And if we can get DST all year round (which I'm personally all-for), it could help be the impetus to finally shift high school times.
The fact of the matter is, our sleep schedules are determined largely by our school/work schedules. Simply from the popularity of DST in the summer, it seems clear that people do prefer for society to coordinate to wake up an hour earlier in order to have an extra hour of daylight at the end of the day.
Here in the northeast, it's horrible in the winter when it's dark by 4:30 pm. For a lot of people, it's a huge life upgrade to change that to 5:30 pm.
Just to be clear, I live in New York City. It gets dark at 4:30 this time of year. I know how frustrating that is.
But I also think that if this bill passed, most would discover that getting up an hour earlier in the morning is clearly worse. Others have posted some great studies in this thread, but for me, the clearest evidence is still that on days when people have the ability to sleep later, that's what they do. We stay up late on Friday evenings and sleep in late on Saturday mornings, without a care for all of the wasted Saturday daylight.
The numbers on a clock are arbitrary—you can change them, but all you're really changing are the societal commitments for which people are obligated to wake up. Our society is already too optimized for early risers, and late risers are paying the price. I don't think we should make the problem even worse just so we can shift around a few hours of sunlight.
No, that's what we do on the weekend when we're catching up on lost sleep from the week, and staying out Friday night.
I know a lot of people with flexible schedules, and they're predominantly morning people who wake up around 6 am. Now I'm not saying they're average or anything, but it certainly disproves your idea that people inherently sleep in late when left to their own preferences.
Why are they catching up on lost sleep in the morning, during precious daylight? They could go to sleep earlier Friday evening and have more sun.
> I know a lot of people with flexible schedules, and they're predominantly morning people who wake up around 6 am. Now I'm not saying they're average or anything, but it certainly disproves your idea that people inherently sleep in late when left to their own preferences.
But I'm talking about the average person. Yes there are morning people who prefer waking up at 6, but most don't.
Not if they want a social life. It's not like sun trumps everything.
But shifting to DST all the time lets people go out Friday night, get to bed an hour earlier, sleep as much as they need, and still have that extra hour of daylight on Saturday! :)
Here's where we fundamentally disagree—I think that extra hour is completely imaginary! Our natural wake up times are mostly determined by the sun, so on average, a person who naturally wakes up at 10 am standard time on Saturday will just wake up at 11 am instead. You end up with exactly the same amount of daylight!
The way that we experience time isn't something a law can change.
My wakeup times are entirely flexible and pretty arbitrary. Depending on the job I've had and how late my friends like to go out, I've had sleep schedules in the past ranging from 10pm-6am, all the way to 2am-10am. And they were all fine and healthy.
Most adult's wake up doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with the sun. I don't have a "natural" wakeup time. I wake up 8 hours after whenever I went to sleep.
So I absolutely get an hour more of daylight with DST because my schedule shifts an hour earlier. Work starts an hour earlier so I wake up an hour earlier. That's just how it works.
No, they aren’t. Even with the progressive infantilization of children over the last several decades, its still generally widely accepted that children over 12 can be left alone for a few hours at a time.
Though shifting the standard workweek to 30 hours and adjusting to that by moving the standard start time forward by two hours wouldn’t be a bad idea, either.
Schools usually close ~2 hours before the end of the conventional work day, though some (usually those for kids younger than teenage years) have optional after-school supervision programs available.
For teenagers, such programs are less common because the social consensus is that teenagers do not need constant adult supervision and can be unsupervised for a period of a few hours at a time.
FFS, this is why we have to change clocks twice a year. It’s like the left or right side of the road debate. Which side you drive on doesn’t matter. Agreement is what matters.
We don’t have agreement on time because everyone has their pet argument for why this or that time standard has some marginal benefit for a given slice of the population. Meanwhile, we can all agree on that those marginal benefits pale in comparison to the measured harms of changing clocks twice a year.
We have a bill. It’s taken work. The choice isn’t daylight time or standard time. It’s this bill gets through the House (and is likely ignored by the Senate) or we punt the issue for a generation. Arguing we picked the wrong side of the coin is a point for the latter.
(If you prefer kids walking to school in the light, just change the school hours.)
One is a pet argument, and the other is a health concern. And this could be resolved simply by asking public health experts to do the relevant studies.
My concern is that is not going to happen, or—more likely—public health experts will issue a recommendation which will be ignored by the the politicians. The reasoning is that people’s pet argument of extra daylight hour is convincing enough.
Also note that this pet argument ignores the majority of the working class who will most likely be working this extra hour in the service industry.
