There's only 24 hours in the day. You can't have 25 time zones. The problem is that most of west Texas should be in the Mountain zone. But they put it in the Central to minimize splitting time zones in states. The true boundry would split Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas.
Please please happen - permanent DST approved in Senate
- Thread starter Center Z
- Start date
There are 38 local times currently in use. https://www.timeanddate.com/time/current-number-time-zones.html
Interesting. Seems that having 15- or 30-minute offsets would be much more confusing though. I still think the real answer is to put the boundry between Central and Mountain just west of Ft. Worth. Or really, if the people in West Texas like it in the Central, just leave it as is.
Having time zones in something less than hour increments seems like a nightmare. I think you'd pretty much have to double them and have half hour time zones.
I think it'd be a lot better if there was just a movement away from standard working hours. With how widespread cellular internet is, is it really a problem to have to google to see if someone in the far east or west of a time zone opens or closes a half hour earlier or later than the 8-5? Or if a business in the northern part of the state opens an hour later? And we're already coordinating time zones east to west, is it really that big a deal to coordinate with people north and south also?
I get it makes it harder on schools/parents if the normal work day is less consistent, but most schools already have some before school and after school care programs. And you already have plenty of parents that don't work regular 8-5 jobs. Seems like it would be manageable if more businesses started work 30 minutes or even an hour offset earlier or later than the start of the school day.
Last edited:
Seriously Clark?
Who in the hell works 9 - 5?
Last year my kids went to an elementary school that started class at 9:10 am. We had to drop off for morning daycare at 7:15 that then bussed them over at 9:00. You're just flipping pancakes on child care. And longer school days will never happen. So now instead of paying for a couple of hours of after school care, you have to figure out mornings and afternoons. It's more expensive by a mint.
This is one of those things that's going to become a big issue after it passes. You will end up with the Northeast/New England wanting to go to Atlantic time and other areas wanting to start or switch to a new time zone altogether. It's as much about being east and west within a time zone as it is north and south. Atlanta and Phoenix will have 8:30 sunrises in winter. Starkville will be around 8:00. Omaha and Amarillo will be 9:00.
Like Dingo said, it was a nightmare 50 years ago. In December of 72' the proposal had a 79% approval rating and by February of 73' it dropped to 42%. By August, the house voted to repeal it by a vote of 383-16. +95% against. I guess the 16 had a large lazy deer hunting constituency.***
It sounds good on paper, but wait until 30-40% of the country has their kids sitting at bus stops, riding bikes, or walking to school in the pitch black. This is going to be a mess. Starkville schools start at 7:30-7:40 am. Kids likely catch the bus at 7:05 or so on average and it will be dark until almost 8:00. Nobody wants kids waiting for a bus in the dark on rural roads. That's a death trap. You are going to see schools have to move 45 minutes or more later in the mornings. Now parents have a decision... Leave the kids at home alone, pay for 30 minutes of childcare, or go to work later.
The reality is the **** will most likely hit the fan. All kinds of crap is going to have to change to gain an hour of daylight in the evening during the time of year where most days are wet, cold, and soggy in most of the country and you will end up staying inside half the time anyway. If you have kids and schools push back start times, you go to work later and stay later, losing much of your gained daylight anyway.
Again, I am for this. I get an extra hour of skiing all winter long and will be able to take the kids almost every day after school. We already have dark mornings in December and January and it's no big deal since we are used to it and have playgrounds at schools lit up like a football stadium. But I think most people have eyes bigger than their stomachs on this issue, much like they did 50 years ago. The people of this country do not do well with change and ***** to high heaven about everything, expect to see some fireworks the first winter this kicks in...
If you are going to schools that start class at 9:10, they are already run by *** holes that don't care about the needs of the parents and they won't have any problem adjusting. Hell, you could in theory come out better because it might push them to start late enough that the end of the work day and end of school will coincide.
I don't live there anymore, it sucked and was a factor in moving out of the district.
