March 13, 2007
Daylight wastings time
Comedian Sam Levenson attributed this description of Daylight Savings Time to his mother: cutting the end of a blanket and sewing it onto the other side to make it longer and then cutting it off the other end and sewing back on the original side to make it shorter.
I've been telling this to my children who are amazed at the wisdom of Daylight Savings Time. Especially now that it's 3 weeks earlier.
The Washington Post heartily endorsed the proposal a year and a half ago:
ONE VERY TINY (but very talked about) provision in the energy bill would extend daylight saving time by three weeks in the spring and one week in the fall starting in 2007, conserving energy and perhaps preventing some crimes and traffic accidents.
The logic being that with more light at the end of the day, people will use less light in their homes in the evening thus conserving energy. Of course, this assumption is based on the premise that people won't need lights for a similar amount of time in the mornings.
Well ABC news reports (h/t my wife) that a study was done (with a control too!) in Australia and it found
Kellogg and Wolff came to their conclusion by studying Australia, where several states extended daylight-saving time (DST for short) by two months in 2000 to accommodate the Olympic Games in Sydney that year.They compared electric demand in the state of Victoria, which extended DST, with its next-door neighbor, South Australia, which did not.
"Our results show that the extension failed to conserve electricity," they wrote.
"If it's dark enough in the morning that pretty much everyone has to turn on the lights," said co-author Kellogg, "what that means is that that increase in morning electricity consumption is going to be so big that it offsets any benefits we get from the extra light in the evening."
It seems that the study making the assumption that extra Daylight Savings Time would save energy was based on a Transportation Department study
Congress's logic was simple. If there's an extra hour of sunlight in the evening, people will turn on fewer lights. The Transportation Department once did a study saying daylight savings reduced America's use of oil by 100,000 barrels a day.
That study, according to ABC, is 30 years old. (And I'm forced to wonder if the methodology was valid or was the study supposed to make the case for extra Daylight Savings Time?)
Given the way the Washington Post blithely dismissed the concerns of opponents of the extended DST
Some critics charge that commercial interests are driving the idea -- but if more daylight means more consumer activity, that's good for the economy. Airlines claim that the move will sting, but they survived a similar shift 20 years ago and there's plenty of time to adjust schedules. Children at school bus stops would be in no more danger than they would be on the dark mornings of December and January. And Orthodox Jews who've protested that a sunrise past 8 a.m. would mean choosing between saying prayers and getting to work on time need fret only if they live in Alaska, western Montana, some parts of Idaho or that detached bit of Michigan.
Maybe it's time for a reconsideration?
Blogdigger tags: Daylight Savings Time, Sam Levenson, Conservation.
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I love the blanket analogy! It reminds me of a critique of a major computer manufacturer I saw a few years back, whose policies for dealing with network issues were compared to telling someone who is late for work due to traffic that they need a bigger car.
I haven't done any studies but it always seemed intuitively obvious to me that DST costs as much extra in the AM as it saves in the PM. Unless the average person doesn't wake up until 7:30, I don't see where there would be net savings. On the other hand, I do wish that congress would mandate that my kids, who now stay up later than I do, not leave every freakin light in the house on all night. Maybe they'd listen to congress where I can't get through to them.
Posted by: Elie at March 13, 2007 11:05 AMI like the new look!
Posted by: westbankmama at March 13, 2007 11:47 AMThis reminds me of the story of the little old lady who wrote to the newspaper, saying that the extra hour of sunlight was hurting her tomatoes. Maybe she read it first in the Washington Post!
Posted by: Bill Rudersdorf at March 13, 2007 2:06 PMI don't care how dark it is in the morning before I go to work. I'm not a morning person. I'm grumpy whether it's light or dark.
But an extra hour of sunlight after I get out of work? That's cool. We should be on DST all year.
Posted by: Julio at March 13, 2007 2:54 PMDo you have any idea how many billions of dollars this time change has cost? There is a lot of hardware out there that is hard coded to the old system. You have to change it manually 4 times a year, new DST start you move it up, old DST start date you move it back, old DST end date you move it up, new DST end date you move it back. Lots of man hours. On the temporary side lots of manhours have gone into updating millions of computers, servers, and printers to get the latest revisions. We are still dealing with systems that don't seem to take the upgrade. Don't know how much we will spend on software changes to make it work. Right now I am spending a lot on tech overtime to fix PC problems. Calender issues seem to be a big problem on several pieces of software. This was a really poorly thought out idea!!!
Posted by: Ron W at March 13, 2007 5:04 PMDo you have any idea how many billions of dollars this time change has cost?
That's not cost, that's revenue! (you can guess where I work!)
Posted by: Elie at March 13, 2007 9:50 PMI am a kid at heart. I love having more daylight. I understand that the gov't is not really giving it to us, but that is separate from my love for DST.
It is always a sign of the coming summer.
Posted by: Jack at March 14, 2007 10:47 AMSoccerDad, great post. I happen to like DST for reasons unrelated to phantom energy "savings" (having extra evening daylight in summer without losing it in the morning in winter) but this change in the start time is nothing short of utter stupidity. I estimate it has cost my company at least $10k in lost productivity. Rants on this starting in the comments here and continued here.
WARNING: EXTREMELY ROUGH LANGUAGE IN BOTH LINKS! Most definitely not for the faint of heart.
Posted by: Ken S, Fifth String on the Banjo of Life at March 16, 2007 9:57 AMChanging your clock to get "more daylight" is like cutting off your head and standing on it so you can see farther.
It's the kind of stupid of which only politicians and other learning-disabled people are capable.
They passed a law in California saying you can't use a cellphone at a gas station. The reason? An urban legend, probably received in e-mail by some idiot legislator.
Of course, they also passed a law against charging for use of an air compressor at gas stations - because "air is free." Apparently compressors, electricity, maintenance and property leases are also free now.
Posted by: Merovign at March 18, 2007 3:02 PMDaylight Savings Time only works at all is when there are more hours of daylight in a day than there are hours of darkness. From the Spring equinox to the Fall equinox that is roughly true, thus the old method of Springing forward the first Sunday in April and Falling back the first Sunday in October. Spring forward any sooner than the Spring equinox and you still have more darkness in a day than light; ditto for Falling back any later than the Fall equinox.
How difficult is that?
Posted by: George at March 18, 2007 6:04 PM