Others can fight about what we call “5pm”, but for the love of everything holy, just stop moving the clocks. I’ll happily ally with whichever side (“anti-winter” or “anti-summer”) that appears most likely to deliver a political victory that ends the madness.
Start schools at the biologically optimal time, not the budgetary one.
I found it surprisingly difficult to find data. Not just data for or data against, but any data at all. What little I found organized by month seems to accurately show the percentage of the month typically on vacation (so people sleep later on average in August than September, or they sleep a lot later in Dec than in Oct due to holidays, at least in the north hemisphere).
I theorized that regardless of DST people would wake up later from June thru Nov (DST starts in Nov where I live). Unfortunately the graph shows the opposite trend of people tending to wake up on average almost 4 minutes earlier in Oct than in Sept. Or in spring our DST ends in March, so I expected people to wake up earlier in May than in April, but its the other way around by five minutes.
I'd theorize if required wake up times strictly followed solar elevation, then something like a graph of car accidents vs time of day would vary greatly by month, but it doesn't seem to in what little data I could find. "Most dangerous time to drive" graphs seem to imply evening rush hour is a little more than twice as dangerous as morning rush hour so that would seem to imply morning wakefullness problems are statistically insignificant.
(Edited to note: I'm not insisting you're wrong, but I am insisting I can't find much of any data on the topic, maybe you are right but nobody knows for certain...)
According to timeanddate.com, the latest sunrise in Durness (NW Scotland, on the mainland) is at 09:09, at the end of December, but "civil twilight" is then at 08:16, so if school starts at 09:00 a lot of people can presumably travel to school with at least some natural light. On the other hand, if they were using UTC+1 it would be civil twilight from 09:16 and sunrise at 10:09, which would be sort of horrible, surely, because then you really would be travelling at night?
The shortest day in Durness lasts 6 hours 18 minutes. In England typical school hours are 09:00-15:00. If those are the school hours in Scotland, and you're dealing with not much more than 6 hours of sunlight in the winter, then I would have thought that a good time for local noon would be around 12:00 rather than around 13:00.
So I hope that a lot of Scots will join me in asking for UTC+0 all year rather than UTC+1 all year!
