, desktops), then I think some kind of dual time system might be workable.

Clocks would display both a "World Time" and a "Zone Time".

The World Time would probably simply be UTC.

For coordinating across significant longitude differences World Time would be used.

The Zone Time applies to a region similar to a current time zone, and is an idealized solar time, adjusted so that sunrise each day is around 6:00 AM LZT (Local Zone Time).

Schools, stores, most offices, mass transit routes that are mostly in the zone, theaters, meals, and similar things would base their schedules on LZT. So office hours, for example, would typically be 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM LZT, year around.

This would let most people work on a schedule that syncs well to the Sun, which should have tangible benefits for many people. There would be no going to work or school in the dark, and in summer the longer daylight time would automatically come after work/school.

This needs to assume people have decent access to interactive computing power because it would complicate planning things that involve interactions between LZT and World Time, especially when planning events weeks or months ahead.

(And yes, under this system 6:00 AM LZT from one day to 6:00 AM LZT the next day would not be exactly 24 hours. So? Things for which that matters would be scheduled on World Time, not on LZT).

Yeah, agreed. There are definitely places where daylight saving time doesn't make that much sense. Aberdeen doesn't have an official night time for 3.5 months of the year, or an astronomical twilight for 2 months. https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/uk/aberdeen Still, without it, in June the sun rises at 3am and sets at 9pm, it still seems like trading the morning hour for one in the evening would be a net positive for most people, even if it's small. Unless I was on a strange work schedule, I would definitely sleep through the first few hours of sun in the morning, and always be awake for the sunset.

I suddenly started to wonder, if we care about daylight, whether work schedules might make more sense if they started at 8 am rather than 9, just to be more symmetric around noon. Or even 7am, if we're preserving evening daylight. But I dunno, that sounds too early. ;)