Proposal on implementing permanent time zones in the European Union

This almost feels like a false flag of proposing the most disruptive plan possible such that it couldn&#x27;t possibly be approved, haha.<p>Splitting &amp; re-groupings are almost arbitrary and have no consideration for politics, business and culture.<p>Ireland &amp; N. Ireland in different TZ? France &amp; Corsica in different TZ? Pushing Ireland &amp; Portugal into their own TZ and calling it Azores time? Bringing UK into alignment with Spain&#x2F;France&#x2F;Belgium&#x2F;Netherlands, but pushing Germany&#x2F;Italy&#x2F;Switzerland into alignment with Eastern Europe countries but out of alignment with Western Europe?<p>A 2 step process by which some countries change TZ twice? Would love to write the code for that mess.

We (Europe) shouldn&#x27;t fragment time zones that much. We (NL) should stay on permanent summer time.<p>Reasons<p>- criminality is lower when there&#x27;s longer light<p>- earlier darkness leads to more accidents. It&#x27;s better to have longer darkness after the masses are RESTED (in the morning), opposed to when they&#x27;re TIRED (in the evening)<p>- longer day-time for office workers, is more productive<p>- shorter time of year that has long after noon darkness. As humans are using artificial light to stay up longer, it&#x27;s better to align the time of day with that

(1) abolishing daylight savings time is great and should have been done years ago.<p>(2) the proposed time zones are really impractical, not necessarily in principle, but in their specific implementation. Germany-Netherlands in different time zones is strange, Dublin and Belfast in different time zones is stupid, Athens and Crete in different time zones is absurd.

Putting Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland (AKA Ireland) on different timezones strikes me as political suicide for anyone proposing it.<p>But otherwise I am warm to the proposal. Some tweaks would make it more practical&#x2F;politically acceptable (keep Portugal and Ireland on the Western Time Zone, don&#x27;t split up Greece from the islands).

All attempts to optimize society by changing time zones and adjusting for daylight savings time time should be abandoned. Let society set the schedule after a static time. With this I mean ordinary time zones and the same time throughout the year. Which approximately should correspond with the sun at its highest at noon.<p>If someone prefers brighter mornings and darker afternoons, and someone else the opposite, the solution is easy. Adapt your life to follow that. Don&#x27;t expect the time to suit you, it is keeping track over the sun&#x27;s trajectory over the sky, not your life.

From the Who We Are page of the site<p>&gt; The Time Use Initiative (TUI) is the main non-profit organisation promoting the right to time all over the world. Its main objective is to encourage public discussion on how we collectively organise our time, seen as a way to improve citizen’s well-being through innovative time policies.<p>So this is not a proposal from an EU department, but it&#x27;s a proposal to the EU. For sure they &quot;encourage public discussion&quot; as the comments here on HN demonstrate.

This sucks, not only will Greece not stay on summer time, we&#x27;ll actually go to <i>one hour back from winter time</i>? So not only will we not get one more hour of daylight in the evening (ie stay on summer time), we&#x27;ll actually get <i>one hour less</i> than we have now?<p>That&#x27;s terrible.

After placing all of Europe on permanent winter time, going by the image provided, this proposal seeks to split Ireland&#x27;s time zone from the UK&#x27;s and place it a further hour earlier, thereby ensuring that the sun will begin setting at 2:30PM, and it will be pitch black out at 3:30PM in the winter, all in the name of achieving &quot;permanent time zones as close as possible to solar time (natural time) in Europe.&quot;<p>Well done.

I live in Europe. As far as I remember, the proposal to abolish DST was already voted in the European parliament some time before the COVID pandemic, and the next steps were for the countries to chose their time zones and implement the change. Then the pandemic happened and this was put on hold.<p>Probably, there is also some analysis paralysis: it is just hard to chose between keeping the winter or the summer time. Just look at this thread: morning birds cannot agree with night owls, someone leaving a bit to the west disagrees with those leaving in the east of the same country...<p>I wish we&#x27;d just settle on any choice. At this point I care much less about &quot;winter vs summer time&quot;, more about abolishing DST itself. Twice a year I have a small jet lag for nothing.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: switching to UTC+0:30 will put a large number of countries in a common time zone without them deviating from their solar time too much.

