Remember when Daylight Saving Time happened to us again?
You know, that day that causes us all to grumble loudly
about the ridiculousness of our biannual clock adjustment and loss of sleep?
In this post, I engage in some self-care data visualization
to explore day light hours in cities across the world and the United States,
inspired by an
awesome night hours series
by
Krisztina Szucs.
As a parent, I loathe daylight saving time.
Nothing reveals the shared delusion of time
like trying to explain to your children
why we moved the clock forward an hour when it means
they’ll suddenly need to go to bed while it’s light out
or wake up and get ready for school while it’s dark.
So in this spirit, I started to wonder:
what kind of returns are we getting on our daylight saving?
Except, rather than try to directly answer that question —
since that’s way too hard —
I chose to visualize day light hours
to see how they align with the modern work day.
The plot below shows the yearly day light schedule for 2022 in Atlanta, GA where I live.
We’ll also take a look at the day light schedule in
other cities around the world
or
across the United States.
At the end of this post, I’ll share the code I used to make the plot below.
Atlanta, GA.
Date
Sunrise
Sunset
Daylight
Non-Work
Shortest Day
Dec 21
7:41 am
5:38 pm
9h 56m
1h 56m
Longest Day
Jun 21
6:32 am
8:54 pm
14h 21m
6h 21m
It’s pretty clear from this visualization that
in Atlanta, GA,
which is very much on the western edge of the U.S. Eastern time zone,
year-round standard time
is a decent way to live life.
What about other cities in the world?
I thought it’d be interesting to visualize day light hours for U.S. cities.
You can use the dropdown below to choose your city
or the nearest city with more than 100,000 residents
(or just pick a random city!).
Then, toggle between Standard or DST
to see how either proposal would affect you.
Or choose Both to see what will happen in the unimaginable case
that the U.S. Congress doesn’t actually make DST permanent.
