In a nutshell, the problem is that we seem to want an absolute, fixed scale (9:00am) to refer to approximately the same time of day all year long … where “time of day” is a relative, variable value. For example: 9am is about two or three hours after sunrise at our latitude. When you state the problem that way, you can see a couple of different classes of solutions:

(1) change our measurements: have work start at 8am sometimes and 9am sometimes. This might be the best answer, but nobody really seems to want this one.

(2) change our rulers: redefine 9am so that it’s what we expect it to be. DST in all its forms is an example of this.

(3) use a more appropriate measure: come up with a sunrise-relative time specification and use that instead. Instead of work starting at ‘9:00am’, it might instead start at ‘2:00pd’ (post diliculum).

I think #3 is interesting too. And it’s the kind of thing that tends to be done in computer science. If one measure turns out to be inappropriate, well, come up with another one that fits better!

Of course, a time method which is non-absolute like that is just a general problem. Businesses which are further north than others would open at different times, and you don’t really want the time differences to be fully analog… so you’d probably need to introduce vertical time zones as well as horizontal ones. And many things would still need an absolute time scale, so you’d never be able to ditch the old am/pm scheme.

In the end, though, it’s probably too many complications. I have to agree with John — as much as the current DST system sucks it’s really not a bad compromise.

That said, if you think the benefits of it are worth the complication, I’d tend to agree that a more finely graded system would have certain advantages over the current one. OTOH, I don’t think that a continuous system is the best answer, mostly due to the clock problem you point out.

I would recommend a finer-grained system, maybe consisting of 4 30-minute adjustments (one every 13 weeks) or 12 10-minute adjustments (every month?), except that the complexity of the system would increase much further the difficulty of reconciling different time convesions than the current (mostly) 1-hour off systems in place.

After reflecting on it a while, I’ve decided that I think the current system is close to the best possible pragmatic approach to daylight saving time. The calculation is easy for almost anyone to understand (if not remember…), and the majority of potential benefits to DST are realized.

At some point, systems just get so entrenched that altering them, even for the better, would create more problems than it solves. It seems to me that the best thing to do, when that point is reached, is offer an alternative rather than an incremental improvement, but I have a hard time seeing any alternative time system ever being accepted either.

Keep current time zones intact all over the world, reset to a common DST/non-DST base reading and start adjusting towards the sliding time at 02, local time? To heck with time zones, define the pan-earth time function f(atomic clock UT1 time, lat, lng) = t?

I think introducing Stardates, and facing the societal impacts and adjustments that would have, would be a more sane course of action, and then I’m not much of a trekkie, either. I find this proposition yet another layer of complexity and software bugs (Y2K is nothing in comparison) on top of an already broken system, for very little gain and much additional pain.

The car accident thing is interesting, but I have had conversations with (several!) people who fell asleep and drove off the road, mostly swing shift factory people, but creating self assessment tools and encouraging safer habits in general would probably have the same impact as the mild shift.

I’m not sure if it would be irritating or not, but the current imbalance between DST and normal months would mean that the length of the day would change more during the winter. Only a little, but if it was noticeable…

I’m a fan of just going to DST full year, mostly because during the summer, I would rather work in the dark than play in the dark and during winter it hardly matters. I get the busing issue, but if we listen to psychologists, children probably shouldn’t bet getting to school much before 10:00 AM anyway, too bad that would inconvenience so many parents.

The benefits of cooperating on business hours are getting smaller, especially as the hours that businesses stay open increases. To the extent that it is mostly just a giant mind hack “You will pretend it is earlier/later.” I’m not convinced it is really all that necessary.