but why do they take it away from us in winter, when we most need it?
We tried having it in the winter. Miserable PR failure.
During the Carter Administration in response to the oil embargo. If you didn't live through it, ask your family about the gasoline shortages, lines blocks long at the gas pumps, only being allowed to buy gas every other day based on your license plate, gas prices soaring up to and past the $1 mark (big problem for gas stations that still had mechanical pumps*), freeway/interstate speed limits clamped down to "double-nickels" (ie, 55 mph).
So they figured to switch to DST year-round, which only lasted one year (or was that slightly less than a year?). Started on 01 Jan, but I forget whether it went away in a month or two or we went back off it on schedule at the end of October. The main public outcry against it was that it was pitch dark when the children were walking to school.
Don't know whether there was any such outcry during WWII when we were on "War Time", which was DST year-round. The British did the same thing, only in the summer they also added their regular "Summer Time" (their name for DST) on top of their "War Time" and called it "Double Summer Time".
Hey, at least we didn't implement it as originally proposed in the late 1800's. Twenty minutes each week for three weeks.
* Footnote:
In the late 70's, most gas stations had not yet upgraded to the new electronic pumps and the mechanical pumps couldn't handle displaying gas prices over $0.99 (must have been able to set that internally, because some just put a "1" sticker in front of the price). So one enterprising station in the Midwest decided to implement the federal mandate to switch to metric (yeah, we know how far that one got too) and started selling gas by the liter instead of by the gallon. Since a liter is about a quart (4 quarts make a gallon), when they posted their prices in liters customers thought that they were selling gas for a fourth the going price and they flocked to buy up that "cheap" gas.
Edited by dwise1, : No reason given.
Edited by dwise1, : No reason given.
Edited by dwise1, : Argh! It killed my footnote!