Seriously, woo!

It literally makes no sense to say, "I prefer to have an extra hour in the evening" (the morning and evening will always have equal numbers of hours). Or "I hate it when it's dark at 5pm" (translation: "I hate when it's dark at 5 arbitrary periods after an arbitrary moment that may be hours either side of solar noon").

My solution: pick the time peg closest to the "correct" one (i.e. standard time) and stick to it. People who want year-round "summer" evenings can continue to have them by the simple expedient of doing what DST forces them (and everyone else) to do already: get up earlier.

The end result is probably going to be more and more fracture on local level, as smal units of administration adopt their favorite solutions. This is obviously bad for doing business between units of administration, and obviously good for circadian rhythms of the people living within given unit. One thing obviously has more importance than the other.

https://lists.iana.org/hyperkitty/list/tz@iana.org/thread/66...

Bad timing on BC's part. They just tagged release 2026a today.

Changing the time every year cause a lot of accidents involving wildlife. Wild animals learn human activity patterns and avoid the roads during our active hours. When we shift the time we start they get caught off guard and a lot of accidents happen. It takes roughly 2 weeks of adjustment apparently.

If you want to move work start time. Regulate that. Schools, government institutions and public transport can all be directed. The rest will likely follow on recommendation. See for period of time and allow those that want to re-adjust again for their needs.

They should have picked Standard Time.

is it summer time or winter time?

https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMi1jb3B5_f52a6bb5-dc0d-4a3a-8...

Multiple peer-reviewed studies and analyses indicate an increase in traffic accidents—particularly fatal ones—following the spring transition to DST. This is often attributed to acute sleep deprivation (losing one hour of sleep), circadian rhythm disruption, and altered light conditions during peak commuting hours, which can impair alertness, reaction times, and visibility. Key findings include:

A large-scale U.S. study analyzing over 732,000 fatal motor vehicle accidents from 1996 to 2017 (published in Current Biology, 2020) reported a consistent 6% increase in fatal crash risk during the workweek immediately following the spring DST transition, equating to approximately 28 additional deaths annually in the U.S. The effect was more pronounced in western regions of time zones and persisted into afternoon hours despite longer evening daylight. Other research has documented short-term spikes, such as increases of 16% on the first day and 12% on the second day after the spring change in some analyses, or broader elevations in fatal crashes linked to the "DST effect." Systematic reviews and meta-analyses confirm short-term elevations in collision risk post-spring transition in many (though not all) contexts, with some evidence of higher fatal accident rates in the U.S. specifically.

The fall transition back to Standard Time shows more mixed or opposite patterns: some studies report small increases in certain crash types (e.g., due to darker evening commutes increasing pedestrian or deer-vehicle collisions), while others note decreases in vehicle-occupant fatalities or no net increase overall. A 2017 systematic review of road traffic collision risk found inconsistent short-term effects across studies (some showing increases, decreases, or no change), but long-term analyses often suggested a net safety benefit from DST periods due to evening light. Recent Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) research (covering 2010–2019 U.S. data) indicated that spring DST increases fatal motor-vehicle occupant crashes (+12% in the following five weeks) but decreases fatal pedestrian/bicyclist crashes (−24%), resulting in a near-neutral net effect on total fatal crashes (slight increase in occupant deaths offset by fewer pedestrian/cyclist deaths). In summary, your memory is correct in that empirical data—particularly from U.S.-based studies—support an increase in traffic accident frequency (especially fatal crashes) associated with Daylight Saving Time variations, most reliably in the immediate aftermath of the spring transition due to sleep loss and misalignment. However, effects are not uniform across all studies, regions, or crash types, and some research highlights trade-offs (e.g., benefits to pedestrians from evening light). Debates continue regarding permanent DST, permanent Standard Time, or abolition of changes altogether, with organizations like the American Academy of Sleep Medicine favoring permanent Standard Time to minimize disruptions.

For a few weeks during the year, half of your meetings start at a different time. Everyone is confused.

Obviously all this is arbitrary including standard time.

The mornings are just wasted daylight anyway because I'm just on the way to work.

With climate change causing extreme heat events to be more frequent, having the sun rise later in the day will defend the work hours of those who find themselves labouring outside without having to adjust the hours that they work.

It's not 1900s anymore. Cars have fancy headlights and sensor suites for AEB. And generally street lighting is available around schools.

1) Do ANYTHING you can to stop the clocks being fucked with twice a year.

2) After that is done and stabilised, everything has been updated to non-wobbly time. Now's the time you can start arguing what the exact time zone should be.

Never try to argue both at the same time. This is what prevents the EU from stopping the DST madness.

So there is zero astronomic reason to fixate noon to a particular number if doesn't suit us, humans.

