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I personally think the way the United States handles time zones is a large part of the problem. I live in Chicago, some of my cousins live in South Bend, IN, an
by Declanomous 10y ago
I personally think the way the United States handles time zones is a large part of the problem. I live in Chicago, some of my cousins live in South Bend, IN, and some live in Niles, MI. For a long time, Indiana didn't observe DST. Michigan was on EST and observed DST. Chicago, of course, is on CST, and observes DST.
It was interesting to take trips and cross between the different systems for time-keeping. For one thing, the sun rises incredibly late on the far Western edge of a time zone, and sets quite late as well. According to this map, while Chicago and NYC experience about 10 days with sunsets after 8:30 pm, the Western edge of Michigan experiences about 130 days where the sun sets after 8:30 PM. On the flip side, Chicago and NYC experience over 100 days with sunrises before 6:00 AM, while Western Michigan does not have a single day with a sunrise before 6:00 AM.
Our current system is a massive improvement over the old system with hundreds or thousands of individual time zones, at least in the sense that scheduling activities between geographically distant areas is much easier. However I think the system is much worse for the life of any given individual. I think it would make far more sense to have a single time zone for the United States, and have individuals choose their schedule based on the time of the year and their local sun.
I have a lot of autonomy in my job, and I have basically been doing this for several years now. I wake up later in the winter, sometimes as late as 7:30 AM. In the summer I wake up with the sunrise and bike to work, leaving my house before 6 AM. Waking up with the sun makes getting up much easier, it reduces my energy usage, and following the schedule of the sun helped my insomnia as well.
I think the idea would be really unpopular in practice, since people are used to the "9-5" mentality, where schedules are set by the clock. A lot of people live far enough South and East in their time zones not to be terribly affected by the shifting time of the sunrise. Furthermore, I can see national companies instituting policies which ignore the benefits of a shifting schedule, forcing their workers on the West Coast and the East Coast to both arrive at the same hour.
- tacostakohashi 10y agoFrankly, I'm beginning to think that the "old system" of per-city solar timezones, defined by the time the sun is directly overhead that city, is actually preferable to the "modern" (post International Meridian Conference of 1884) system of timezones with hourly offsets. With solar time, the timezone, and offset with every other timezone, is fixed. With the timezone system, it became a political decision, subject to constant changes as everybody tries to move into the timezone of their trading partners, or make adjustments for the time of year. Scheduling things between geographically distant areas can, in fact, be really hard with the timezone system - e.g., the offset between New York and London is either 4 or 5 hours, and changes 4 times per year, due to the different DST schedules. Not much fun if you're trying to run, say, an airline offering transatlantic flights + US connections. In the old days, the solar system would have been difficult to work with, if you had to use some hard-copy chart (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/01/Comparative-time-table.jpg/350px-Comparative-time-table.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/01/Co...), and calculate things manually. These days, it would be trivial to build the functionality into devices, watches, apps, etc, on the basis of an exhaustive, static database, instead of the timezone database which needs frantic updates due to political changes.
- upofadown 10y agoAt this point I would go so far as to say that the time zone system is an archaic hack. If we want to do things with respect to sunrise and/or sunset we can just do that and use UTC for everything else. Note that solar time can be determined with a small algorithm based on latitude and longitude that can fit in small embedded devices. The only remaining question is; what location should be used?
- maxerickson 10y agoAn easy way to consider the combined effect of the timezone and DST is that solar noon for the western edge of the Eastern timezone is ~1:50 right now. I think the (utter non) popularity of UTC for setting meeting times sort of points to people not being ready to switch to a single zone (they have had access to the convenience for decades).