Andy Woodruff

Most of the world tends to prefer to not be too far from the center of the timezone (where solar noon matches solar time in standard time). Geographic and political boundaries make it so that often it's more red. The extremes of north and south tend not to care as much because it doesn't matter as much. https://andywoodruff.com/blog/where-to-hate-daylight-saving-time-and-w…

http://andywoodruff.com/blog/where-to-hate-daylight-saving-time-and-wh… has a nice interactive viz for # of days a place has a sunrise/sunset before/after a certain time with or without DST.

That saying is also oddly appropriate here because the joke for anyone who lived in boston is that the city is built on paved-over cow paths. (yes yes fun-police, it's actually a myth https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2018/03/06/boston-streets-cow-path… but the truth of it being a bunch of ad-hoc cities that coalesced into one entity isn't too far off from the truth. My favorite bit of Boston artwork is road silhouettes of all the Boston-area squares: http://andywoodruff.com/blog/boston-squared/ )

Here’s a good visual way of exploring that: http://andywoodruff.com/blog/where-to-hate-daylight-saving-time-and-wh…

Really depends where you are on the globe in terms of latitude. Russia is a gargantuan country that currently spans 12 time zones, I don't think there's a single solution that can cover it, especially given that the southernmost portions of the country (mainland) are around 41° and the northernmost parts are around 77°N. I think the US tends to be much simpler in this regard (49°N-24°N - contiguous states). It seems in much of the country you really do get a more optimized time for sunrise/sunset if we all moved over 1 time zone: http://andywoodruff.com/blog/where-to-hate-daylight-saving-time-and-wh…

This is why we still use it. http://andywoodruff.com/blog/where-to-hate-daylight-saving-time-and-wh…

This one has a good scrolling time and totality map: https://andywoodruff.com/posts/2023/eclipse-2024/

Thank you for answering. Now let's discuss this answer. The first question is: which specific time? This time will differ based on the timezone and geography. Because of timezones, sunrise time effectively makes a one-hour jump at the transition points, which makes this chart of yours look different for people living living close to timezone border vs. someone living in the center. To that end, which time zone and which city was this chart made for? Because we'd need many charts like that to see the effect of DST on sunrise time. (Remember, timezones make sunrise/sunset times depend on longtitude (exact coordinates, actually) as well as latitude and time of year!). Thankfully, some people have done just that[1][2] (note that [2] is interactive!). As you can see by playing with [2], if your goal is to have sunrise before 7:00AM across the country on as many days as possible, then DST works against this goal. Of course, one can always throw one's hands up in the air and say "it's an approximation". In the same sense, 0 is an approximation to any number -- just not a very good one. The US foreign debt is approximately 0 dollars, if you don't talk about error margins. Now, looking at the interactive chart at [2], do you really think that DST is a better approximation to "having the sun up at (your chosen time)" than doing nothing at all? Or shifting the whole timezone by an…

Enjoy! http://andywoodruff.com/blog/beyond-the-sea/