[QUOTEFor people who live in the Northern Hemisphere, the change in autumn means more hours of darkness and colder weather,][/QUOTE]
The number of hours of darkness are determined by the sun, not the clock. I think what you mean is that the change means more hours of darkness in the late afternoon when people tend to be out and about and would prefer more daylight.
I think the abrupt change, not only the autumn change but the spring change as well, is what causes people problems. We have been getting used to the shorter days a few minutes at a time as the sun progresses in its yearly rhythm, and then, wham, a whole hour adjustment has to be made.
The other issue for us here in SoWal is the Central Time Zone. In Jacksonville, which is not much different from our latitude here, today's sunrise is 6:45 am and sunset is 5:35 pm. In Austin, also a similar latitude, it's 6:48 am and 5:39 pm. If we were on Eastern time, sunrise today would have been 7:02, and sunset would be at 5:53 pm.
If you look at the US time zone map here and bring the boundary between Eastern and Central time due south from the Indiana/Illionois border, most of Alabama and all of Florida would be in the Eastern time zone. This makes more sense to me.
http://www.timetemperature.com/tzus/time_zone.shtml