Though travelling is more convenient now than it’s ever been (post-9/11 protocols notwithstanding), modern travel is still full of mishaps, missed connections, arbitrary expenses and a lot of minor, anxiety-causing inconveniences.
And since I am a very foolish person, I unwittingly added another item to my list of Weird Travel Potholes. Last week, on our trip to Nova Scotia, the usual joy of crossing time zones was complicated by another factor — daylight time.
Who would do such a silly thing? Travelling already stresses me out. Not a lot, but enough to make a time change a source of some mild anxiety. Even with my smartphone (which is usually smarter than me, especially when we travel together) and my accessible-anywhere data and my triple-confirmed itinerary, I would have been happy to have avoided the whole daylight-time thing.
Why are we still doing daylight time? My travel orneriness aside, daylight time is maladaptive for the modern non-equatorial world.
I say non-equatorial, because much of the world doesn’t do daylight time, nor has any reason to. Obviously, countries farther from the equator are the only ones who have to think about the pros and cons of adopting a schedule that will allow them to maximize sunlight hours; the rest of the world is laughing at us.
Most of North America and Europe are on board with daylight time (except for Russia, which, after three decades of daylight time, decided to drop it in 2010), but more than half of South America avoids it and almost all Asian and African countries don’t bother. Oddly enough, Namibia observes daylight time, but as of 2013, is the only sub-Saharan African nation to do so.
Ever since William Willet proposed our modern daylight-time system in the early years of the 20th century, it’s been controversial. Fun fact: Daylight time was first adopted in Germany in 1916, for its pragmatic use as an energy-saving measure while the country waged war.
That made sense a century ago, but nowadays it’s difficult to tell if this rationale has any basis in reality. Theoretically, it makes sense that longer daylight hours would result in less energy use (and more fun outdoor leisure activities), but according to C.G.P. Grey (a YouTube channel featuring short educational videos), our move away from the insanely energy-inefficient tungsten light bulbs toward more efficient lighting makes this argument moot.
Furthermore, we use our energy differently now. Not only have our televisions and computers and other entertainment technologies warped our previous patterns of energy use, things such as air conditioning have also come into play.
Victoria doesn’t have to worry about this kind of thing, but who would want to head out on a smoggy Toronto evening to “enjoy” the late sunlight when you could stay at home in your air-conditioned bubble instead?
(I used to be snobby about people who used air conditioning, and then I lived in Montreal for a year. I no longer judge. I am so, so sorry.)
Proponents of daylight time say that the longer summer hours promote mental and physical health (assuming you avoid sunburn) and keep traffic accidents and crime down, for reasons that have everything to do with increased sunlight. But if that’s the case, then why not just keep us on daylight time? Our winter lives are already miserable and cold, and the switching back and forth between time schedules has serious repercussions.
Studies have shown that a tremendous amount of productivity is lost when we “spring forward” or “fall back,” to such an extent that the potential energy savings (depending on which study you read) can’t outweigh the downsides in terms of tired office workers and grumbling labourers. In fact, farmers are usually the biggest opponents of daylight time, because it wreaks havoc with their schedules.
So what’s the point of it? At this stage, it seems more like an exercise in observing minutiae than a useful social strategy. One of the weirdest things about daylight time in North America is that rather than shifting all together, time zones shift at 2 a.m. local time.
In Nova Scotia, we were on daylight time an hour before B.C., which meant that for four hours, we were five hours ahead. In the fall, Mountain Time and Pacific Time unite for an hour when Alberta falls back to 1 a.m.
Even weirder, though I’ve written this column in the past tense, I wrote it before I left for my trip. Whatever. Time is an illusion.