I expect schools to push back start times in many cases. This will be a shock to peoples work schedules and the bitching will commence. Just thinking about when I lived in Dallas. We had as 7:30 drop off and I barely made it to the office. 8:00 or 8:30 would be a real ***** for hundreds of thousands of employees and employers in that metro area alone. Where we lived, the school bus won't pick up since it was to close to school, but you don't really want kids walking to school down busy roads either.. even in daylight hours. You will also have a whole lot of people now commuting in the morning darkness that aren't going to be happy about it. The shortest day of the year in Dallas has sunrise/sunset at 7:30 and 5:30. Rush hour (7:00-8:00 and 5:00-6:00) is never really in the dark, there is always a little twilight during those hours. I can't imagine 7:30 am Dallas traffic in complete darkness and rain. 17 that.
I fully expect the outrage of the 20% to overwhelm the acceptance and embracing of the 80%. As it always does. I just don't know what has changed since the abject failure in the early 70's other than more 2 income families and much more protective parenting.
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/02/03/...t-saving-in-winter-widely-doubted-second.html
I expect schools to push back start times in many cases. This will be a shock to peoples work schedules and the bitching will commence. Just thinking about when I lived in Dallas. We had as 7:30 drop off and I barely made it to the office. 8:00 or 8:30 would be a real ***** for hundreds of thousands of employees and employers in that metro area alone. Where we lived, the school bus won't pick up since it was to close to school, but you don't really want kids walking to school down busy roads either.. even in daylight hours. You will also have a whole lot of people now commuting in the morning darkness that aren't going to be happy about it. The shortest day of the year in Dallas has sunrise/sunset at 7:30 and 5:30. Rush hour (7:00-8:00 and 5:00-6:00) is never really in the dark, there is always a little twilight during those hours. I can't imagine 7:30 am Dallas traffic in complete darkness and rain. 17 that.
I fully expect the outrage of the 20% to overwhelm the acceptance and embracing of the 80%. As it always does. I just don't know what has changed since the abject failure in the early 70's other than more 2 income families and much more protective parenting.
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/02/03/...t-saving-in-winter-widely-doubted-second.html
Your wives will have your asses working in the yard longer hours. Honey-Dos will grow exponentially. Except for Taco. And his bad luck is the ladies will see him in daylight now.
Do they not offer early drop off at the schools? Our school district is pretty good at considering school from the view point of the parents. Not perfect, but they have a few people that are very intentional about making sure people at the schools maintain some connection to reality. Of course it'd be harder to offer early drop off if 80% of the students needed it instead of 20%, but still doable.
One thing that has been batted around here essentially as brainstorming, not really anything close to reality, is having an extra period each day, with students having the option to essentially elect to start their day with the earliest period and leaving before the last period, or starting their day with second period and remaining through the last period. The idea being that the need to economize on bus schedules is causes some schools to start really earlier than is ideal. So parents are for example dropping their elementary school kids off at school 30 minutes before the workday starts and having an extra half hour of care to figure out after school. Lots of challenges to making that work and it may not be doable, but one of the first problems identified was a concern that it might be a very uneven split between SES. The least well off would probably be tied to the bus schedule. The high SES with stay a stay at home parent would possibly/probably be over represented in the later classes. The families with two working professionals seem to try to do everything to be as close as possible to the stay at home parents, even if it requires them spending a lot of money on help. SO there was concern that you might have people attending the early session in more disruptive classes and have that compounded by being filled with children that are largely sleep deprived because they have to get to school at an unnatural time.
ETA: I suspect you will get very different survey results depending on whether you ask the question closer to the time when people drive to work in the dark or closer to when people are getting to enjoy some daylight after work.
For those people that live in a place where they're realistically aren't going to have daylight after work on any reasonable schedule, I guess they're going to hate it regardless but I'm not sure why.
Last edited:
Never had an early drop-off to speak of at any of the 3 elementary schools my kids have attended. 2 of the 3 have after school programs. The current one is an "outdoor science school" where the kids are bussed over to a state park everyday and the local college has natural resources, science, and teaching graduate students teach the kids in outdoor classrooms... Rain, sleet, snow, or shine. Really awesome program. They do experiments, fish, snowshoe, hike, build campfires... It's like scouts meets a natural sciences class. Very lucky to have access to this.
