The Economics of Daylight Savings Time

cepheus

mayonnaise wrote: »

Quote:
1. Energy savings
an extra daily hour of sunlight in winter could save £485 million each year, as people use less electricity and heating.
2. Business benefits
Moving clocks forward by an hour would bring the UK in line with Central European Time, which means London would work the same business hours as Brussels, Paris, Frankfurt and Milan. It would also give the UK an extra hour of overlap with Beijing, Tokyo and other major import and export markets in Asia.
3. Safety improvements
An extra hour of evening daylight could save the NHS £200 million a year in accident related costs.
4. Tourism boost
Lighter and longer winter evenings could provide an annual boost of £3.5 billion to the tourist industry, according to the Tourism Alliance.
5. British sporting success?
The extra hour of daytime increases the time available for exercise, makes people more likely to attend evening sporting events and means professional athletes can train for longer.

How is it possible to get an extra hour of daylight, do we stop the Earth rotating?

MARTYM8`

davetrousers wrote: »

Clocks go back (just less than) 2 months before the shortest day BUT go forwards (just over) 3 months after the shortest day.

The should go forwards at the end of February not March.

That's the change we should make - the clocks should go forward in early March not the end of March. The EU sets the dates - so we can't do this even if we wished to.

Its crazy that for almost the whole of March (27th is the date next year) we have daylight at 6am (5.30am by the end) - when most of us are in bed - but it gets dark at 6pm (mid rush hour). People are literally dying as a result - as there will be more accidents as more people are on the road at 6pm. Instead we could enjoy daylight at 7pm or later (post rush hour) and still have daylight well before 7am.

This is what the Americans and Canadians do - unfortunately while we are in the EU we are forced to stick with the last Sunday in October to last Sunday in March clock changes.

While I support BST all year round the Scots will never agree to it.

zagubov

They could just devolve time zones to the Scottish and welsh parliaments like they have to the Northern Irish Assembly. i doubt they'd use them but it would remove the objection.

The US copes with multiple time zones with ease; some of its states have multiple time zones themselves and the reservations in the states sometimes keep different summer time rules from the surrounding states. Not a problem.

Even Greenland has 5 time zones and it isn't very wide (but mind you neither is the world that far north).