If my options are to either switch clocks twice a year, or to be at work by the equivalent of 8 am in the winter, I'd much rather switch clocks.
It's not even close, either. I'm scared of these permanent DST bills.
I'm confused. You contradict yourself from one sentence to the next.
Can we not agree, or are we all in agreement?
I say it's the former, not the latter.
Teenagers should start school later anyway. I think that is a different issue.
And considering that they'd be getting hundreds of hours more daylight after their working day for the entirety of their adult lives it seems like a more than fair trade.
Teenagers are far more resilient than young kids when it comes to this kind of thing. Extending the portion of the year that parents can let younger kids recreate outdoors in daylight has far more societal benefit than whether a teenager is 10% more irritable. The teenager problem could also be solved by letting them go to school on their own and decoupling their school timing from adults work schedules.
Are you sure? Have you done the research? They had this discussion in Iceland recently and I think they found this point inconclusive. I think health officials still favored moving out of permanent DST into permanent standard because they know the health benefits of good sleeping, and they know that many children are sleep deprived.
Iceland is significantly farther north than the northernmost point in the continental US, so what is best on-balance for Iceland on a matter that has to do with the relation between social schedules and the sun is not necessarily a guide to what is appropriate in the US, even if we assume the correctness of the judgement in Iceland.
Which is not to say that you are wrong to question the evidence, only that “Iceland found…” is itself of not much value in a discussion of US policy on the issue.
This was linked by another commenter, and I think it's pretty strong evidence: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01676...
Also, everything in your post would be addressed if school would simply start later, like at 9 or 10am.
School should be for educating children and shouldn't be a government-provided babysitter. A working, functional society should make children a benefit if it wants to exist past a generation, and it should therefore enable and support families so children aren't a personal financial devastation to people and things like education don't have to be overloaded with other functions. We need to fix these social problems.
The reality is otherwise, of course. So, if businesses really depend on public schools babysitting children to have workers or exist, then it's proper that they suck it up and work with the school schedule if they are really that subordinate to it.
> Which means modifying public transportation schedules and business hours.
Only some major cities in the US have public transportation that's really developed, reliable, and useful enough to have this problem--everyone else commutes to work (or is only taking public transportation because they don't have a car). The cities that have the resources to have the system in the first place also have the resources to reschedule rides--it happens anyway for special events, holidays, etc.
We're getting a little far afield, but I actually think we should admit that schools do both.
The government should provide childcare—more than it already does—so that both parents in a family to work, which has economic benefits. And since kids need to be educated, it makes sense to teach them at the same time.
What are you even proposing? Sending a babysitter to everyone's house for one hour in the morning between when the parents leave for work and when the kids leave for school?
> The reality is otherwise, of course. So, if businesses really depend on public schools babysitting children to have workers or exist, then it's proper that they suck it up and work with the school schedule if they are really that subordinate to it.
So then you're starting everything an hour later anyway and there is no point in setting clocks the other way.
Why? Teenagers can get themselves to school can't they?
I'm very much in favor of giving kids more freedom at younger ages, for privileges well above waiting alone for a bus. But I think it depends on the kid, and schools are for everyone.
† Assuming there is a school bus.
I mean, look, I'm generally politically liberal and I think all these services deserve more resources than they get, but unless it's attached to the DST bill I have zero confidence it would happen in most communities.
This is not the case in most of the US. In some places it's because public transportation is not prioritized for funding, but in many it's a matter of low population density making it less practical.
If you're 13 you're entirely capable of waiting at home for the school bus after your parents have already left for work, no?
Where I grew up in upstate NY -- and I believe commonly across the US -- the buses go out first for middle/high school students, then go back out a second time for elementary students.
The solution is just to swap them! Elementary school kids wake up early naturally anyways and need parental supervision. Get them out of the house by 7:30 so parents can leave for work earlier, and your high schoolers sleep more and grab the 9:00 bus instead.
If you'd like to both switch to year-round DST and also move everyone's professional start times an hour later, I'm definitely on board... but you should realize that you've effectively moved us to permanent standard time!
In the morning, you have adults going to work, kids going to school, delivery trucks rolling out, people going to get supplies they will need for the day, people doing morning exercise, and so on. Sleep is a big synchronizer that tends to get most of us aligned at the start of the day.
By the evening rush, most of those people other than adults who went to work are already home. Also, the times people start the evening commute tends to vary more than the times they start the morning commute.
Add in to this that morning weather and evening weather are quite different. Mornings tend to be colder than evenings, as they are coming off the sunless night.