I'm just saying that astronomic argument is kinda meaningless for the DST discussion, the only thing that matters is manual allocation of light time for the most people as possible, so that a majority of population would receive highly beneficial natural light as much as possible. When the solar high point would happen in that scheme should be entirely irrelevant.

I think this is the worst thing about it frankly, the kids. And you can't just push the school time back cause it interferes with the parents getting to work.

"Daylight Savings" time never made sense. Why are we "saving daylight" when there's more of it?

The linked map is outdated regarding Russia. Here is an up to date map: https://64.media.tumblr.com/4a9a4613f057d3b5f17ec548e6ac06d1...

Currently it's doubly bad because the clocks changing also cause a spike in deaths.

The worse case is he pushes a federal change to standard time, in which case I suspect BC would have to go along.

In any case, most people can get up earlier, if they want to.

Or the clocks are wrong. Once you realize noon is 13h in winter and 14h in summer, never 12h, things start to make sense. Late lunch? Not really, Sun at same height than Italy, but clocks off by 1.

For the "public image" part of the experiment, the conclusion is easy: bad. Time to change clocks so waking up happens at "3h" in the morning, and become a country of hard workers with no nightlife, because everyone retires "early". Even if discos are full as in the past.

How is transitioning permanently to one easier than transitioning permanently to the other?

How to transition to permanent DST: wait until we are in DST and then stop switching.

How to transition to permanent Standard time: wait until we are in standard time and then stop switching.

In my professional experience, having needed to work with relatively unsophisticated people across many time zones, the only thing that worked consistently was "[City] time". That way people could always check 'what time is it in X now' or 'when it's X in [City], what time is it here', and get correct responses.

Descriptors like "Mountain time" are too vague, especially when there are various places that do/do not practice DST within that timezone, or there are similarly named time zones internationally. (Australia has Eastern and Central time too, for example, and in summer - which is northern hemisphere winter - they split into four different time zones due to varying DST practices.)

Trying to be overly clever and exactly specify the time zone, e.g. "MDT", leads to lots of subtle mistakes in my experience. Often people will think they know what that is, and then get it wrong. Or their calendar app will helpfully suggest MST and they'll click on it, not noticing the difference. Or they'll just scramble the letters when writing them down and wind up with "NTT time" or "AT&T time" or some such.

I would be less surprised if it were the commerce power used to uphold time zone coordination - for the promotion and regularity of interstate commerce etc etc. Tenuous, but consistent with a lot of the other nonsense that's been hung from the commerce power over the years.

Then there's the actual enforcement angle - time zones are just a social convention whereby people in a given area pretend that the time is slightly different than it 'really' is (local solar time). There's no reason local / state government and businesses can't post / operate on different hours, and leave federal bodies to operate on whatever 'federal time' they want. This already happens in parts of the world where the official time is locally inappropriate, such as Eucla in Australia or Xinjiang in China.

Obviously the optimal solution here is to coordinate a time change at all levels of government, but failing that there are other options.

(I miss Hammertime sometimes daily when using Slack at work.)

We could standardize such tools. We could make them easier to use like <mylocaltime:14:00> or <mylocaltime:3/2 2pm>. We have the technology (decades of date parsing experience and date math libraries).

Will we? Probably not. Unless we did something wild like move to 15-minute timezones and force ourselves to.

[1] https://hammertime.cyou

And even many digital clocks are still dumb devices that need to be manually synced. Such as most kitchen appliance clocks.

(There was one year where the time change in March did actually have a noticeable effect on my kid... and a few days later, just when she had gotten back to "normal", everything shut down for COVID.)

Well, if you look up the histories of the time zones in the respective countries ("Time in Poland" and "Time in Spain" on Wikipedia, I have no reason to doubt their accuracy) you'll see that both settled on CET, with or without daylight savings, long before the EU was even an idea.

BC/Alberta

Sackatchewan/Manitoba

Ontario/Quebec

Quebec/New Brunswick

Nova Scotia/PEI/NFLD/New Brunswick

etc

The big companies have offices in each, but they'll usually break them down even further into eastern, central, western regions. And they'll largely never talk to eachother.

Wait, why? Where? I've never heard this. Which driving conditions are you talking about? Rain? Snow?

When we change the general time, this applies to school days as well as office hours, so the kids go home to evening traffic relation will stay constant.

One way might require less rescheduling, and that's valid, but these discussions out in the world tend to go to "but everyone does X at Y time and it will be dark out!" as though this isn't all made up and changeable.

I also think that learnings from previous attempts decades ago may not apply as strongly today. In the US at least I think people's schedules tend to be much less fixed on the rigid 8am/9am to 5pm in-office schedule than they were 10 or 20 years ago. The number of people out driving at all hours of the day all week speaks to that.

