European MPs vote to end summer time clock changes (opens in new tab)

I'm only aware of Russia switching to permanent summer time in recent memory and they switched back to permanent winter time two years later because the long dark winter mornings were unbearable. Also, your circadian rhythm doesn't care for where the hand on the clock is and doesn't like being pushed too far outside of where you naturally would have it.

It would be best to keep the clock as close to astronomical time as the timezone system allows and adjust certain business times if required to be off the standard 9-to-5. Which already happens.

>Under the new legislation, governments opting to make summer time permanent would adjust their clocks for the last time on the last Sunday in March 2021.

For those choosing permanent standard time - also called winter time - the final clock change would be on the last Sunday of October 2021.

It's down to the member states to decide but I think most would prefer summer; save for maybe the Nordics, where the vast difference in the amount of daylight hours makes quite a significant difference.

Edit: Removed Iceland, since they froze their EU application.

If you don't vote, don't complain. I live in the UK and I also voted to end the twice-yearly wrecking of our body-clocks with the attendant accidents, injuries and deaths.

Moreover from an IT perspective it would be convenient if we don't pick permanent Daylight Saving Time in that the UK would effectively always be using UTC.

There were other consultations though.

In the French poll, 2 million answers were given and 84% were also in favor of ending time savings, 60% wanted to keep summer time rather than winter time. For some reason, people often take France and Spain as examples of countries that would be badly impacted by a decision "taken by the Germans", but France and Spain are very much in favor of staying on summer time.

I don't know if the BBC is trying to push the idea that the decision is somehow undemocratic, but most countries in the EU have had consultations and as far as I know the results were in favor of giving up time savings everywhere.

The late evening sunset in the summer is a godsend for anyone who has a day job and has projects they need to work on outdoors. It's like having every weekday followed by a Saturday afternoon for productivity purposes.

I'm not particularly a night owls but sunset at 9 PM or 10 PM in June is much better than wasting sunlight when people are sleeping at 5 or 6 AM (which is my country is pretty much all of us.) I'll vote for permanent summer time if we'll have to make a choice by holding a referendum.

THis is actually false.

School start at the same time in Spain and UK, people wake up early in Spain.

One of the main reason of eating late is that it gets too hot in the beginning of the afternoon so people take a break then. Work hours can be 8-14 and then 18-21 for instance.

Making solar noon 12:00 would not help anything at all.

In addition, it would require rewriting all the laws regarding night work, all the work agreements etc. (because your contract says from 18:00 you are paid x% more, but suddenly with your change 18:00 is way too late).

This would be a disaster and with no real benefit apart from saying that you synchronized an artificial time construction with a solar phenomenon.

Summertime sounds better than wintertime because of the association with summer. Give people the choice between UTC+1 or UTC+2 and you will get wildly different answers.

Because in the northern latitudes there is no such thing as 'noon'.

Arizona doesn't observe DST, but it contains the Navajo Nation which does[0], and in turn contains the Hopi Reservation which doesn't.

So you can go back and forth by an hour within a single US state.

[0]The Navajo Nation extends into Utah and New Mexico, which observe DST, so this lets the Navajo Nation maintain a single time throughout.

Note that the article is incorrect. I just went thought the proposal and what member states can choose is between keeping summer ot winter time!

quote:

"Consequently, the Commission proposes to discontinue the seasonal time changes in the Union, while ensuring that Member States retain the competence to decide on their standard time, in particular whether they will move to the standard time corresponding to their summer-time on a permanent basis or whether they will apply their current standard time permanently. "

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...

Edited: clarified "This is actually incorrect" to "Note that the article is incorrect."

That's already what happens if you go from France to the UK or Spain to Portugal, so it's not really something new.

That's so very common.

In North America, for example, there are (admittedly not very populous) mountain time regions that are north of areas that observe both Alaska time, which is 2 hours behind, and Eastern time, which is 2 hours ahead.

If you want to complain about bouncing back-and-forth across a single time zone boundary by going north and south, as someone who's lived almost their entire life in various places along the Central/Eastern time border, all I can really offer is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Committee or not, it's gonna happen. Because there are so many reasons beyond simple longitude to pick a time zone.

I once found a latitude with 4 different time zones. I think it goes through Pakistan. Time zones are always going to be weird.

Outside the EU that's already true, even between countries that all observe DST (since start and end times of DST vary). But having most of the EU in the same time zone with the same DST rules was very convinient.

That's the case currently in the US year-round as the timezone borders aren't nice, straight lines and no one seems to have a problem with it. For example, traveling North through Western Indiana.

There is already no single timezone, with the possible exception of a timezone in the deep pacific, that would allow you to go from south to north without adjusting your clock once.

