Daylight saving: like night and day?
Hi there! This is Elana, co-CEO and lead of the development team that’s hard at work building Datawrapper’s visualization features. Today I’m emerging from behind the scenes to put the fruits of our labor to the test. This time, with an exploration of how we try to bend time to get the most out of the sun.
Let morning people of Europe rejoice — our clocks went back last weekend, depriving us of an hour of sun in the evening, but allowing early risers to be greeted by a bit more sunlight on waking.
Instinctively, I’m sad about it. When the opposite change happens at the end of March, and the evenings become endless, it heralds the beginning of a new, hopeful part of the year. The reversal puts an official nail in the coffin of that carefree season; in its place, months of dark evenings lie ahead. Naively, I wonder, wouldn’t it obviously be nicer not to do that?
As it turns out, things aren’t as “obvious” as I thought. Although a majority of Europeans (85% of those surveyed) seem to agree that they want to abolish the practice of changing the clocks twice yearly, that’s where the agreement ends. Despite the European Parliament voting in 2019 to end the practice, the inability of countries to agree on either permanent summer or winter time, as well as concerns about the practical implementation and the patchwork of misaligned time zones that the change might create, stopped that initiative in its tracks.
Although there is a tendency to prefer permanent summer time, it’s far from cut-and-dry, and the answer will very much depend on who you ask. And of course, that’s just what people think they want — what health experts recommend is another matter entirely.
Turns out there are a lot of factors that are going to determine what you say you prefer, from whether or not you are a morning person, when you wake up, start and finish work, the latitude, longitude, and time zone that you live in, and — at least if you’re like me — probably how deeply you’ve actually thought about it.
After discovering a visual exploration of the question by cartographer Andy Woodruff in the context of the United States, I set out on a similar exploration for Europe:
The map lets you simulate what settling for permanent summer or winter time could mean in practice for how many sunny evenings and mornings we get. While permanent winter time would result in more balance, permanent summer time would plunge our mornings into darkness.
It's also interesting to observe that, depending on how far east or west you are within a time zone, your day is relatively 'earlier' or 'later'. In the west of Spain, the sun won't rise before 9 a.m., but you'll always enjoy the sun in the evening until at least 7 p.m. In Serbia, in the east of the same time zone, you have the opposite effect, with days that start and end more than an hour earlier than in Spain.
After playing around, I realize that the part I temporarily and conveniently forgot is that the day length is fixed — any evening gains are paid for with morning losses. So the question becomes: is that trade-off worth it? How much do you value your evenings (or mornings), and how much are you prepared to sacrifice one for the other? And is there even enough sunlight in the depths of winter to work with, for this to make a meaningful difference?
In my case, keeping permanent summer time would add around one month where the sun is still up at 6 p.m., which, on the flip side, would mean another month where it’s still dark at 7 a.m. It would also push the latest sunset up to 4:52 p.m. (from 3:42 p.m.), while the latest sunrise shifts to 9:17 a.m.
So, I guess I'll just have to accept that the day is short, and getting shorter, and I’m going to be enduring plenty of darkness in the months ahead.
In the end, I also can’t help but wonder if most of us really know what we want when we complain about this, or if maybe it’s just an instinctive rejection of that melancholic feeling of entering into winter, or even just of change in principle.
That’s all from me for now! To my fellow Europeans, remember to use your bike lights and stay safe while going home from work! We’ll be back next week with a new edition from Erle from the visualizations team — let’s see if she continues the sun-oriented theme for the fourth week in a row!
