British Columbia to end time changes, adopt year-round daylight time

Average school start/end times in BC are 8:30 AM and 3 PM. Standard time in Vancouver puts sunrise/sunset at 8AM/415PM at winter solstice for standard time. That's 30 minutes of daylight before school and 75 minutes after school. IOW, kids are more likely to be walking in the dark in the morning, even with standard time.

Switching to daylight time will switch sunrise/sunset to 9AM/515PM, guaranteeing kids will be walking in the dark in the morning.

In addition to the reason already given (kids get home before the evening traffic picks up), another reason is that generally driving conditions are worse in the morning than they are in the evening so if there isn't enough light for both the morning and evening drives to be in light it is safer to give the light to the morning drive.

I have children and I’ve never heard any arguments for DLS that make any sense.

Most of the time people conflate longer summer days with DLS.

The situation with dark mornings is winter not standard time.

My children are already waking to school in daylight this time of year prior to the switch to DLS.

As others have said. I would rather permanent standard time but I’ll take permanent DLS. Moving the clocks twice a year is insanity.

Where I live, in winter it's dark in the morning (and also the evening depending on the length of the school day) with and without DST, and in summer the sun is also up either way.

Conversely, I'd rather my kids have more daylight after school so they can explore outside.

Selfishly, I just want as much daylight as possible, which has very little to do with how a government selects a time range for legal reasons. The rotation of the globe has not been yet controlled, as far as I'm tracking.

A lot of people hate standard time in winter because the sun sets at 4 or 5, and they want the sun to instead set at 8 or 9 like it does in summer. DST in winter doesn't actually give you the 8 or 9 sunset, it gives you a 5 or 6 sunset (which doesn't get you all that much) combined with moving your sunrise to 8 or 9, which causes its own set of issues most people don't think about.

The last time we went to year-round DST, we stopped almost immediately because people experienced what winter DST was actually like and went "wait, this sucks."

They worked best when everybody were farmers and had to get up early and go to bed early. Now most people don't live their lives centered around noon, our free time comes after our work is done at around 17:00, so having more light in the evening instead of worthless light in the night makes sense.

We don't use standard time because it works best, we use it because it's "correct" relative to the position of the sun.

Now, standard business hours (9-5 or whatever) were probably chosen for working well in the circumstances where they became standard, and it might be interesting to watch for whether tweaking the clocks leads to tweaking the nominal time of things...

> It's "standard" for a reason

The reason is that with standard time, solar noon coincides with local noon, so the day is approximately symmetric about noon, not regarding atmospheric refraction lengthening the day. It wasn't done on a whim.

Sadly, this isn't really right. Humanity settled on solar time. For somewhat obvious reasons.

Alas, I don't see my preferred method of changing the clock by 10 minutes every month taking hold. Basically ever. :D

I also don't think this is nearly as important for places that are not further away from the equator. If you are on the equator, you are almost certainly fine with no change throughout the year.

The US decided (and Canada followed) that daylight time was more correct for the larger portion of the year, presumably it's easier to transition the remaining 4mo to daylight than it is to move 8mo to standard.

But also, all the opinion polling (business and individual) was like over 90% in favour of year-round daylight time, so here we are.

I’d guess that there is less of a need for light at the beginning of the day since most people don’t farm. Personally I prefer more light at the end of the day.

> Humanity settled on these numbers long ago because they work best.

Absolutely not. It was a compromise tempered by practical and political considerations.

Not that long ago, and we keep fiddling with them. The US time zones were adopted just over a century ago. The dates for daylight saving time were changed less than 20 years ago. Much of Western Europe changed time zones (much of it rather violently) in the 1940s, as did China. The tz database often requires updates for changes.

If you want to go with what was settled long ago, that would probably be a return to each town observing its own time based on local solar noon, which would be pretty annoying.

And that reason was that it was the standard before the standard was rethought. There's no deeper meaning to it.

And we rethought it yet again, should we go on the time standard (DST) that we're already on for ~65% of the year, or the one we're on for ~35% the year.

It should be pretty obvious why DST is the new winner, it's the current standard.

Save it in the evening, it was always dark in the morning.

Historically we were saving daylight for the morning

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day!

Nah, it also sounds terrible on paper.