If it were that simple, politicians would experience no problems in trying to end it!
There is a marked difference in opinions about DST between Scotland and England. Due to the political angle, discussion of this is forbidden under forum AUP, but you can Google the arguments for yourself very easily, and might be surprised by what you find. There has also been attempts to alter DST in the EU Parliament, discussion of which falls into the same category.
Interestingly, I’ve had a brief dig on Google Scholar and not found much in the literature to swing the argument one way or the other. For example, a recent meta-study found no conclusive link between DST and road traffic accidents (Carey & Sarma, 2017. Impact of daylight saving time on road traffic collision risk: a systematic review).
I’m not arguing for or against one way or another, I’m pointing out the history & where it came from, & as I see it each option has pros & cons.
As for me, I really don’t care, I’m retired & tend to wake & sleep depending on daylight & weather, a walk around my nearby hills on a sunshine dawn is as good in mid winter as it is in mid summer.
If you look around the world the setting of the time is much more to do with politics than common sense.
Spain, Portugal and a large part of France are further west than Greenwich, yet only Portugal stays on our summer time. Spain used to keep on the same time as the UK, however the Spanish government wanted to be on the same time zone as Germany in order to show support for Hitler.
Arizona stays on the same time zone throughout the year, so if one is travelling in and around the adjoing states to AZ then one is often changing the clock time in the car.
The US had it altered the weekend of the putting the clocks back by one week a few years back so that the sweet manufacturers would sell more cookies etc at Haloween as the evening would be longer lighter so the parents would allow their kids stay out longer Trick or Treating - so consuming more sweets.
As has been said there’s the same number of daylight hours whether clocks change or not. Personally I like it being lighter in the morning as I go to bed and get up early so if they didn’t go back it would be nearly 9am before it get light but yes dark by 4pm on shortest day. Can’t win!
Anyway i know there have been various reasons taughted over the decades, to energy saving, agricultural, safety with children etc etc…
I simply enjoy the ritual… it marks the move into late autumn and winter, and conversely spring in March.
Further It allows an extra hour in bed when it is starting to get darker and colder… what is there not to like, and now most of my clocks self adapt so we don’t even need to adjust most of them
This is more than good enough as a reason to continue. It’s a marker that moves us into and then out of ‘winter’.
In the real world the actual hours of daylight don’t trouble most of us. It’s getting light in the morning when we leave for work, and dark when we come home. Moving that about a bit seems to be a fuss over nothing, if it means we get home in half light but within half an hour it’s dark anyway.
Generally though, if something happens and countries around the world continue to do it, it seems that it’s probably a good thing and should only be undone if there’s both good reason for changing it and a large consensus.
I can certainly imagine that when we retire - and are therefore able to have more say over when we have leisure time - I will be less invested in longer daylight in the evening.
Yes, it is utterly unnecessary. Some countries do not have DST, notably Japan, and they are doing fine.
PS: No, these countries are just not doing fine, they are doing better because everything is simpler, no issues, no problems sometimes caused by switching to & from DST.
Once again, I invite all of the ‘totally unnecessary’ grumbles to Google some of the reasons cited by our cousins North of the (English-Scottish) Border as to why they feel DST has arguments in its favour. You might not agree with them, but you can’t claim there are no reasons for having it!
Wait a minute. The clocks are moving back to standard time. The change was actually to introduce summer time. I’d be happier if we stayed on standard time the whole year 'round. Staying on summer time through the winter would make the mornings unbearably dark and depressing. (I’m speaking from Canada, but it is the same principle.)
I like daylight early in the morning, so I can be out on the roads on my bike before they’re wrecked by drivers. Most people are lazy, and sleep as late as they can, so the early mornings are very quiet, and I love that. I get it that people who can’t be bothered to get out of bed until the last minute would want their daylight at the end of the day so it can be light out while they’re watching telly.
