Daylight Savings is such an interesting phenomenon. Most people have no idea of its purpose, benefits or problems it causes. What I find interesting is that it’s effect is changing over time.
Daylight Savings is the practice of advancing clocks so that afternoons have more sunlight and mornings have less.
Here are a few of the benefits of using it as created and used over the last 100+ years (since 1895):
- Retailing, Sports (the golf industry benefits strongly), and afternoon activities benefit by more evening hours
- Traffic fatalities are reduced when there is extra daylight in the afternoon. (On the same side, it can be argued that the same accidents increase in morning darkness driving)
- It reduces the use of evening lighting. Evening lighting used to take up a larger percentage of overall energy use than it does not.
It also creates several standard problems:
- It can cause problems for farming schedules. “For example, grain harvesting is best done after dew evaporates, so when field hands arrive and leave earlier in summer their labor is less valuable.”
- Evening entertainment that relies on darkness can suffer
- It causes many scheduling problems (travel, meetings, etc.)
However, as lifestyles change, Daylight Savings begins to affect new social issues.
- International business can be quite confusing. Certain countries do celebrate, some do not, and many change at different times and dates. The can cause a lot of issues for those trading on international markets or lining up international business meetings, shipping, outsourcing, and more.
- Population is moving away from the farm and toward the city. The implications of DST are quite different on these two groups yet we don’t seem to adjust according to these habitual changes.
Even within the U.S. there are conflicting areas. Arizona, Hawaii, and part of Indiana do not change their clocks.
If you have time, check out the Wikipedia page for Daylight Savings. It is a quite non-biased view of it all and really points to zero conclusions of its benefit or detriment to society. If it is not proven as necessary, is the confusion worth keeping it? Or would it be more confusing without the change?
Personally, I think it is worth going to no-change. The change to no-change will be worth the lack of confusion in the long run.
*image source: brunopieroni.com
No related posts.
I can tell you for certain that everyone who works in the electricity markets would love to see daylight savings go away. It is an enormous software headache to deal with a 23 hour day in the spring and a 25 hour day in the fall.