Doug’s Dime: Why not Daylight Savings Time all the time?

On Sunday, clocks fell back to standard time, which means that we got this year’s cycle of the “man, it would be great if we had permanent Daylight Saving Time.” The fact is, people think they want that, but when countries have actually implemented this, usually people hate it and roll it back. The United States famously tried permanent DST in 1974 and quit that very same year — it sucks to send kids to school when it’s dark out — and a Russian attempt at permanent DST that started in 2011 wrapped up in 2014. Looking at all cities that have tried to have later winter sunrises, most don’t stick with it. Looking at cities that get nine to 9.5 hours of winter daylight (New York, Chicago, Madrid, etc.) and a sunrise at 8:30 a.m., if they were forced into winter DST, only 35 percent of people who had experienced it are still living under it today. The rest having usually voted or legislated their way back to either the seasonal time-shift or permanent standard time. Olivia Walch, Contraclockwise