re: #31 ipsos

Maybe where you live. When I added on to my house a few years back, I built with the intent of optimizing southern exposure. If the sun is out and it’s not completely clouded over (a crapshoot in an upstate NY winter, to be sure), my lights aren’t on and my heat’s not running as much as it is when it’s darker and cooler.

You’re mostly on target with your first statement: DST is absolutely a political decision about how to make clock time better correspond to solar time. But we all focus on the shortest day of the year, and on the shortest day of the year, we northerners are screwed no matter what. If the sun’s up when you’re driving to work, it’s dark when you drive home, and vice versa. What matters more, in a lot of ways, is the longest day of the year. Very few of us benefit from a sunrise at 3:45 AM clock-time. Many more of us benefit from a sunset in June or July at 8:30 PM instead of 7:30 PM. That’s the real win from daylight time up here in the north.

(And conversely, it’s why Arizona in particular sticks to not observing DST: when it’s 105 degrees in June, you want the sun going down at 7:30 instead of 8:30 on the clock so you can do more in the cooler evening hours before the clock says it’s bedtime. Again, it’s the long days of summer when DST vs. non-DST makes a difference, not winter.)

A road trip during the Thanksgiving-Christmas season has to be carefully planned. Some people (ahem) don’t like to drive at night and pull off at a motel stop on the road as the sun goes down. If there is bad weather, roads can freeze over after sundown and cause horrific accidents.

This actually happened to us on a road trip from Detroit to NYC in January 2012. It started to get dark at about 4:30 so we checked into a motel in Clarion, PA. About 20 minutes later, there was a 20-car pileup on the I-80 just a few miles back. Then there was another one in the Eastbound lanes.