The world used to revolve around everyone being in-office next to their phone during defined expected business hours. Today my mortgage broker is texting me from a coffee shop.

It still requires federal approval, but from Sec Transit instead of Congress

* https://esrs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/To_the_EU_Commiss...

I would hazard to guess some of those folks have looked at data for northern Europe and took it into account when forming their conclusions.

Perhaps if Sweden adopted a different policy it would have an even longer life expectancy!

DST means a later sunrise.

The song is about a secretary who didn't get a lunch hour, so started an hour later than her boss.

Tech workers generally start at 9, but that started decades after the song came out.

But why? Because it's not even in standard time, except for around 1/60th of a time zone at best, if you're rounding to the minute.

If solar noon jumps from being at 11:35 in standard time, to at 12:35 under DST, at your coordinates, what does that matter?

Noon was at noon before the railroads. But ever since time zones were invented, that's no longer been the case.

Digits on a clock are just a number. If you care about when solar noon is, just memorize it.

"hurr durr summer better than winter, me choosey summer"

Once you start putting timezones inside a country, the provincial borders start to become pretty natural places to put timezones.

And yes, you are correct that the small population makes it easier. Or rather, it's less about the small population, and more about the spikiness of the population. Practically Nobody lives anywhere near the border between BC and Alberta, it's a gigantic mountainous national park the size of a medium-sized European country. Almost everyone in BC lives in Vancouver, and almost everyone in Alberta lives in Calgary or Edmonton. When I lived in Edmonton, it'd usually take me about 12 hours to drive to visit my parents near Vancouver, and if I was in Calgary it'd take around 10 or 11 hours. So putting a timezone change at the halfway mark is pretty much irrelevant.

The strong interconnections and vibrant border regions of European countries are the main reason so much of the EU is in one timezone. If it weren't for that, it'd probably make sense to put a timezone border between Germany and Benelux / France, but that'd be too annoying for everyone, so people just put up with a wide timezone. e.g. this map gives a good idea of where the 'natural' timezone boundaries are, and lets you compare against what people decided on based on political / economic realities.

Germany population is about 2x that of Canada.

Most of the issues time zones cause are not "day of the week" related anyways (at least in my experience), so I think having to figure out what day of the week it is somewhere else wouldn't be a common problem anyways.

If everywhere runs on UTC, they will still have different times when people are working/not working/sleeping so you still have to look something up and figure it out.

With time zones, you look up "What time is it?", realize it's 4:30AM and since most people around the world follow similar schedule, you quickly realize he's fast asleep.

Farmers have to wake up early because their animals wake up at sunrise and some tasks are best performed at that time. So they wake up before sunrise regardless of the clock time.

Human, like farm animals, are better off if they wake up at sunrise and go to sleep in full dark. At the equator that's easy, wake at 6, bed at 10PM. And standard work hours are 7-3 or 8-4.

Anyway, I doubt that that analogy goes for noon. I eat lunch by the clock, not when the sun's highest. I expect most people do. Especially the ones that are cooped up in an office during the daytime.

I always find it strange how particular people are about the numbers attached a purely astronomical phenomena(myself included, but I am pretty hard in the "let the sun figure it out camp"). If they want more "daylight" hours then get up at a time to enjoy them. But people would rather bend over backwards fiddling with the numbers as if that is going to change how long a day is.

I do not care if the sun is up as I shuffle groggily into the building. I don't think I'm alone.

After college I moved from the far western edge of one timezone to the far eastern edge of another zone. I grew up with 5-5:30pm sunsets in winter, and now I live with 4-4:30pm sunsets. I moved here 25 years ago, and every single year when November/December come around and I get those early sunsets I hate it. It's one of the reasons I'd like to move away from here.

I know it's just one person's opinion, but to me those extremely early sunsets in the middle of winter are a huge quality of life reduction.

I believe part of the problem is that if you're in the middle or western edge of your zone, the winter sunsets aren't so bad. I suspect a lot of people who would prefer DST year round live on the eastern edge.

Russia is telling since they changed their timezones in 2016. I'm going to note that timezones are also a political identity too. https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/russia-new-time-zones.... For a map https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Difference_between_l... and the Wiki article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Russia#Russian_Federat...

China is aligned with Beijing and the rest of the country follows from when noon in Beijing is.

Sudan's history is in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Sudan

Argentina is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Argentina - My speculation would be that Argentina (the east coast especially) wanted to be economically synchronized with the coastal cities of eastern Brazil. Buenos Aires and São Paulo being on the same timezone makes it easier for the two of them to do business.

