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Map of Proposed US Time Zone Changes

167 points by synack 7y ago

moonka 7y ago
Interesting that so much of the country seems dissatisfied with their current time zone. Being in WA, I'm certainly hoping that it moves forward for us.
- aiiane 7y ago
  The linked page is a bit misleading, because it's not necessarily so much that people are dissatisfied with their current time zone as they are dissatisfied with it changing for half the year. The linked page portrays it as e.g. CA moving to "MST" but that doesn't actually accurately represent what's proposed, because the lack of a DST switch is meaningfully different from just moving to the same timezone as current Mountain time states.
  - rrix2 7y ago
    MST is Mountain Standard Time is UTC-7. California wants to change their clocks such that their time is PDT, which is Pacific Daylight Time which is UTC-7. Rather than have different colors for daylight times versus standard times, they're effectively colored by UTC offset. This does not seem misleading to me. The page is trying to provide a visual for how "off" our maps and tzdata are going to be if laws like these pass without a unified vision of the move. What sort of reasonable thing is California and western Kansas being in the same time zone but not Utah? EDIT: And after all that, there will still be states that will observe daylight savings time.
    - aiiane 7y ago
      It would be more accurate if the left hand map had 2-color stripes to indicate both the summer offset and the winter offset, e.g. if CA were striped blue and red on the left, and solid red on the right.
  - jml7c5 7y ago
    Is there any difference between saying "PDT all year round" and "MST"? Though I do agree that the graphic could be better, as the important information is really just: will the winter time move/not move 1 hour, and will the state observe/not observe daylight savings time. They need to add crosshatching or similar to indicate the latter info.
    - bsder 7y ago
      Yes, a legal one. Current federal law does not allow you to stay on "Daylight" time year round while you can stay on "Standard" year round.
- jcranmer 7y ago
  The colors are really hard to understand. Essentially, gray means "would stay on daylight savings time," i.e., follow the time to their left in winter and to their right in summer. The colors mean "would stay on this time year-round." So if a state changes color, it means "drop DST and use summer time", and if it stays the same, it means "drop DST and use winter time." The states that would stay on winter time are ID, AZ, CO, NM, ND, KS, OK, HI, AK, IL, MI, OH, NY, PA. The states that would stay on summer time are WA, OR, CA, MT, WY, UT, MN, IA, MO, AR, TN, MS, AL, FL, SC, NC, WV, DE, CT, RI, VT, NH, MA, ME, DC. Some are undecided as what to do (i.e., GA, TX and VA), while IN proposes to move to the Central Time winter time rather than stay in either Eastern summer or winter time.
  - lscotte 7y ago
    Except that AZ is gray in the right graph and we already do MST year round with no plans to change. And then Nevada is listed as N/A for proposed time zone which makes no sense. So, yes it is confusing, and a bit incomplete - thanks for your efforts to decode it!
  - chrismcb 7y ago
    I don't know what gray means, undecided maybe. It certainly doesn't mean stay on dst. Texas is saying no more dst, but unsure of which time to stay on. Same with GA.
- Gene_Parmesan 7y ago
  My time zone's fine (EST), I just hate having the clocks shift so the sun is setting at like 4:20 pm during the winter. Leave it the way it is the rest of the year and help out my seasonal depression!
- snarf21 7y ago
  As someone else said, everyone is kinda okay with their time zone but hate changing twice a year. If they get to pick from the two, they'd rather have more "time" and sun after work than before it.
leemailll 7y ago
this will make travel for long-distance extremely painful
new_realist 7y ago
In the age of smart phones and smart watches, we have the ability to define two dimensional time zones and skew the time each night by a minute or so, in order to achieve the ultimate goal: the sun always rising at a constant time (e.g. seven a.m.). That is how we evolved to live: human time, optimized for our circadian rhythms.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > in order to achieve the ultimate goal: the sun always rising at seven a.m. That is how we evolved to live: human time. What's so magic about seven?
  - new_realist 7y ago
    Seven is arbitrary. The point is that the dawn is always at a fixed time of day, which allows human activity to be synchronized to daylight: just as humans and proto-humans had lived for half a million years.
    - chrisseaton 7y ago
      > Seven is arbitrary. So, not the 'ultimate goal' at all then?
      - DJBunnies 7y ago
        It was an example.
      - p1necone 7y ago
        You're being needlessly pedantic. I'm sure you can understand what new_realist is saying.
        chrisseaton 7y ago
        They literally said 'the ultimate goal: the sun always rising at seven a.m' giving a precise specific time! I thought since they highlighted that exact time as as being the 'ultimate goal' is was important to what they were saying!
doorty 7y ago
Tldr; Allows California to set the standard time to year-round daylight saving time if federal law authorizes the state to do so. Move from current PT (pacific time zone) to MT (mountain time zone) year-round
halfway 7y ago
Perhaps missing something obvious, but what's the advantage of having time zones over everyone using UTC/GMT?
- sithadmin 7y ago
  Predictability for travellers. It's helpful that no matter where you are, one has a relatively stable point of temporal reference to sunrise and sunset.
  - mimixco 7y ago
    This map throws predictably out the window, rather violently.