HN, please explain why everyone is so upset with having a time offset in the city&#x2F;region&#x2F;country next door.<p>In Germany, there are 16 states. Many of them have different laws, e.g. regarding store hours and so on. Neighboring countrys like Austria or Poland have even more conservative laws.<p>The difference between sunrise and sunset in Palermo and Oslo is almost 90 minutes twice a year.<p>There are tons of cultural differences between Europeans. In southern countries, people tend to stay up later in the evening and sleep longer in the morning than in northern countries (at least that is my impression from traveling).<p>In the continental United States, there are four time zones, none of which even pay much attention to state borders.<p>Still, everyone manages to live their lives, talk to people on the phone, commute from one place to the other.<p>So why are Europeans so afraid that the people they talk to might be an hour or two off?

I find it kind of absurd that people claim that clock alignment has negative impact on their health. Studies show that but:<p>You do it only twice per year. But how often do you stay late up because of an event or whatever. And how often do you travel to another time zone, sometimes even &gt;6 hours.<p>I think the latter effects outweigh the health impact of clock alignment significantly.

If you move Spain to UTC+0, then it would finally line up with Portugal. Why move Portugal over even further? It&#x27;s accurate enough.

Ha why “Azores time zone” including Ireland and Iceland when the Azores are miles away. “Atlantic time zone” seems to make more sense.

This proposes that The Netherlands switch to WEST&#x2F;UTC. There is already no clear consensus on whether to stay on permanent summertime (+2) vs wintertime (+1), and I would expect the switch to UTC to be even more challenging to adopt. Interestingly we switched from Amsterdam time (+0:20) to Berlin time (+1) during WW2, so going to +0 would mean a much earlier noon. Additionally policymakers have been saying to favour keeping the time with our major export market (Germany) in sync, so that wouldn’t fly with this proposal. Personally I don’t care that much for what offset is chosen, as long as we abolish DST.

Japan Standard Time is funny: very early in the morning you have bright light, and you are in the darkness at 4pm in winter. But it’s the &quot;Land of the Rising Sun&quot; after all, so it makes sense.

I also want permanent summer time. Winter is so depressive when it&#x27;s dark at 15:30 already.

We need a two-tier schedule for businesses and institutions. Summer time and winter time. So, when authorities switch from CEST to CET or viceversa and clocks are adjusted an hour, schedules are inverted to leave things as they were according to the Sun.<p>So if after the switch you are supposed to start an hour earlier, you just start one hour later, thus starting at the same time according to the sun.<p>This might sound crazy but the craziness of making people switch clocks is evil and cruel

The debate here shows why we&#x27;ll be stuck forever with the status quo: It&#x27;s a topic that can be endlessly bikeshedded, everyone has an opinion, and there are a million incompatible proposals (each with drawbacks that will make some groups strongly oppose them).<p>Meanwhile, I bet most even don&#x27;t understand the effect of DST (minimizing how much the clock-time of sunrise varies, at the cost of increasing how much the clock-time of sunset varies, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;coolinfographics.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2012&#x2F;11&#x2F;6&#x2F;daylight-savings-time-explained.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;coolinfographics.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2012&#x2F;11&#x2F;6&#x2F;daylight-savings...</a>)

That line putting the whole Benelux, France, and Spain on one side of the divide (Western European Time) and Germany, Switzerland, and Italy on the other (Central European Time) makes this proposal just about dead in the water.

This actually kinda sucks. I like not changing clocks. But I&#x27;m not happy about moving the timezones around.<p>I&#x27;m in The Netherlands and after this Germany will be in a different time zone than me. That&#x27;s not cool.

I&#x27;d put Portugal and Ireland in the western zone.

Surely just getting rid of summertime would have most of the benefits without moving countries current time zones?

Serious question, why not adopt one timezone globally? For some of us sunrise would happen at 10pm, for others on 4pm. So what? Wouldn&#x27;t we just get used to it? Is there any rationale for anchoring start of the day between 4am-8am?

Apart from the specific location issues highlighted in the comments here, the entire site can be summed up to &quot;everything is better, just trust us&quot;. Zero arguments for any claim. Terrible.

Time zones are geopolitical artifacts just like borders, laws, currencies, etc. They can&#x27;t really be &quot;permanent&quot;...

Good luck convincing Greece to have two timezones. These are the people who made a Macedonia change their name to North Macedonia

Don&#x27;t think it is workable. Changing clocks is annoying, but probably a good idea when you live in high latitudes.

No way RoI and Northern Ireland will be okay having separate time zones.<p>On the other hand, I&#x27;m glad to have Central European TZ.