Time change won't be a big deal for us. We live in a really small town and work from home. Just thinking to when I lived in a huge city and then a mid sized city... Everyone struggled with what to do with kids before and after school. Again, you want no part of that 9:00am start time. It's a mother. Post covid, I would think adding any extra programs will be a bear for most school districts in growing areas. There are already massive shortages in both teaching and childcare, I have a feeling if schools move there times, it will cause some working folks to have to stay home or go part time. Not sure how much, but some level.
Anyway, I don't want to come across as a whiner. The change works well for me where I live. Just trying to look back on how it would have affected other places I have lived.
Time change won't be a big deal for us. We live in a really small town and work from home. Just thinking to when I lived in a huge city and then a mid sized city... Everyone struggled with what to do with kids before and after school. Again, you want no part of that 9:00am start time. It's a mother. Post covid, I would think adding any extra programs will be a bear for most school districts in growing areas. There are already massive shortages in both teaching and childcare, I have a feeling if schools move there times, it will cause some working folks to have to stay home or go part time. Not sure how much, but some level.
Anyway, I don't want to come across as a whiner. The change works well for me where I live. Just trying to look back on how it would have affected other places I have lived.
Yeah, I don't like that.
That's way too late.
Who sleeps in that late?
Make standard time permanent instead.
It's dark in the morning when the school bus picks up the kids in my neighborhood already - seems like 6 of one and half a dozen of the other
Maybe. But I'd rather that alternative to it being dark at 5:00 in December. Encourages seasonal depression
Can't wait to see what all outdoor adventures yall do with this amazing extra hour of evening light in January.
If it’s not DST all year round I’d rather just keep it how it is now. Standard time all year would be a waste of daylight plus I don’t want to get up at 3 am to go to work.
I hear you, and the real answer is there are tradeoffs with any system/plan. It's just that I'm amused to hear folks waxing poetic about what all they're gonna do with an extra hour of evening daylight in late December & January.
Getting to throw the baseball or shoot basketball with the kids, even for just 30 minutes, after work in the winter will be pretty great when it happens. Sucks for it to be 60 degrees and sunny at 4:00 when you get home and 55 degrees and dark before 5:30.
Semi in response to you, it's amazing how many people forget that lots of jobs require daylight to work and can't just be shifted around. Just talking to different people and seeing different people commenting about the potential change, the vast majority of them don't even make any reference to how it impacts anybody but them. I've heard people say things like they'd rather go to daylight savings time plus an hour because they'd rather work two hours in the dark and have two extra hours of sunlight after work. Which I get they are talking about what would be best for them personally and not really pushing for that as an actual policy, but I really don't believe they are thinking about all the people that work outside and need light.
Mostly I see people completely oblivious to geography and say things like "why would you want to work for two hours in the dark" like they don't realize everybody doesn't live in northern michigan. Even though I know they "know" that you get more daylight in the US if you are further south, I don't think they really internalize/comprehend how much variation there is north and south. And I think a lot of people don't even realize or haven't thought about the fact that what time you have daylight is impacted a good bit depending on whether you're on the eastern or western edge of a time zone.
Sometimes it’s necessary that we work late and in the dark (especially during harvest) but I hate working in the dark. There’s pros and cons to the whole time change and I totally get the darkness in the morning and school bus issue. My preference would be DST all year but if it happens or doesn’t happen it’s no big deal.
AND we had 100mil fewer people in this country then. We are much more crowded now and the problem will be worse. This is going to be a CF for the ages.
It will be dark for all of them this way, including the walkers. It was absolutely HATED when we did it under Carter. They even repealed it a year early because people were so against it. You aren't going to do much with that extra hour after work in the winter anyway. How many people posting in this thread remember it the last time? i certainly do.
Last edited:
OK, you've said it twice, and I didn't correct you the first time. The time it was done in the 70's was under Nixon, not Carter. The google machine will tell you that with a quick, simple search
LMGTFY
Latest posts
Get unlimited access today.