Like it or not, Daylight Relocating Time is here

 The semi-annual avalanche of snide memes and loud lament held off almost entirely until the day of clock change arrived. Then the usual players emerged, like the one that supposedly quotes a Native American saying only white men would cut the top off a blanket and sew it to the bottom and think that they have a longer blanket. By deftly misinterpreting the process, the joke sets up its straw man for an easy takedown.

Daylight Saving Time suffers from a lot of problems, but it was never intended to make the day longer, only to reorient us relative to sunrise and sunset, because we had long ago given up living according to natural light fluctuations. You want scheduled things like public transportation and regular business hours? Something else has to move to accommodate the desire to have lighter evenings and not have sunrise at 4 a.m. when you don't need to get up until 6.

Of course any specific example will trigger specific rebuttals from debaters who then take a victory lap as if they have demolished the entire case for changing the clocks. Fortunately, this blog has such minuscule reach that I seldom if ever get buried in comments.

This year, it looks like the weather might cooperate with the earliest possible start to my bike commuting season. This is good, because being stuck in motor vehicle traffic was making me crazy. My time in transit to work can vary as much as 20 percent depending on what idiot I get stuck behind on the two-lane road with limited opportunities to pass. My time in transit on the bike never varies that much unless I have a flat tire or a mechanical issue. The most likely mechanical issue is a broken shift cable, which would make the ride more strenuous, but doesn't make me several minutes later. In bike season my primary cause of tardiness is that I'm easily distracted by things around the house that delay my departure, but I'm damn sure not going to drive just because of that.

Arriving a little off the mark at work, I usually work a little extra at the end. Sometimes I work even more to make sure that things are caught up before I take days off. Thus the late daylight becomes even more critical for a safe ride home.

Years ago, I put lights on my commuting bike, and upgraded them steadily to the present system with a very functional dynamo head and tail light system, augmented by assorted battery lights. I can see well on a dark road, and have a lot more then the minimal legal requirement for lights to make me visible to motorists. After many seasons I can tell you that these are completely inadequate, especially now that motor vehicles are equipped with blinding banks of blazing lights that completely obliterate the view of anything else when two such beasts approach each other in dusk and darkness. People pop those headlights on while the sun is still up, blinding or at least distracting each other well before actual nightfall. I gave up trying to claim space on the roads at night. On the dark stretches of open highway, if a single vehicle is overtaking, they can see me well enough. But as soon as vehicles are approaching from both directions, a cyclist disappears in the solid blackness and blinding glare. Add a bendy, hilly piece of road and it gets much worse.

Protected pathways would be nice until human predators realized that cyclists would make easy pickings thereon. This danger will vary from place to place, but there is no defense. Carjackings prove that the armored shell is no defense either, but a locked car in motion presents a much more difficult target than a cyclist who can be taken down with a trip wire or just kicked from a dark corner. 

If you ever want proof that humans are basically good, just look at all the potential mugging scenarios that don't happen.  There is a lot of easy meat walking and riding around out there. The vast majority of the time we get way with it. And that's as it should be. But I feel less vulnerable riding at a good steady pace on the roadway than I do on an isolated path in the woods where I'm illuminated and someone with bad intent would not be. I hate to have to think about it, but humans have been preying on each other since before we were humans. Because of this, I make the most of daylight while it lasts.

Bitch bitch bitch about the time change

Social media is full of the semiannual carping about all aspects of moving the clocks. Lots of people have no idea which is Daylight Saving Time and which is Standard Time, they just know that it's stupid and they hate it.

I never gave much thought to Daylight Relocating Time until I started riding a bike a lot. When I was training to race, I had to calculate whether I had enough daylight for a training ride after work. When I was commuting -- and I still do -- I have to decide whether to risk riding in dusk and darkness. The jet lag aspect didn't "dawn" on me until I was over 50.

Human time is an artificial grid laid over natural time. Plants and animals respond to light and darkness. Humans do too, which causes most of the friction between metered time in general, and mandated displacements of the schedule in particular. Since humans already have the constant stress of accommodating artificial time, which goes unnoticed because it has been normalized for generations, the extra squeeze of switching the clocks provokes whines and squeals. Especially now that the Internet can broadcast and magnify such things, it has become a spring and fall bitchfest that has even led to legislative proposals to stay sprung forward or hold back and make Standard Time the unalterable standard.

With so-called Standard Time only in effect from the first Sunday in November to the second week of March, the so-called Daylight Time has become the de facto standard, because it occupies more of the year. If we were to stay one way or the other, I would prefer the later sunset, although I have a lot of trouble waking up when it's still dark out. Who invented that anyway? And who was the sadistic bastard who came up with the alarm clock, to yank a person from blissful slumber when they are clearly not ready?

No doubt, hunters and gatherers who woke up and got themselves into position before the morning light were more successful than the ones who strolled out after brunch to see what might be available. This transferred to agricultural societies, and then to industrial ones. But there's no avoiding the change in daylight from winter to summer solstices. When we lived according to the daylight alone, how far you pushed into the darkness at either end was somewhat up to you. Now that we have to punch a clock, the discrepancies have more of an impact.

