Charlie ([info]vruba) wrote,
@ 2008-03-09 13:14:00
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Daylight Saving Time

It’s spring ahead day in the US. If I haven’t complained about summer time to you before, let me do so now.

DST doesn’t work in Indiana, doesn’t work in Australia, and moving it forward doesn’t work. It wastes energy. The overall health effects of the time jump are unclear but certainly non-positive, and there will be a 7% spike in road accidents tomorrow.

The problem that DST is trying to address is that business hours are asymmetrical around solar noon. Instead of declaring time discontinuous, we might consider fixing the problem at its root by popularizing flextime and staggered work hours. This would presumably drift toward the effect of year-round summer time, and we wouldn’t have to do it by redefining time itself.


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[info]jazkharma
2008-03-09 08:43 pm UTC (link)
here here!

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[info]gfrancie
2008-03-09 09:54 pm UTC (link)
There you go again... being sensible and reasonable.

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[info]jekissa
2008-03-10 04:18 pm UTC (link)
Could you explain "we might consider fixing the problem at its root by popularizing flextime and staggered work hours"?
I just don't understand what it means.

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[info]vruba
2008-03-10 07:26 pm UTC (link)

I’m not sure what to explain. Feel free to re-ask.

In the spring and fall, people who drive to work do so in daylight but come home in dusk. Another way of saying this is that the work day isn’t centered in the solar day – there are 8 hours of work and roughly 10 hours of good light this time of year, and they bump on one side but not the other. We see this in the firgure on the left (blue shows work hours).

The DST solution is to rename the hours, thus tricking businesses into opening and closing earlier and centering the work day better. In summer time, we call the hour mark nearest solar noon “1:00 p.m.”, and so on. (We’re glossing over some time zone stuff here.) Visualize this with the help of the middle diagram.

But we could have the best of both DST times – permanent names for the hours and less dark commuting – if we simply started work earlier and left later. I have sketched this in the rightmost picture.

How do we shift work hours like this? Not by fiat. We simply encourage businesses to say to their employees things like “come in this week when it works best for you, so long as you make 40 hours and are always here for the 3:00 meeting” (that’s flextime) or “your group’s hours this year are 7–3 [or 10–6, etc.], and this other group’s are something else” (that’s staggered work hours). Both these approaches are already used by compaines like Boeing which are big and central enough to largely internalize problems like employee parking lot traffic jams. (Also, they much improve urban traffic flow and emissions.)

There are problems with this approach. For example, in winter, it may be best to have one commute in full darkness and the other in twilight, rather than both in deep twilight – I don’t know. You could object that we rely too much on the idea of 9–5 for coordination, although in my experience these numbers are already gooshy. And people like me will feel kind of bad about even maybe seeming to sorta-kinda endorse car commuting. But on the whole, I think it would work at least as well as changing the clocks twice a year.

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[info]jekissa
2008-03-10 07:36 pm UTC (link)
Alright, that makes more sense. I needed explanation on "flextime" and "staggered work hours" but they don't have anything to do with DST, strictly speaking. That's why I was confused.

Also, do you know where I might read about the history of DST? Or do you know it well enough to explain it to me?

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[info]vruba
2008-03-10 07:47 pm UTC (link)
As usual, I’d start with Wikipedia.

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[info]inthewall
2008-03-10 04:22 pm UTC (link)
Logic. Charlie has it.

I'd also like a bit more detail too, if you feel like rambling.

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[info]mossaia
2008-03-15 04:26 pm UTC (link)
I have mad hate for DST now that I'm actually working full-time. I have to catch the bus so early that I wake up when it's still dark out, which makes me feel like less than a person.

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