Silly traditions
Once I again I want to chime in on the uselessness of tradition. And in this case, not only the uselessness, but the actual net negative that comes from getting set in our ways. In the United States, we have this idiotic tradition known as Daylight Savings Time.
The tradition works like this: twice every year we screw with everyone’s sleep schedule by tampering with the clocks. We move the time either an hour ahead or an hour behind, depending on the season, so as to maximize the light in the morning. Now that I live in a country that doesn’t do this, it makes me rather happy, because I always loathed this twice yearly inconvenience. Now it seems the time change’s downside exceeds mere annoyance: it’s killing people.
Now, people die for all sorts of reasons, some of them positively mind-blowing in their stupidity, and people dying isn’t automatically, in an of itself, a reason to ban something, but this recent study shows that right after the fall daylight savings time switch, pedestrian deaths occur at thrice the rate for other times of the year. Just in case the poor quality of my English obscured the important bit, i’ll put it in numbers: 300% more pedestrians than normal die in car accidents right after the time switch.
Of course, this is perfectly logical; during the time change, people miss appointments, are late with work, etc. and so on. People are just not good at handling rapid change, favoring instead gradual change. So it’s no surprise that drivers make more mistakes during these periods, as the patterns they are normally navigating through have changed, however subtly, causing their muscle memory to fight with the new reality, and occasionally fail.
There are arguments for daylight savings time, which seem to me like mostly red herrings: energy savings, safety for children in the morning. But the energy savings is just transferred from one end of the day to the other, while the safety issue is probably made worse: streets are busier at dusk than they are at dawn.
No, it’s my belief that society clings to (and, in fact, even legislates) this idiotic behavior for one main reason: tradition. People have been doing it so long they’ve forgotten what life would be without it. But, in my humble opinion, the fact that you’ve done something for 100 years has fuck all to do with whether you should continue doing it or not.
December 5th, 2008 at 11:07
The only problem with your argument is that “Daylight Savings Time” is intended to maximize daylight in the EVENING, not the morning. When clocks are set back an hour in the fall, it is merely to return to “Standard Time”. I actually kind of like the extra hour in the evening during several months of the year, especially here in Maine where we’re at the eastern edge of the Eastern Time Zone. But it’s a matter of preferance, I guess.
December 5th, 2008 at 11:09
Oops, I just realized I misspelled “preference”.
December 5th, 2008 at 14:30
One other thing is that the article that you referenced actually argues in FAVOR of “Daylight Savings Time”, believing that it even should be extended year-round: “The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety of Arlington, Virginia, in earlier studies found the switch from daylight saving time to standard time increased pedestrian deaths. Going to a year-round daylight saving time would save about 200 deaths a year, the institute calculated, said spokesman Russ Rader.”
December 7th, 2008 at 11:43
Ahh…thank you on the clarification on the Daylight Savings Time thing. However, the point of my article wasn’t pointing out whether Daylight Savings Time or whatever is superior. The point of the article linked (and my post), is that the switching of time is what causes the deaths, and the switching of time has absolutely no practical use anyway; it doesn’t make anyone safer, it doesn’t save energy; all it does is inconvenience us).
Also, about the quote you lifted: you lifted it out of context. I don’t think they’re saying that Daylight Savings time is inherently safer; they’re saying that stabilizing the time instead of screwing with it arbitrarily is the problem. (If they had written the article in the Spring rather than the Fall, they would have said the reverse…that staying with normal time would save lives.)
December 8th, 2008 at 9:06
I just re-read the article, and you’re right that it does appear as though the quote was taken out of context. I think the ambiguity lies in the fact that the article was referencing multiple studies and possibly slightly differing opinions (e.g., Fischbeck and Gerard from Carnegie Mellon, John M. Sullivan at the University of Michigan, and Russ Rader from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety). Your interpretation likely came from the Carnegie Mellon study, while the quote I referenced was from the IIHS one.
In general, I think the main reason for society wanting to move an hour of daylight from morning to afternoon is the configuration of the waking part of the day for most humans (at least here in the US, and likely in most of the Western world). Due to the fact that the astronomical “middle of the day” (i.e., approximately noon, depending on where in one’s Time Zone that he/she is located) is usually two or more hours behind the “middle of a person’s day”. If only we could all wake up at 4:30 a.m. and go to bed at 7:30 p.m., there wouldn’t be any perceived need for Daylight Savings Time.
December 9th, 2008 at 11:34
Not to beat this dead horse TOO much more; but just for the satisfaction of my own ridiculous level of curiosity, I sent an email yesterday to Russ Rader (the IIHS guy quoted above) and the two Carnegie Mellon professors, in attempt to find out if any of their research indicated whether the cumulative traffic fatalities in a given year are higher now (i.e. with the DST switching-an-hour-back-and-forth thing) than they would be if Standard Time were used year-round (i.e. eliminating DST altogether). So far, David Gerard (one of the professors) and Russ Rader have written back. Mr. Gerard’s response was inconclusive on the overall year-round “net” effects; but Mr. Rader seems to feel that we’d be worse off, as far as traffic-related deaths, if the clocks were never turned back than we are with the current system.
David Gerard’s email response:
“Prof Fischbeck and I looked at the switch in the Spring and in the Fall, and we found a spike in risk (measured in deaths per miles walked, per trips, per minute) for the evening period in the Fall. That was pretty clear from looking at our data, and (as per Mr. Rader) it is consistent with published research in this area. Our motivation was simply to alert people to this risk. These deaths appear to be offset by fewer deaths in the morning, but for a variety of reasons it is difficult to tell from our data what the net effects are.”
Russ Rader’s email response:
“Our research indicates that it is the darkness earlier in the evening that increases the risk. The Institute favors year-round Daylight Saving Time because it increases the amount of evening daylight, thereby reducing crash risk. From a safety standpoint, we would be worse off by extending Standard Time year-round.”