Daylight Saving Time in the EU

[Charriu]

Some of you may have noticed it, but for those who didn't. The EU is currently looking into abolishing daylight saving time in the EU. But before that they want to get the opinion of their citizens. For that reason they started an online poll. You can find it here

[Japper007]

Please yes! It would save me two unnesessary days adjusting every year. The link seems to be dead at the moment btw, too much traffic?

EDIT: it just took a while, it isn't truly dead

[RFS-81]

I wasn't aware of this, so thank you! I'll just echo Japper: Yes please!

(Also: inb4 this blows up worse than the politics thread )

[Rowain]

NO please keep DST (or make it a constant use) I really love to get home and still have a lot of Daylight left to go swimming/barbecue/other outdoor activities.

[Charriu]

Well in that case you should also visit the link as you can tell them exactly that.

[Charriu]

For those interested in the topic. The survey has ended and the results are in:

Results

Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission said on german TV that he will propose to stop Daylight Saving Time.

[Huinesoron]

For those interested in the topic. The survey has ended and the results are in:

Results

Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission said on german TV that he will propose to stop Daylight Saving Time.

That is interesting. I've just plotted all the percentages on a map:



(Score is % who want to get rid of DST; red is highest, purple is lowest.)

The patterns that pop out at me:

-The countries that most like DST are all in the Mediterranean region. You only start to leave the Med when you hit 70% and yellow, and even then 2/4 are fairly far to the south. That seems to suggest that DST is seen as having more value in places that get longer sunlight periods anyway - perhaps because they don't end up 'getting up in the dark', but get a lovely long evening? (As a natural night-owl, this appeals to me, and is why I'm in favour of DST. It also makes the kids sleep in longer, with the darker mornings, which is worth its weight in gold. ^_^)

-The countries that most hate DST are in the far east and west. Notably, there's a near-solid red line down the eastern border of the EU. A lot of these (Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Spain in the west) are out on the fringe of the CEST timezone; the others (Lithuania, Finland) lie outside it entirely. That's a possible explanation.

Alternately, perhaps it's to do with trade. Those eastern countries seem likely to have more trade outside the EU, which means they're more prone to mixups during DST changeover. Notably, Russia doesn't use DST at all, and I would guess is a big trading partner in the east.

It's also worth highlighting that the survey has fairly low turnout. Germany clearly has a strong opinion, and Austria too, but other than them and Luxembourg, no-one had over 1% response rate. More than half of the countries were below 0.5%, and the UK was a hilariously low 0.02%. (Interestingly, Cyprus and Finland, two of the most polarised countries, one for, one against, both had relatively high vote turnouts, so it's hard to say either result is a data artefact.)

hS

[Charriu]

But keep in mind that this survey is not representative. It's a very tiny portion of the Greece and Italy population that voted in this survey.

In the case of Spain you also have to remember that they are basically in the wrong timezone for the last decades. They should be in the same timezone as Portugal and UK. Maybe this is an option for spain to get into a better timezone for them.

[Rowain]

@Huinesoron Your map and conclusion is a bit misleading.

Because the huge majority of the "Want to get rid of DST"-part doesn't want to get rid of DST. They want to get rid of the summertime/wintertime-change but not of the DST at all.
What Juncker proposes and the majority of this poll wants is to keep DST all year long.

What I find interesting is that in this poll ~0.9% of all populace voted and still Juncker and Co jump immediately to push it through. For me that is a sign that there is a lot of money pushing for this change and the Commission just looking for an excuse to make it work and do a "We listen to you people"-show.

[Huinesoron]

@Huinesoron Your map and conclusion is a bit misleading.

Because the huge majority of the "Want to get rid of DST"-part  doesn't want to get rid of DST. They want to get rid of the summertime/wintertime-change but not of the DST at all.
What Juncker proposes and the majority of this poll wants is to keep DST all year long.

What I find interesting is that in this poll ~0.9% of all populace voted and still Juncker and Co jump immediately to push it through. For me that is a sign that there is a lot of money pushing for this change and the Commission just looking for an excuse to make it work and do a "We listen to you people"-show.

Now that's really interesting, because the results page doesn't say that at all. They seem to be hiding that fact entirely.

So what they want to do is basically shift the entire EU one timezone to the right, putting France on Greek time and Greece on Russian time, and then getting rid of DST? Have I got that the right way round? GMT+1 would become GMT+2, because we add one hour when we 'spring forward'. That would put... let me see.

Per this lovely map, Spain is currently about an hour and a half ahead of solar time. By the time the sun reaches its zenith (about half an hour after noon GMT), the clock says it's already half past one in the afternoon. This shift would add an extra hour to that, so clock 12 noon takes place at 9:30 in the solar morning.

????? I'm not sure what the 0.19% of Spain who voted were thinking (I think that's about 80 thousand people), but that doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

hS