If we did not change to Daylight Relocating Time, first light in the peak of day length would begin at about 3 a.m., and sunrise would follow at about 4 a.m. in northern locations in the Lower 48 of the USA. Your local time depends on where you are in your time zone. The western edge can differ significantly from the eastern edge. The sunlight moves smoothly across the chunked-up human boundaries in which we try to corral time and domesticate it. Thing is, we can tag it with a number, but it always manages to escape.

If we stay on Daylight Relocating Time, sunrise in the dark months of November, December, and January would be pushing 9 a.m. in some places that are northerly and westerly in their zones, like Seattle. It would be solidly after 8 a.m. most places.

When the Bush administration pushed the start of Daylight Relocating Time well into March, I was initially lured into the general griping, because sunrise was finally coming early enough to bring a hopeful feeling of spring to the mornings. The clock change two weeks into March knocked our sunrise back to January, while turning the afternoons into detached pieces of April, brightly lit but still cold. It increased opportunities to exercise outdoors after work, but March being March the conditions out there weren't always very inviting. But as the winters have rapidly weakened overall, it's starting to turn into bike season. Just remember that cold weather can return, and big dumps of dense, clumpy snow can ruin everything. March snow, except at what passes for high elevations in New England, can be too sticky to ski on, but too persistent to ignore when trying to get out on the roads.

Even when the time change waited until April the saying was that there wasn't much to look at, but plenty of light to see it by.

Whatever the clock says, it's hard to see the light go, and a welcome sight when it returns. Most people can agree on that.

The convenience of Daylight Relocating Time

Daylight Relocating Time arrives this coming Sunday in the states that observe it. Let the whinging begin!

I get that it's disruptive. It may get worse as we age. But throughout my childhood I looked forward to the later daylight. As an adult racing cyclist, I found it very useful as well, for training rides after work. Even without training in the mix, it extends the safe(r) period of riding on the road by putting daylight where a lot of us have to use it, in that span between quittin' time and supper time.

If anyone with the power to set policy is listening, if you decide to stop playing with the clocks, please leave them in the DST position, for this late daylight. I have had to ride in the predawn darkness at times, but riding toward and into the coming day is still better than having to deal with early sunset. Or we could adopt Universal Time overlaid with local time, so that things that need to be scheduled will all be on the same clock (see you at "14:00" for that morning meeting!), but each locality has the option of responding to its own photoperiod and sun angle in a more natural way. Sounds like a mess, but at least it would be a novel mess. And whatever number we set on our alarm clocks, we wouldn't have to shove it one way and then the other twice a year.

I think about this today, because it's totally beautiful outside, and I was considering a bike ride. The weather looks conducive for the coming week, and the long range forecasts indicate that the pattern may have shifted for good. Even more importantly, a man at the conservation commission meeting last night, whose family has been here for generations, wished us all a "good mud season" as we adjourned, meaning that, in his experienced observation, this winter has run its course. That means that any saddle toughening I go through now will probably be good for the rest of the season, unlike years when I make false start after false start and go through that "kicked in the ass" feeling multiple times.

The hitch today was that I was up late last night after the meeting, so I got a slow start this morning. And the best of the day came after the sun got up far enough to put out real warmth. There's no point in going out when it's still in the 30s when the middle of the day will be so much nicer. But it's also my last day off before the work week resumes, so I have a list of things that need to get done, plus some residual paperwork from last night's meeting. I calculated the time needed to gear up, get out, and put everything away again, and substituted some ski-trudging as the quicker and easier activity to launch.

On the subject of freezing and thawing, I might actually plan to ride when the temperature is below freezing, if my route includes dirt roads. We're entering the notorious mud season. Even though the scant snow cover means that the mud season will be short and mild, dirt roads will still be better for riding when an overnight freeze paves them for a few hours.

Daylight Relocating Time would have allowed me to knock off a bloc of time-sensitive chores and still have enough light for a worthwhile ride before sunset. We're not quiiiiiiiiite there yet. It's close, but DRT would make it a very comfortable margin.

The frost heaved roads don't present much of a problem to me actually piloting my bike, but they do make drivers even more erratic as they bob and weave through the hummocks and holes. That occupies more of their attention than the unexpected sight of some bike rider's lights in the dusk. All through the winter I have seen pedestrians in the dusk and darkness, while I was driving, presenting what they think are adequate lights. In every case the display has been more confusing than anything else, even if it was bright. None of them were bright enough to stand out against the glare of oncoming vehicle headlights blasting me at the same time I was trying to keep track of the flickering fireflies of foot traffic.

I know my bike lights are bright enough to gain me a measure of respect on the road, but they're still a lot smaller than car and truck lights, especially some of these new trucks that have four low beams blazing at all times. Whoever is responsible for designing those should be strapped in a chair with his head in a clamp and his eyelids held open with alligator clips, and be forced to stare into that sociopathic wall of light until his eyeballs turn into raisins. Right next to him should be whoever is responsible for the shitty light dispersal pattern of LED headlights in general, staring into a bank of those. They just made a bad situation worse.