Alaska used to have four timezones. In 1983, they were consolidated into two timezones - Aleutian and Alaska. Being in -9 rather than -10 brings Anchorage closer to the Pacific west coast in its business day with the note that it doesn't matter too much when solar noon is if sun is up for 22 hours or 5 hours.

Since you're discussing BC housing policy, I assume you know of the amazing Uytae Lee?

In the evening I'm tired, so I want the extra sunlight to cancel that out a bit, and I want it so I have more opportunities to do things after work. No one is going to do anything for fun in the morning, so giving the light to that time period is wasting it. I want it after work, so I can go somewhere, enjoy the extra warmth, just be anywhere besides home and work.

I apologize society is inconveniencing you.

It amazes me that we actually argue about this based on vibes. We know that people are better off the closer the time between waking up and sunrise.

but it will happen regardless of what you think about it, the only choice you have is to pretend it's happening at a "different time" because you assign a different number to it

Switching to daylight time makes more sense in Eastern BC than it does in Western BC. But Eastern BC is relatively unpopulated. The population of Penticton is 40,000 vs 3,000,000 in metro Vancouver. Second largest metro (Victoria) is west of Vancouver.

Penticton experiences sunrise/sunset about 25 minutes before Vancouver, so their kids experience approximately equal amounts of sun before & after school on the winter solstice.

When people propose switching to UTC what they are actually proposing is that everyone nominally switches to UTC but still uses local time informally in everyday life, which is a worse system than time zones. At least with time zones there is a way to know what time it is in any given place. With informal time you lose that.

I don't think that's very realistic though is it? School times are fixed and that anchors a lot of families to those specific times, and businesses tend to have set hours.

Changing the time to give people more light in the evening frees up a bunch of people to enjoy some sunlight without making it a whole fight to have different hours at work.

If that's what passes for aspiration these days then the labour movement truly is dead.

Move to DST and if you want the ability to start your day later and end later, [...].

Exactly. Also, changing business hours to suit specific work conditions would ease traffic congestion. For instance, a farmer would milk cows at different times of the year. Similarly, milk tankers would be on the road at hours set by cows' routines.

When we start getting more sun, it’s fine in the morning even with the spring forward.

We go back to standard time in winter because otherwise it stays dark too long.

And all of this ignores the core fact that time zones are way more politically determined than geographically. And that’s a whole other problem

We tried permanent DST in the US in the 1970s. People hated it.

> you're getting natural sunlight through all your windows for hours every morning

Hah "hours". Not in Northern Europe you're not. My commute is dark on both sides. If I had to choose which side I'd prefer to be brighter I'd prefer the end of the day rather than feeling like my daylight has been wasted in the office. I shift my schedule in winter to make up for this as best I can.

There's nothing more glorious than those late summer solstice sunsets w/ daylight time, where the sun doesn't set until 10pm. Great for festivals and planning outdoor activities with friends.

Sadly, not if you're a student living in a basement in Vancouver!

It also cites one opinion poll. And we have to keep in mind this happened FIFTY years ago.

I’m not even a permanent DST advocate. It’s just weird to me the link you shared does nothing to substantiate your position.

Update: my suspicions were correct — there was a public panic caused by parents groups that had no basis in fact:

> Considerable opposition to observing DST during the winter had come from school groups, such as the National School Boards Association, which expressed concern over darkness during the morning school commute.[47][48]

> When members of Congress introduced legislation to repeal the practice, they stated it jeopardized children's safety, citing the deaths of eight schoolchildren in Florida since DST had been enacted a few weeks prior

Ironically:

> A meta-analysis by Rutgers researchers found that permanent DST would eliminate 171 pedestrian fatalities (a 13% reduction) per year

> Permanent daylight saving time was signed into law by President Richard Nixon in January 1974, but there were complaints of children going to school in the dark and working people commuting and starting their work day in pitch darkness during the winter. By October 1974, President Gerald Ford signed a law repealing year-round daylight savings time.

It's a perfect example of "the public" not really knowing what they want or perhaps different factions (unknowingly) wanting different things and not realizing this until the change actually happens. This isn't helped by how these ideas are often oversold as having no downsides instead of being realistic about what the trade-off is.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#History

I like how the light signals the shift from angst season to normal season, though.

I'd rather not have a clock and farm from sunrise to sunset, to be honest.

"Big Golf" has been super active in lobbying for DST. https://businessjournalism.org/2020/10/the-stakeholders-of-d... I'd personally prefer Standard Time year round, so I can have daylight to do activities early in the morning.

Russia tried all-year DST for several years and ended up getting rid of it. So even in more-north regions, where you'd think it would not matter, people still do not seem to like all-year / permanent DST (pDST).

Had to do a double take, as that's my steam handle.

But, what a terrible argument! "I prefer", haha. Oh well.