Here, during the winter, daylight starts between 6:23 and 7:25 in the morning. In the summer, it's between 5:47 and 7:21 am. That's with DST. Without it, full daylight would come as early as 4:47 am.
For them, winter daylight start between 6:28 and 7:51 am. Summer daylight starts between 5:26 and 7:26 am with DST. Otherwise, it would be as early as 4:26 am.
So basically, the more north you are, the more summer daylight comes very early in the morning. Given that humans are diurnal animals, and given that a lot of jobs depend on daylight (e.g., agriculture, construction), and given that we use a social definition of time to regulate a lot of coordinated economic activity, the question is: do we adjust the schedules or the clocks?
Certainly when DST was invented, adjusting the clocks was the only practical option. If we have too many light hours in the morning and too few in the evening, let's just swap the clocks by an hour. There aren't many clocks and you get everybody to do it at once, so no communication is necessary.
These days maybe you could replace it with seasonal hours set by every business on as they see fit, but that's an awful lot of schedule-adjusting and hours-checking that needs to happen to know if you can pick up coffee on your way to work. So personally, I'm for staying with DST.
> So basically, the more north you are, the more summer daylight comes very early in the morning.
That is half the picture. The more north you are the later in the evening sunlight lasts. I grew up near Minneapolis - in winter there is nothing you can do to get daylight both before and after school hours, and when close to the equinox it is hard to even hit one if you sun during recess as well (one hour after school starts or one hour before it ends).
Daylight savings time is useless in the north because there isn't enough daylight in winter to do anything useful with no matter what you do. In summer it is pointless as there is far more daylight than you need and so you have to learn to sleep with the sun up.
I grew up at a similar latitude, and I disagree. That one can't perfectly solve the problem through a clock shift doesn't mean that there are no benefits to the clock shift.
States can opt out of DST (as Hawaii and Arizona do). However, several states want to go to "permanent DST", which requires Congressional approval that has not yet come.
There's a couple of states that have opted out. I'm gonna agree that it's just an issue that not enough people care about to do anything about. Sort of like the penny or metric system
Neither Arizona (with the exception of the Navajo Nation) nor Hawaii observe daylight savings time. Additionally, none of the territories do either (including American Samoa)
These two states are examples of states where it is "easy" to do your own thing. Arizona and Hawaii's metro areas do not bleed over into nearby states.
It'd be tough for New York, for example, to abolish DST without New Jersey and Connecticut doing the same, you'd have people crossing time zones part of the year in their daily commute. Then, it would be hard for New Jersey to do it without Pennsylvania (where many New Jerseyans commute to) also following suit. Likewise in New England, where Boston is the center of the universe, all of New England is best off being in sync, you don't want commuters from New Hampshire and Rhode Island to cross time zones to get to their jobs in MA.
Where I am at right now its DST and sun up is 7am and sundown is around 7pm. Without DST it would be 6am to 6pm. I think the average person gets more use of the sun from 6pm-7pm than they do at 6-7am. A decent chunk of the population is sleeping until 7am and virtually nobody is sleeping from 6-7pm.
That doesn't really support switching away from DST in the winter. So I'd rather stay on DST all the time. But if its between never DST and DST half the year, I pick half the year.
All you’re arguing for is that business hours could/should be variable between summer and winter. Don’t you realize there is no need to change the clock setting to solve your problem?
