Permanent daylight saving time: Do most Oregonians and Washingtonians really want this?

[Atomicdoug]

Absolutely not! Permanent Standard time makes way more sense here.
I don't need it light until 10PM in the summer. Nor do I like it dark at 8:30 am in the winter.
Daylight savings makes no sense in Northern Latitudes.

Originally Posted by Those Who Squirm

The state legislatures of Oregon and Washington passed bills to make DST permanent, pending approval by the federal government. In California, the voters approved a referendum, but it failed to get the required confirmation in the state legislature.*

Seeing as how we didn't personally vote up or down on this, is it something we actually want? I'm curious especially because the population of both states tends to be more concentrated in west, between the Cascades and the ocean. The farther west you live in your time zone, the later the sun sets irrespective of DST, so there's less justification for it. If we imagine an ideal time zone exactly 15 degrees wide, with City A just inside the eastern boundary and City B just inside the western boundary, then City B already has the equivalent of DST with respect to City A. And I would expect that the residents of City B are less eager to establish permanent DST, because that would mean very late sunrise times in the winter.

*I'm not not sure how the law regarding voter initiatives works in California. I voted on many initiatives during the time I lived there, sometimes for and sometimes against, and I can't recall any successful voter initiative that required legislative approval.

What's your take?

[Those Who Squirm]

Originally Posted by Atomicdoug

Absolutely not! Permanent Standard time makes way more sense here.
I don't need it light until 10PM in the summer. Nor do I like it dark at 8:30 am in the winter.
Daylight savings makes no sense in Northern Latitudes.

Believe it or not, in another discussion elsewhere on this subject, a couple of people from British Columbia were saying they wanted permanent DST. Go figure!

But there's hope! You've probably heard that an OR state senate committee voted unanimously in favor of ditching DST, in the past day or two. So what, you might think; this sort of thing happens all the time and it never makes it out of committee. Although I can't find the news story I read earlier, this article said that the population is in favor of this by a comfortable margin*; I have no idea if that's always been the case or if it's been just in recent years. ISTM a few years ago most people wanted permanent DST.

Also encouraging is the fact that if we enact permanent standard time, we don't need approval by the federal government to implement it. I wasn't aware of that until just now; I thought if a state wanted to opt either ST or DST the year round, they needed federal approval. It's only for permanent DST that federal approval is needed.

As for latitude, I agree permanent DST doesn't make much sense here, but there's also longitude, which has far more of an impact on your local sunrise and sunset times than most people realize; overly detailed explanation follows:

Spoiler

In an ideal time zone exactly 15 degrees wide, someone living near the eastern edge of this time zone will see the sun rise and set almost an hour earlier than someone at the same latitude near the western edge. By the same token, for the time of either sunset or sunrise--but not both--a difference of 15 degrees longitude can make as much difference as 10 degrees of latitude. Of course, the time between sunrise and sunset on any given day is a function solely of latitude. Today in San Diego, the sun went down at 17:36, actually nine minutes earlier than it did in Eugene, because San Diego is six degrees east of Eugene. The additional 30 minutes of daylight they got today was all in the morning.

[ormari]

Full disclosure: I am an ex-patriated native Oregonian, not a
current resident. I grew up in the Willamette Valley, in the western end of the time zone. I don’t presently live in Oregon, nor vote there.

I remember how dark it gets in the afternoon in the winter, and how late it stays light in the summer (used to love this... except the next morning). I’m for standard time all year round. I find it takes weeks to recover from the time shift. That’s enough argument for me to want standard time all year.

[KarlaT2]

Yes I would love to have it stay light later by keeping DST permanently. If it has to go back to standard that would be my second choice, but really I just dont want to keep going back and forth. It would be great to get off work when it's still light and have more time to do things in the yard, or go walking, or whatever. I dont care if it's dark when I go to work, but would enjoy it being light when I finally get home.

[Those Who Squirm]

Originally Posted by oregonwoodsmoke

Just guessing, but I suspect that "scientists" are pretty evenly divided among all standard time, all daylight savings time, and keep both. You could easily find scientists who support any clock plan that you want supported. But to me, it doesn't seem much like a "science" question, so the "scientists" opinion doesn't really carry any more weight than any other person's.

You're probably guessing wrong. Sleep medicine specialists, that is the MDs who specialize in treating sleep disorders, overwhelmingly support permanent standard time over permanent daylight time. That might not be the case with rocket scientists, chemists, and physicists, but I'd rather go with the sleep specialists. Personally I would prefer permanent standard time anyway, not just because the sleep specialists recommend it.