Daylight Savings Time

image We don’t practice daylight savings time in Hawaii because Hawaiians are smarter than the rest of the country. Daylight saving time is unhealthy, and has also been shown not to improve electrical usage (the original purpose). I also discovered that Queensland voted down the use of Daylight Saving Time, which is cool because it means my race will be slightly less noonish (1:50pm, which would be a solar 12:50pm if Australia were on DST).

Meanwhile, the mainland US, except Arizona, is going the opposite direction from Queensland, and has made DST last about a month longer than it used to. The US now observes DST for about 7 months of the year, and of the 300 million Americans (or however many we have after the past few years of abstinence education-induced teenage pregnancies) I have yet to hear from somebody who a) likes the idea of taking an hour from our spring and putting into our autumn, or b) can give me a logical and intelligent explanation as to why we do it. Then again, my sampling may be biased due to the fact that I spend most of my time in a) the Northwest, where summer twilight lasts until after 10pm so you can’t get to sleep, or b) the Tropics, where getting home from work with an extra hour of summer daylight means waiting an extra hour for the house to cool down enough for sleep. (Notice my main reason for hating DST is that it messes with my sleep schedule?) I would be happy with year round DST, or no DST, but the switch is lacking in logic. I’d much rather have the extra hour during the winter when it gets dark at 4pm in Seattle.

Published by Ben

Ben Collins Professional Triathlete

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5 Comments

  1. I once went to europe: +8 hours and spent the night in London, then I flew to Paris +9 (I think) and then got a note under the door on my 2nd night in Paris that daylight savings was changing the clocks -1 hour (I think France is on a different DST than the US which made complete sense to me) and then flew to Stockholm which I think is on a diffrent time zone. This was all within like 4 days. I didn’t appreciate any of it – but when you commute by bike to work, DST is awesome. You can see the potholes that you’ve been narrowly missing for months in the dark.

  2. no loren now if you were going TO work you’d be blind but coming FROM work you’d be able to see. so that depends on if you commute both ways or just one. Personally I vote just get ride of it.

  3. Pretty simple (Columbia man). For those of us that now have to work full time we need that extra hour in the evening to run/bike/play with the dog. Being able to ride outside after work for another hour is great. And we also get the added bonus of not having sunlight wake us up at 5 AM!!!

    And who amongst us does not love that extra hour of sleep in the fall?

  4. Wow, Christine… That’s pretty much exactly what I was going to respond to Loren – only guy I know that says he commutes “to” work, when in reality he would take a ferry there and bike commute “from” work.

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