“Only count your sunny houres”, originally uploaded by bc anna

Why can’t the United States and Europe get it together on Daylight Savings/Summer time?

For many years Europe has switched to Summer Time on the last Sunday of March (after the Spring Equinox) and has gone back to standard time on the last Sunday of October (a month after the Fall Equinox). These dates were also standardized by the International Telecommunications Union for shortwave stations to make their regular schedule changes.

The United States has always been on its own little schedule, out of contact with the rest of us. But a few years ago the US finally signed on to end Daylight Savings Time on the same Sunday that Europe ends Summer Time. There was a small semblance of unity in the world.

Until now…this year, as part of a new energy savings plan, the US is ripping it all up. Daylight Savings will start this Sunday, March 11, and won’t end until the first Sunday of November, a week after Europe. The change is not uncontroversial. Many are pointing out that computers are programmed with the old system, and may not switch on Sunday, although this is probably only very important to people running calendar software.

What is probably much more serious is that the switch will cause havoc with airline schedules. That is a problem that would have been vastly mitigated if Europe and the US switched on the same days.

The idea isn’t bad, if only Washington and Brussels could talk about such things and adopt a unified system. If memory serves, one year after the energy crisis, Europe actually switched on the last Sunday of February. While that might make for very dark mornings in Sweden, it would be nice to get away from 2:45 PM sunsets.

The one advantage the US has in this system first proposed by Benjamin Franklin is the easy to remember slogan “Spring forward, Fall back”. There is no counterpart in Swedish, although there were attempts to mint one last October.

The newspapers used garden furniture and barbecues as the metaphor. You put them out in the Spring, and back in the Fall. “Back” is the same in both languages, and works as well with the clock. To put sometime out, “ställa fram” works with clocks, because “fram” also means “forward”.

It’s hard to say if the metaphor worked. We’ll see in a couple of weeks if anyone tries using it again, or if they come up with a better one.

The one advantage to being in California this year now and flying back to Sweden in a week is that you get to go through the switch to Daylight Savings/Summer time twice! That means experiencing of of the best days of the year all over again.