This means that hazardous driving, biking, and even walking conditions are more likely in the morning than the evening. This won't make a different in Florida (where the author of this bill is from), but it sure makes a difference when you get into the northern parts of the continental US.
Put this together and whenever you have the morning commute before the sun is up you are combining the most number of people, the greatest mixing of pedestrians and bicycles with cars, and the highest chance of bad conditions (icy roads and sidewalks, poor visibility).
When you have the evening commute after the sun has set, it sucks, but you have less traffic of all kinds and better road and weather conditions.
Thus, if you have to have one of the commutes outside of daylight, it is going to be better to have that be the evening commute.
I'm sure there's a contribution, but obviously the effect is small given that the length of the day varies by ~6 hours throughout the year, for pretty much all the US? And we all sit inside all day in artificial lighting anyway?
Kids don't give a shit about walking to school in the dark. I know, as someone who was recently a kid and resented winter "daylight wasting time", I would much rather have had more hours of daylight in the afternoon when I was finished with school and could actually do fun stuff outside, rather than useless daylight in the morning while I'm sitting on the bus or in a classroom at 7:30 AM. And as an adult I feel the same about work.
I was actually thinking of "walking to school in the dark" as a safety issue. You and I probably live in safe communities, but not everyone does. And, sadly, the same communities that have more crime are frequently the ones less able to afford services like school buses.
But I also think a lot of kids and adults don't actually want what they think they do with regard to DST. Having more daylight in the evening seems appealing, and it's what I wanted when I was younger—but then I was in a situation where I had to get up an hour earlier in the winter. It's not fun.
Heat the bus stop
Drive kids to the bus stop
Move bus stop to a more convenient location
Wear appropriate clothing for being outside in the winter.
There are a lot of ways to limit a few people being cold besides shifting all of society to a suboptimal schedule, and it's not like it's balmy an hour later anyways.
> Drive kids to the bus stop
If this were possible, they would already be doing it. It isn't going to be so simple for a lot of families.
> Heat the bus stop
> Move bus stop to a more convenient location
But that requires money.
If a permanent DST bill included measures (and a budget) for "helping municipalities accommodate children commuting to school before sunrise," I think I might be more willing to get behind that.
But if it wasn't in the bill, I think we both know it wouldn't happen. Not in this country and political climate.
Unless the effort of doing so isn't currently worth it but would be under the new circumstances. Further, many already do this. Combined with moving bus stops to more convenient locations (ie closer to people's homes) and it's easy to imagine this satisfying the vast majority of people.
> But that requires money.
Having a motor vehicle drive up the street to the pedestrian rather than having the pedestrian walk down the street is a pen-stroke away. It was one thing 50 years ago when the route had to be determined by a random guy with a paper map to keep it simple, but nowadays forcing kids to go long distances to get to a bus stop is inexcusable.
As for heating bus stops, a 1500W space heater is $50. Assuming it's on for 1 hour per day, 120 days per year, it'll use $20 worth of electricity. Assuming 2 kids per bus stop, that's 29 cents per day per student the first year and 8 cents per student per year subsequently. You only need to do this for a small subset of students who have long wait times at a bus stop and no reasonable alternative. Even if you had to provide it for every single student, that cost would be about 0.2% of the current average education budget allocation per student for the first year and less than 0.1% for subsequent years. Even if you wanted to go really fancy and add a solar power system to the bus stops to power the space heaters, you're still looking at less than $5 per student per day to pay it off in one year.
Again, these or any one of the other countless methods humans have devised for solving this problem make a lot more sense than pretending the sun rises earlier.
You have to be aware that there are social reasons for why people—including kids—stay up later. Moving the clock to a permanent DST might move social activities with it and ultimately cost a significant portion of the population a healthy sleep cycle.
You make a compelling argument for the schools starting later, they should do that.
More importantly, why tie recent science (which can change) about the high school population with our standard of time.
Solve that problem separately.
Also, many of the US timezones are too far west to begin with. Indianapolis is on Eastern Time, but it is approximately where the middle of Central Time should be. Putting it on permanent DST will make noon 2 hours late.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01676...
Just change all of the school and office start times when you make the switch and you get the exact result you want. Numbers are arbitrary labels for points in time. You can just assign different labels.
Getting up earlier would just make me have to go to bed earlier. It's dark either way.
Source: I was a teenager in a place that observed permanent DST in a heavy north latitude.
Permanent standard time, seven hour work day.
Presumably this is only relevant to people who live with no household lights?
> And just to top it off, you'll be forcing a lot of kids to walk to school in the dark.
