Find the Date Your Berlin Ride Home Goes Dark
Pick the time you leave in the morning and the time you ride home, and the board plots Berlin sunrise, sunset and civil twilight for every day from September to March with your two times drawn across it. It marks the day the sun goes, the day the last twilight goes, and how many journeys sit in between.
Sun times calculated for the centre of Berlin and cross-checked against published almanac values, with the 25 October 2026 clock change applied. Twilight here means civil twilight. Gate hours are the published monthly hours for Tempelhofer Feld. Accident counts come from the Berlin police road safety report for 2025.
Berlin sunset moves from 19:55 on 1 September to 18:47 on 30 September, and then the clocks go back on 25 October and remove another hour overnight. That is enough to change a commute twice inside seven weeks, and the date it actually happens depends on the hour you travel rather than on the month. This board plots sunrise, sunset and civil twilight for every day from 1 September to 31 March, draws your own morning and evening times across it, and names the two dates that matter: the day your ride home starts after sunset, which is already the point where German law asks for lights, and the day the last of the twilight is gone. It counts the journeys between those dates and the day the daylight comes back, and it draws the Tempelhofer Feld gate closing times on the same axes, because the Feld shuts at 21:30 in September and at 19:00 from the first day of October. Underneath sits the Berlin police monthly count of road accidents involving cyclists, with September marked, because September is the month that combines summer riding volume with evenings that have already gone.
What the board plots
Every day from 1 September to 31 March on one pair of axes: date across, clock time down. The pale band is daylight, the olive band is civil twilight, and the dark field is night. Your morning and evening times are drawn as two yellow lines, so the point where a line leaves the pale band is the date your journey stops being a daylight journey. The dashed vertical marks 25 October, when the clocks go back and the whole evening edge jumps up by an hour in a single night.
Why twilight is the line that counts
German road traffic law asks for lighting bei Daemmerung, bei Dunkelheit oder wenn die Sichtverhaeltnisse es sonst erfordern, so the obligation starts at twilight rather than at full darkness. That is why the board marks two dates on your evening line and not one: an amber ring where it first falls after sunset, which is where the legal duty begins, and a dark ring where it falls past the end of civil twilight, which is where it stops looking like dusk and starts looking like night.
The gate line
The white dashed step is the closing time at Tempelhofer Feld, which follows the light and changes on the first of each month: 21:30 in September, 19:00 in October, 18:00 in November and 17:00 in December. Where your evening line sits below that step, the crossing is open when you ride. Where it sits above, the gates are already shut and the route has to go round. The step from 30 September to 1 October removes two and a half hours overnight.
What it cannot tell you
It works from the sun, not from the sky, so a heavy grey afternoon in November can put you inside the same legal window hours before the board says sunset. It also uses one set of times for the whole city, which shifts by about a minute between the eastern and western edges. And it says nothing about whether your own lights are approved: that is the wavy line, the letter K and a number stamped on the housing.