I am the US Northeast and the proposal is to move to join the Atlantic standard time and not have DST. Season-wise and Lifestyle-wise, a study concluded that this would be a better fit than the current condition. I’d personally love that.

Seems unlikely to happen. While there are negatives to either changing the time or New England being in Eastern, there are also very big negatives to being in a different time zone from the rest of the East Coast, especially NY and being another hour removed from the West Coast. Large companies will keep de facto operating on ET.

I work for a large company and am in New England. I already regularly meet with colleagues in Europe or Asia, and it can be inconvenient but it's fine. If we were in a different timezone than New York I think people would mostly work around it rather than de facto falling back to New York time.

Given the choice between EST all the time or AST all the time I'd choose the latter, but it's still not ideal b/c it require school-kids to go to school in the dark, which is potentially more dangerous than the problem we're trying to fix. The counter-argument is something like "kids in Alaska do it" but I don't find that super convincing -- they do it b/c they don't really have a choice, doesn't mean it's the right choice for us.

There are certain latitudes where DST makes sense and for the rest of the country it's just an annoyance. It seems like people in the rest of the country don't really understand the benefits or why some people embrace it.

New England is probably one of the extreme cases in the US where you're trying to balance:

- Being in the same time zone as locations, like NYC, that you communicate with and travel back and forth to a lot.

- Not "wasting" (from the perspective of most) summer sunlight at insanely early hours.

- Doing the best balancing act possible with less than ten hours of sunlight in the winter for necessary morning and late afternoon activities.

Go further north and you're pretty much screwed in the winter anyway--it doesn't really make sense for Newfoundland to try to eek out some winter morning sunlight--but in the Boston area you sort of can.

That map is somewhat deceptive as the east coast has such high population density vs the mid west. Further, the bluest areas are in the far north with low population density, less land than it looks like, and extremely long days in the summer and short days in the winter.

Thanks. Finally I have evidence to backup the fact that my hometown's time zone (Rio de Janeiro) actually makes a lot of sense relative to nearly anywhere else I've ever traveled to, including my current city, New York