Is this an inherent problem? People manage this in the far north and south all the time.
That sounds like a problem of school starting too early.
Honestly, I like having sunlight after work, so I can do things out of doors like bouldering. I don't need sunlight in the morning when I'm commuting to an office with no windows, or even if I'm working from my home office.
> My view is that we already start our workdays too early, particularly when you take commute times into account.
Again, this just sounds like some people need to be accommodated for time shifting their work days. There are those of us who naturally wake up with the sunrise, even when we don't have to, and getting up when it's dark to get to work early is routine for us. Offsetting working shifts by an hour (or more) would also help reduce traffic congestion.
ETA: You sound like those people who insist that everyone has to work in an office building because otherwise they will be goofing off at home, neatly ignoring all the water cooler time wasters distracting everyone in the open office by talking about celebrities and sports.
Not everyone has children. Not everyone is the same.
It's more of when we turn on the lights in the house. The lightbulb has messed with our sleep cycle for a long time, e.g. causing people to stay up later than they did in the days of kerosene lamps.
Artificial lights certainly mess with our clocks, but not to the same extent as the sun, because they have different wavelengths.
The article largely thinks increased schedule flexibility is the solution, but I don't think that's every going to be practical for many types of work. But, we can at least make sure we don't make our world even more lopsided.
I think making the argument that everyone should be forced to cater to a special interest group is not the way to go, and I strongly believe that school start times should be adjusted, and work shifts should be flexible too. Too much regimenting with a one size fits all approach is the problem, not DST
I agree flexibility is good, but it’s impossible to enforce by definition, and nothing is going to magically make it happen, whereas a law does make it happen.
I can't speak for your psyche (and you may well be a naturally early riser), but we know that having to wake up earlier decreases a lot of people's sleep overall, and that is also not good for mental health.
And kids have been going to school in the dark for a long time already. Talk to the Alaskans who go to school in the dark for a lot of the year. If anything, this would push people to move to a year round school schedule so we can take a longer winter break during the darkest part of the year.
Is there any research that shows this? I’m not aware of any. In fact there are social reasons people might stay up late. It is a mistake to ignore that.
They had this discussion in Iceland recently (which is on permanent DST; and with heavy population centers way north of Alaskan population centers) and health officials were pretty keen on moving to standard time precisely because teenagers have a hard time waking up so often before sunrise. Yes a big part of the year will always be before sunrise, however on standard that part is shorter.
Yes, a lot. It's well summarized here:
This research would need to show that blinds and artificial blue light would be sufficient to replace natural sunlight for setting the sleep rhythm to a healthy level. The existence of flux actually suggests the opposite is true, and people need software to prevent artificial blue light from disrupting the sleep rhythm.
So because we _can_ disregard the sun, we should? I have lights in my home, but the sun still shines in the windows in the morning and on my head while I walk to work. I'd rather have sane policy than worry about always having a portable SAD light available in the winter mornings.
Either way is probably fine but daylight time applies for more of the year, so this is a smaller change.
Next step: to abolish leap seconds.
In favor of what? Having the day just drift?
In 4000 years we can adjust all the timezone definitions by 1 hour, if we even still care about how close noon is to solar noon. The once per 4000 year adjustment could be planned tens or hundreds of years in advance (just less than 1000 years in advance, for accuracy reasons). Timezone differences/changes are already handled pretty well by existing systems too, so it isn't the case that extensive new plumbing would be required for this.
In exchange we save tens (to hundreds) of millions of dollars a year that are spent on preparing for, managing, and suffering from leap second disruption, building systems that are tolerant of 'time' being discontinuous or even non-monotone. We avoid de-synchronizations from systems which handle leap seconds differently. We also gain the ability for independent atomic time to keep subsecond accurate civil times without some costly to obtain (and often dubiously secure) date feed of unpredictable leap seconds -- something that will likely become more relevant as solid state optical atomic clocks become something commercially producible.
At the moment we appear to be moving in the direction of a negative leap second. If one occurs the disruption will likely be substantially greater than the typical leap second disruption (which is still significant-- and growing the longer we go without a leap second). I hope we abolish the leap second before a negative leap second is issued, but if we do not I hope that it will at least be the last leap second.
Out of curiosity, do you have children? I didn't think it was so bad until we started having kids in the family. They do not adjust well to time zone changes.
No federal law is needed for this. Each state can decide on its own to stay on standard time the full year. Notably Arizona still doesn't.
Forget the teenagers, standard time kills people. People are more tired in the afternoon and have more accidents if the sun is already down. Summer time actually saves lives.
