Andy Woodruff  · Cartographer | Blog

Update: a newer version of this little project helps you make your complaints about daylight saving time—whether they’re for or against it—with clearer messages about whether keeping DST, abolishing it, or making it permanent would be best for your daylight preferences. Give it a whirl over at Observable.

If you’re on Facebook or Twitter or really are any person in America with friends who say things, you hear it twice a year, in March and November: “LIFE IS THE WORST WHY DO WE HAVE TO CHANGE THE CLOCKS WE SHOULD GET RID OF DAYLIGHT SAVINGS [sic] TIME!!!!!”. Maybe you’re even one of the people saying it.

Usually the whining is short-term shock at the sudden change in the timing of day and night, not a reasoned assessment of what it means for the timing of daylight over the whole year. People often don’t even know what they’re complaining about: they’ll rail against “daylight saving time” even if it’s the early sunsets of standard time that they hate. For the record I’m no DST hater, because my morning commute is about 5 seconds (no pants required) so I never need to wake up before the sun, and I live in a place where the sun sets at 4:11 in the damn afternoon in winter so I’d love to push that back an hour.

There is a cool interactive piece about this by Keith Collins on Quartz charting how keeping or abolishing DST would affect your daylight hours. In New York, you’d have to wake up at 4:30 AM or go to bed absurdly early in order for DST not to increase daylight in your waking hours.

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