>So if you travelled vertically within a timezone, you could end up going back and forth by an hour repeatedly, depending on the state’s decision made here?

See: Arizona

This is already the case. Travelling across Europe, you would go back and forth between the current date and VG Day 1945.

Getting date and time correct is already a challenge in some cases, adding multi-dimension time zones does not make it easier.

This is why people don't trust politicians - they don't understand the effects of their decisions (it _might_ be slightly more complicated than that.. but it's still).

There are two curves to account - sunrise and sunset. Daylight savings attempts to flatten one of those and not the other!

I don't think you're right that it's mostly poor people who get up early, but even if it is, they would benefit even more from permanent summer time. There would still be sunlight after they get off work, and if they started their shift at 5am, then they get a whole lot of sunlight after work, an hour more than they would otherwise.

Whether you go to work in the light or in the dark is determined by your work schedule relative to the local solar day/night cycle. Not DST. If you want to drive to work in daylight, negotiate for your working hours to start after sunrise. If you'd prefer some sunlight after work ends, negotiate for your working hours to end before sunset. Keep in mind that you won't get both year-round at most latitudes simply because a typical work day is longer than the length of visible daylight in winter. (What would probably make the most sense would be 10-12 hour work days in the summer and 4-6 hour work days in the winter, centered around solar noon, but that's likely to face strong opposition from both sides.)

The only _practical_ consequences of DST vs non-DST lie in whether we try to force everyone to shift their schedules all at once twice a year or leave it to individuals and businesses to set their schedules as they see fit.

There are no practical consequences for permanent-standard-time vs. permanent-summer-time. Either way, people will adjust their schedules to suit local conditions just as they do now, but without the complication of abrupt time changes in the spring and fall. My preference would be to place local noon as close as possible to solar noon (+/- 45 minutes, to permit one-hour time zone offsets without splitting up dense urban areas) so that morning and afternoon are approximately the same length, but I wouldn't call that a _practical_ difference, as long as the offset from solar noon is consistent. It's more a matter of aesthetics, in particular a distaste for needless complexity.

Exactly. Basing the policy of the whole Union on the internet votes is... just wrong.

it's just a tz library to update, assuming you're using a tz library. Any poorly localized software is going to have issues.

The challenge is actually getting that update pushed out to everything that needs it. Every embedded and IoT device needs to get a new tz database, and any applications that might use a different tz database to the system one need to be updated. It's not significant programming work necessarily, but it's still probably going to cause a significant number of bugs in reality.

Do all of them actually have to agree or just some majority?

> two regions would end up in different time zones for half the year

AIUI, every pair of countries will (like now) either always be in the same time zone or always be in different ones. Daylight Savings Time is being abolished; the choice is whether the permanent time zone will be the current summer one or the current winter one. Germany and Austria, being closely connected and at simular longitudes will probably choose the same one.

Currently Germany shares a timezone with all of it's neighbours. Most Germans seem to think they would prefer UTC+2; there would probably be no reason in that case for Germany's eastern neighbours (including Austria) to go to UTC+1. It's Germany's western neighbours that might end up on a different timezone. Certainly permanent UTC+2 seems crazy for Spain (which is geographically in the UTC zone); France and the Benelux countries are more of a toss-up.

How is this any different than various people bordering Germany thinking they can just pop in for some shopping, only to discover it's Sunday and pretty much everything's closed?

Maybe the result of countries being able to fiddle with DST is going to be silly, but it's a big stretch to think that it's something the EU must centrally enforce as an economic union.

Think about what time change does to hospitals and other critical services. Many systems, but not all are based on UTC and at some point the information needs to be interfaced to a human with the expectation of clocks being a certain way.

I think you misunderstood that bit, see this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19491551

> When you describe it this way

Which is by far one of the most accurate description in this community.

> the entire process sounds like something that takes place in a totalitarian state run by a crazy person

It's due to the way the Universe works, it only requires a review of your early school notes about science / geography / astronomy.

DST is a way to compensate that "strange" behavior for the current definition of a "time-zone".

Is DST good ? it depends because we over-generalize the definition of a "time-zone" by taking in consideration only the longitude, but not the latitude. (and above/below certain latitudes, nothing can be done)

Is DST good for EU (or North America) ? Mostly yes if you take a closer look at the year-round daylight charts for key geographic coordinates.

Extra notes while here:

1) "EU propose to get rid of DST", its our best interest to keep it; don't let some incompetent rule such a thing because he/she doesn't really know how it works but only how it's perceived.

2) "If I have to choose, I prefer more daylight in the evening": fine, but that is out of scope from DST; it's about changing schedules. Clock should (I'd say "must") stay on their natural "time-zone" for the sake of coordination and travel.