What is this, a high school competitive debate?
I could just as easily argue that permanent DST kills people. People are sleep deprived, and stressed, and have higher rate of depression, etc.
I think these claims are best supported by public health experts that actually use studies to back up their claims. In fact we should ask public health experts if this move is cleaver instead of leaving it up to the politicians to decide what is best for us.
They remind me of “if you’re not happy with our immigration policy just move somewhere else”. It is completely ignoring how people actually live.
Winter is depressing because it's dark during our leisure hours. This bill gives us an extra hour to enjoy.
This is the correct decision.
Some armchair logic would say it is a mistake to ignore sleep-deprived workers when measuring what is “good for business”. It is also a mistake to ignore the health impact of teenagers that are forced to wake up before sunrise bigger part of the year now. My armchair logic says that you should expect a rise in depression, especially among teenagers. And that seems kind of bad for business, when workers have to deal with their teenage children being more depressed.
Restaurants, for example, would love for an extra hour of daylight. It brings patrons in an extra hour.
By your same argument, the health of workers faced with depression from getting off work at night is also worth noting. I don't have a compelling paper to cite, but I can say that anecdotally everyone I know and talk with about DST hates wintertime hours.
You are also aware that if kids should wake up later and go to school later you’ve effectively changed nothing except now true noon is around 13:00 as opposed to 12:00, that is you’ve lost your extra hour of sunlight to schools staying open that extra hour.
We've known for a while that school that starts too early [1]. Some school boards have shifted back start of school by an hour already [2].
If the education board really wanted, they could offer afternoon start times or evening school. This has actually been proposed and met with enthusiasm. [3]
But to my point - this is entirely independent of when we choose to have the sun overhead.
My argument is that most workers and non-school age people are
- likely sleeping through the first hour of sunlight in the winter
- enjoy leisure hours after work more than before work
- enjoy having sunlight after work
Shifting sunrise forward an hour would result in a dramatic quality of life increase for most people.
Further, the added enjoyment of extra sunlight will cause people to spend more time outdoors and away from home after work, increasing their consumption. Businesses will be happy about this.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/sleep/features/schools-start-too-early.h...
[2] https://www.washington.edu/news/2018/12/12/high-school-start...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/05/how-s...
These claims need to be backed up by data as there is a conflicting claim that potential sleep deprivation caused by the offset would negate these benefits.
The fact that school already starts too early, makes me doubt that changing to a permanent DST would magically fix that. In fact I would argue that it would make the problem worse. Much more robust is to move to standard time.
I think most people actually prefer sleeping through the first hour of sunlight, and would continue doing so given the choice. I think it is only exceptional that people wake up earlier to enjoy longer part of the day, e.g. during a vacation. During the everyday life I think most people would naturally prefer starting their day with the sunrise (as opposed to before). And in fact I believe there are health implications in forcing people to do otherwise. Not with everybody, but with significant enough portion of the population that it would be unwise to force it on everybody.
Your point about school hours being independent of the rest of the population is naive. Parents life syncs with their kids as they prefer to be working while their kids are in school, cities set bus schedules according to school hours, businesses open in accordance to when school is over, etc. Peoples lives are heavily depended on school hours.
If we're doing away with DST, so be it. I mean, it'll be horrible in the winter when sunrise is at like 9AM (or in the summer when it sets at 8PM, depending on which option you choose), but I understand the arguments.
But if we get rid of it, permanent standard time is the only sane choice.
I sincerely disagree that sunrise and sunset are more important. We can shift business hours, which would probably look like the federal government changing its hours and everyone else following. I think that's much more logical than saying "eh, we're going to arbitrarily pick solar noon to be 1PM now so that the big hand on the clock will point to a number we find aesthetically pleasing".
We already have major issues with e.g. making teenagers wake up earlier than most of their bodies are tuned for at that age. How much worse is it going to be if they have to get up an hour earlier in the winter? (Remember: what our bodies consider "early" is dependent on when the sun rises, and not the numbers we put on our clocks.)
And just to top it off, you'll be forcing a lot of kids to walk to school in the dark.
---
Edit: To be clear, it's not just children!
On weekends and holidays when people don't have to work, how much of the population do you think wakes up right when the sun rises, in order to maximize their daylight? I certainly don't have any data on this, but I would guess a large majority take the opportunity to sleep in.
Having extra daylight seems really nice at first, and it is. Unfortunately, shifting clocks doesn't actually create more sun, it just creates a societal mandate. My view is that we already start our workdays too early, particularly when you take commute times into account.