Both sides of the Atlantic these sort of articles crop up regularly. Move to summer time year round and so forth.
What is always forgotten is latitude, and that we forget to learn from history and experience.
In Southern England, or California I doubt it's much more than an annoying relic of olden days. But I don't think anyone has true statistics on whether it is or not. Go north and it starts to matter and accident rates go up when you don't have DST.
The UK had an experiment of staying on summer time between 1968 and 1971, introducing British Standard Time. At the end of the period, the vote was to restore the old way, by a large cross party majority.
I believe at the start of the expermient it was generally thought it would confirm the sense of getting rid of summer time permanently. Switching clocks twice a year is annoying after all.
Interesting. I would have guessed that it would have been the other way around. Go far enough North, and DST is pointless because they're just isn't enough daylight no matter where you put it.
Also, your comparison on latitude is a bit off. London is at a higher latitude than Seattle, for example. It just doesn't get as cold, because you have the Gulf Stream warming it up.
Wintertime there definitely isn't enough daylight to go around here, but staying on summertime meant that northern England and Scotland wasn't having sunrise until nearing 10am. Dark mornings, it seems, had more effect on accidents than dark evenings.
I just picked southern parts of each nation, rather than checking. It may be that it is more relevant to Canada than US, excepting Alaska. :)
Work and living patterns have changed quite a bit in 50 years too.
China has only 1 timezone, which is based on a city on the east cost. In the west part of the country, the sun always comes up and goes down later than what we east coasters consider as normal. However, they got used to it anyway.
Time zones are artificial and don't make it too complicated. Pick a simple solution and let people adjust.
From what I've heard, in Xinjiang (the westernmost province of China), the locals completely ignore the Beijing timezone rules and work on a local timezone that's two hours off, although that's also in part a (relatively) benign form of civil resistance against the unwanted Chinese government.
The vote to abolish all-year BST was based on politics and idiot campaigning from newspapers that focused on the increase in morning accidents. (Lack of accidents in the evening isn't news.)
There was a government report on accident statistics after the abolition, and contrary to the impression given by the newspapers, the evening accident reduction outweighed the morning accident increase.
What is always forgotten is latitude, and that we forget to learn from history and experience.
In Southern England, or California I doubt it's much more than an annoying relic of olden days. But I don't think anyone has true statistics on whether it is or not. Go north and it starts to matter and accident rates go up when you don't have DST.
The UK had an experiment of staying on summer time between 1968 and 1971, introducing British Standard Time. At the end of the period, the vote was to restore the old way, by a large cross party majority.
I believe at the start of the expermient it was generally thought it would confirm the sense of getting rid of summer time permanently. Switching clocks twice a year is annoying after all.