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The dumbest of all american traditions, literally serves no purpose and is a nuisance.
If America wasn't built on cars, I might agree, but as it stands it reduces the frequency with which children waiting for buses in the morning are killed by cars.
My fellow Americans keep saying this, ignoring all the evidence that points to later school start times being better, and refuse to move school start times like a sane people.
It also correlates with more traffic crashes as people have to adjust their schedules and are more sleep deprived.
I guess I'd need to know more to have an informed opinion here. I'm reading that for the first week after spring forward traffic fatalities rise 6% or so and fall off toward the end of the week. Doing some very morbid math here: 2021 saw 42,939 deaths from traffic accidents in the US, which is roughly 825.75. 6% of that is about 50. So DSL kills about 50 people a year, maybe. (I'm also seeing an NIH study that says that DSL may not actually drive accidents, but I'm having trouble understanding their reasoning, tbh)
How much WOULD removal of DSL impact bus stop traffic accidents? If it kills more than 50 a year, it'd technically be an increase in deaths overall, plus basically all of the extra mortality would be kids.
Maybe permanent DSL would be better? People would be grumpy about the sun going down earlier in summer though.
In any case I have absolutely zero ability to effect change here, and I'm just going to keep crying when all the excel sheets at work shatter into a thousand pieces twice a year due to DSL.
Maybe permanent DSL would be better?
Noon is definitionally mid-day, when the sun is at its highest point, which traditionally is 12:00. If we want to tweak the start & end times of school/work/whatever, then let’s simply do that. Why futz with the clock?
Well, for work times, I guess the answer is we live in a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and our government isn't going to tell them what to do. For schools it's moving the times without changing work times also would be a logistical disaster.
If the government had full control of the economy it could do all of this at once, but of course, then it could also just implement good public transit and reduce car usage.
heart attacks also increase. changing the clock is social murder.
Funny you should mention that. When I used to take the bus to elementary school one day I moved my spot in front of my house further up the hill and it saved my life, a drunk driver crashed literally where I was standing before.
IIRC, that was only an issue in 1973-1974 when the US government tried year-round DST (permanently setting the clocks forward one hour). The consequence of this was that the roads in the morning were still dark due to the sun not rising until ~9am during winter, which compromised safety for schoolkids.
If DST was abolished, school safety wouldn't be affected much because the sun would be rising even earlier from spring to fall, and sunrise time would be unchanged in the winter months.
I may have gotten mixed up as to what half of the year is dst. I guess it makes sense that it's the one that gets you more evening sunshine.
So yeah, just abolish it and have the "sun comes up earlier" version in place all year, we don't need the sun to be up at 9:30pm in the summer.
I WILL NOT ALLOW FATHER TIME TO LIE TO US
American and Canadian traditions.
EU too
