The European Parlament voted in favor of the European Commission’s proposal to abolish Summer Time with the plan of ending it in 2021. Five years later, it’s still blocked by a disagreement between the European Commission and the Counsil of the European Union.
Should we settle on the Standard Times we have or pick Summer Times as the new standard? Countries disagree, resulting in a possible redraw of the time zone map with France, Germany and Finland in the same zone.
My proposal is to side step this issue by gently moving into time zone UTC, field by field rather than moving the whole society.
Briefly about time zones
We used to keep time in the local solar time but that got increasingly inconvenient with the nauseatingly fast travel speeds of 18 km/h with the railroad. So we started using time zones instead, arranged along national or regional borders.
In the present day, with instant messaging speeds across the planet, it makes sense to set the internal time of a communication device to an agreed upon auxiliary time zone and show the time stamp converted into the local time zone of the user. That auxiliary time zone is UTC and we set almost all of the other time zones as an offset from UTC, usually full hours.
Briefly about Summer Time
The practice called Summer Time (also known as Daylight Saving Time elsewere) is meant to make the population go to work or school earlier than they normally would. In most cases it’s one hour earlier. That earlier starting time is followed by an equally early ending time potentially trading a darker hour of spare time in the morning in excange for an extra hour of spare time during the light time of the day.
The assumption is that most people would go to bed earlier and wake up earlier than they normally would, saving resources in energy production used for lighting homes. A figure of 0.3% in electric consumption reduction was found in a meta-study from 2017.
The transition is accomplished by resetting all the clocks one hour early in the spring and then back to normal in the autumn. Lots of people get less sleep the weeks following the spring transition, resulting in health risks.
We have been doing this for about a hundred years. Prior to that, moving certain activities to earlier in the day in the summer was a thing one could do on ones own volition.