In the last vote 80% peoppe wanted to stay at summer time permanently to have more aunlight after work. Wtf is this?

Half of greece having a different timezone that&#x27;s kind of ridiculous<p>Why don&#x27;t we reduce working hours to 7 also

I never understood why you have to change the time zones, when you can just change the office hours

Crete not having the same timezone as the rest of Greece?

I have a modest proposal to end all time-zones forever: the fractalizing time grid.<p>Currently, partly due to a historical legacy of railroads, time-zones are longitudinal. That is, they help standardize time (and daylight hours) across east-west distances.<p>However, given that the number of daylight hours is even more starkly affected by north-south latitudinal differences, we should also implement time-zones in that direction. After all, what does &quot;12:15am&quot; really mean if its dark in London and sunny in Reykjavik?<p>So, in order to standardize daylight hours, we could implement north-south time-zones as well, producing time-offsets for each lat&#x2F;long cell on the globe. We could standardize the number of daylight hours in a given 24-hour period (using the equator as reference) and standardize each cell to have the same number of daylight hours.<p>In order to do so, we would simply have to redefine what a &quot;second&quot; is (or really, all time measurements.) So, the further north you go during the summer, the shorter a &quot;second&quot; becomes (so as to preserve the same number of &quot;seconds&quot; per time-cell) whereas in the winter you would have the opposite effect. Therefore this also has the interesting consequence of changing the duration of all time measurements seasonally, with a greater delta the further away from the equator you are (a &quot;second&quot; would always have the same duration at the equator.) So the further away you are from the equator, the quicker the duration of time changes with respect to equatorial time as time passes seasonally. Still with me?<p>Good, because we can do even better! Why even have time cells? Time-zones were implemented as lines on a map because that was the technology that was available at the time. But now that we have the internet, we can instead standardize an algorithm that could be implemented into all RTC chips and run on reference servers a la atomic clocks. So instead of &quot;crossing over&quot; into the next time cell, all of your time measurements would be sped-up or slowed-down proportionally to your GPS-measured latitude (standardized to some number of significant digits.)<p>So all analog clocks would immediately be rendered useless -- unless you are exactly on the equator -- and we would live in a world where you could speed up time by running north, but only in the summer.<p>If you&#x27;ve made it this far without throwing your laptop&#x2F;phone out of the nearest window in rage, thank you for your patience (and welcome to the time grid!)

Interesting tidbit from the full document:<p>&quot;During the Second World War, Western European states were forced to adopt Central European Time by Hitler and Franco. After the war, this was not revoked, leaving the Western European states at a disadvantage to the Central European states due to the detrimental effects of misaligned clocks.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;timeuse.barcelona&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2023&#x2F;02&#x2F;proposal-on-implementing-permanent-time-EN.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;timeuse.barcelona&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2023&#x2F;02&#x2F;proposa...</a>

This is absurd and absolutely detached from reality. Not one person on the island of Ireland is going to accept either a timezone border between Ireland and Northern Ireland or between Northern Ireland and Britain. Unsurprisingly not one expert or group on their list is Irish or from the UK.

this is just as ridiculous as the lengths countries have gone near the international date line.<p>just getting rid of dst seems most reasonable to me but iirc it has been prposed before without any success.<p>if the world is still ok with adjusting with time like taking 6 hour flights twice every year, then so be it.

&quot;After agreement of a common date within the EU, we recommend doing the transition in 1 to 2 steps, depending on the member state:<p>Step 1: All EU countries abolish the clock change to DST in spring and remain on the clock time they use in winter. For those countries whose recommended time zone is their current standard time, no further steps need to be taken.<p>Step 2: Those countries whose recommended time zone is not yet their current standard time, additionally turn back their clocks one last time by one hour in autumn, in order to adopt their recommended time zone as their new standard time.&quot;<p>I really wish we could do this in the US.

here&#x27;s an idea - UTC everywhere

Abolishing daylight savings and keeping standard time.<p>If you’re going to abolish it, this is the way. None of this permanent summertime nonsense.

+1 for this proposal. It is just unhealthy to permanently live in a wrong time zone and this proposal would fix that at least in europe.

DST is social terrorism at this point. &quot;We&quot; keep it that way because the herd is too scared to change. Never underestimate the awful raw power of herd thinking, it&#x27;s the worlds greatest cancer.