It's Backwards I Tell You!

I don't know why it's taken me so long to figure this out because it's really SO simple when you think about it. But our daylight savings time is all wrong. For my whole life I've dreaded the moment that we switch over from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time. It means that your world goes from one that is filled with joy in the evenings and nice jogs just enjoying the weather to a life of leaving work or school after dark with nothing to hope for in the evening besides darkness.

That's when I thought it would be nice if we could simply stay on daylight savings time and never switch back over to normal. Then even in the dead of winter on the 30th Parallel it still wouldn't get dark until about 6:30 pm.

See the problem is that we have it all wrong. We currently employ daylight savings when we have plenty of daylight to spare. You shouldn't be saving when you have a surplus! You should be saving when there is a scarcity of something. And in the case of the sun it's most scarce in the winter; therefore, we should try to save more of it then. So my proposal is that back in the 1940s-1950s when we were doing other stupid things like deciding to drop the speed limit down to 55mph we also made the huge mistake of implementing Daylight Savings Time backwards.

Let's take a simple look at what this would look like if you have the following considerations:




Actually though, after thinking about it and crunching the numbers and even making the graphs, I think the real problem is simply with Standard Time. While the world may have once run in farms and so forth and everybody needed to wake up early the world has changed. Over 80% of the US lives in cities and those cities would benefit greatly from having a switch to Daylight Savings Time for good. No more jumping around just adjust to the sun instead of trying to fight it at least twice a year.