I always thought that DST is unnecessary and did not really understand the rationale behind it. I mean, sure, in 1916 it might have made sense to conserve those cca. 3% in home electricity consumption. Today, however, spending more time at home in the heat may introduce additional costs through higher use of air condition. I guess wikipedia's article on DST rationale can explain better than I can :)
That said, doing away with DST is IMO not necessary. People are already used to it and there is little confusion, even if people have to be reminded each year. How the benefits compare to the drawbacks I cannot judge, there are different arguments either way.
But...
The way the EU decided to approach this is worse. Every country will be able to decide whether they want to keep summer time or they want the "normal" time? I think that's another example where the compromise just destroys every benefit of the proposal.
I live in a small country where a lot of our businesses work with neighbouring countries. There is even a significant percentage of people that live here but go to work to another country. So, the kids' kindergarten will use a different time than your workplace?
I think this will create much more confusion and stress if the different countries choose different times than the problems we have now with the switching.
I guess there are countries that have this problem already (if the neighbouring country is in a different time zone) but still we may introduce the problem to places that did not have it before.
I don't think that's a highly informed comment. As far as I'm aware choosing time zones has always been a member state decision, where as clock time changes have been regulated by EU in order to be uniform. Nothing changes in regards to time zone regulation. It's just a political expression to say that you can choose to be in "summer time". In reality there's no such thing as permanent summer time.
The reason why it's politically expressed this way is because there is a strong majority consensus that summer time probably isn't useful, but there's isn't one about which time zone should be used. So expressing it this way makes it easier for the politicians.
Agreed, thanks for the correction :) I guess I just used the terminology that's currently being thrown around (in the article and in the media here).
I just wanted to say that this will open up a discussion on which time to use (i.e. which time zone should apply :) ) and that if we are not careful it may complicate some people's lives.
> I live in a small country where a lot of our businesses work with neighbouring countries. There is even a significant percentage of people that live here but go to work to another country. So, the kids' kindergarten will use a different time than your workplace?
I think that's a fairly small problem, and there's a good chance that it'll solve as many cases as it makes worse. For example, the longest single border within the EU is Portugal/Spain. Right now they're in different timezones, but that doesn't make a lot of sense - it leaves Spain in the same TZ as Poland, and with a noticeable unusually late sunrise/sunset. This would be a nice chance for Spain to sync up with Portugal/the UK/Morocco instead, all of whom match its longitude much closer.
Might well not happen, but it's certainly not clear that it'd make life more difficult than it is now.
The amount of car accidents is higher on mondays after the switch, this alone is a reason for me to abolish DST. Your body needs 2 weeks to fully adjust after the change, i.e. a full month a year your inner clock is out of tune.
It's called Daylight Saving Time (DST), not Electricity Saving Time (EST ?!). While some of the thoughts around it seems to have started with energy consumption (and thus cost) in mind (which proved useful in time of war), those were just consequences with little to no reason nowadays. The reasons are astronomical and therefore DST must be somewhat observed; it's the implementation approach that must be improved (IMHO together with the time-zones implementation), but people doesn't seems to understand it.
That said, doing away with DST is IMO not necessary. People are already used to it and there is little confusion, even if people have to be reminded each year. How the benefits compare to the drawbacks I cannot judge, there are different arguments either way.
But...
The way the EU decided to approach this is worse. Every country will be able to decide whether they want to keep summer time or they want the "normal" time? I think that's another example where the compromise just destroys every benefit of the proposal.
I live in a small country where a lot of our businesses work with neighbouring countries. There is even a significant percentage of people that live here but go to work to another country. So, the kids' kindergarten will use a different time than your workplace?
I think this will create much more confusion and stress if the different countries choose different times than the problems we have now with the switching.
I guess there are countries that have this problem already (if the neighbouring country is in a different time zone) but still we may introduce the problem to places that did not have it before.