    - pfranz 7y ago
      Most of these states are motivated by ridding themselves of DST. Shifting time zones is just a byproduct here. The benefit of time zones (that roughy correlate to local solar time) is that I can get a good idea about their day without any other info; (1am they're probably sleeping, 12pm they're probably at work but might take lunch). If I need to convert between time zones I use my handy lookup table that any computer/phone or back of the envelope math can do. If I want to have a meeting at 1pm in some new fancy Internet Time I have to do some gymnastics to figure out if my friends in India are even awake, let alone working. If I'm flying to Japan and my flight lands at 6am Internet time--should I find my hotel to sleep or go watch the sun rise?
- aasasd 7y ago
  As an example: I got up at 1 am today. I bet you're able to understand that time point without me supplying the location. Weirdly enough, this advantage is more pronounced in the age of globalization.
- mimixco 7y ago
  Because it's weird for planning purposes. I'd be eating breakfast in a "morning" hour in one country while someone else eats breakfast at a "night" hour somewhere else. Just kinda goes against the grain.
fencepost 7y ago
The map visualization is pretty terrible, since the color codings between the maps have different meanings - the first map shows what time zone states are in, the second map shows what time zones states will be in if they're changing. Having the second map show what the actual proposed final time zone layouts would be would be much more useful. It is interesting that Montana, Wyoming and Utah are (considering?) jumping onto Central, with most other western states moving to Mountain (except Nevada, which likely won't last long), but it's not clear from the map or descriptions if they're jumping to CST or CSTCDT.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- mimixco 7y ago
  Agreed! And if the time zone borders are literally all over the map like this, who will be able to keep track of what time it is where?
  - fouronnes3 7y ago
    tz maintainers
  - tantalor 7y ago
    https://www.iana.org/time-zones https://www.iana.org/time-zones
- BorisMelnik 7y ago
  I really tried to remain objective and open minded, but this is pretty bad. Not that this matters, but it also doesn't "match" the rest of the world, wich pretty much have (somewhat) straight lines running down the center of the globe.
  - test6554 7y ago
    We are going to need computers to tell us what time it is and to remind us when a specific time arrives.
quickthrower2 7y ago
Remember if you store local date times in your DB it may be hard or impossible to get back the UTC later.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- koliber 7y ago
  It should be possible in most practical situations. This is assuming you are storing the timezone correctly. You can always look at the date component of the timezone, look it up in a DB like the Olson DB to see what the UTC offset was on that date, and then apply that offset to get the datetime in UTC. There are a few relatively small periods in time when that mapping is not one-to-one. Then it is not possible without additional information. That being said, do everyone a solid and store your date times in the DB in UTC, in a field type that explicitly supports date times with timezones.
  - jsjohnst 7y ago
    > field type that explicitly supports date times with timezones So as a string then in MySQL? ;)
- gpvos 7y ago
  You should store local date-times. But also the timezone name (not just the time offset!). Unless you are logging, then you can store UTC.
- jrockway 7y ago
  UTC is not a good format for storage either. It has leap seconds, resulting in some seconds that happen twice or some seconds that happen never; you can't just subtract two times from each other and get the duration, for example. Use TAI.
DoreenMichele 7y ago
A little history: Clocks used to be on local time. You typically had a town clock tower and noon was when the sun was overhead. Then we invented trains. We introduced standard time zones so you figure out when the train would be at the station. I'm not a fan of daylight savings time, but this proposed patchwork is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
- noobiemcfoob 7y ago
  Then we invented everything else and along with that UTC. Which works until we have colonies on another planet. We should go ahead and move to a galactic time standard.
  - imoverclocked 7y ago
    We already have Mars time which is based on Mars Sols. Once we get to the point that we have to worry about galactic time, society will (hopefully) have a better understanding of relativity and how time isn't really linear anyway. Also, at the point that we have scheduling issues between planets, we'll have some pretty crazy infrastructure in place! By then, we should have figured out that timezones are pretty silly inventions to keep bringing forward. It would be really cool if we could just skip to that step.
  - snarf21 7y ago
    We just need to bite the bullet and move everything to UTC. In the short term, just post both EDT (e.g.) and UTC on websites and signs and then eventually drop UTC. The math of knowing what time to call your uncle halfway around the world doesn't change, you still know their normal day runs at an X hour offset.
    - DoreenMichele 7y ago
      Knowing when to call a relative involves more than knowing their time zone. It also involves knowing a bunch of other details about their life, like their work schedule, if they have the kind of job where it is okay to call them at work if you keep it brief (eg overnight security guard who walks around once an hour and otherwise watches video feeds from cameras), whether they are a morning person or a night person, what non work activities they regularly attend (church, hobbies) and when they attend them, etc. In practice, if you keep in touch on a regular basis, you don't actually need to remember their time zone at all. You can remember the correct time to call in relation to your own schedule: "Got to call Grandma as soon as I get home from work. If I wait until after I eat dinner, she will be asleep." In actual practice, that's how most people seem to handle long distance relationships where they keep in touch regularly. (Or maybe that's just me.) Plus, it's the relatively rare Luddite that you can only contact by phone these days. A lot of people keep in touch with long distance relatives via email, Facebook or text messages, all of which allow you to send the message whenever you feel like it without worrying if the other party is currently available for live interaction. If you can contact them via such a method, you can arrange an appointment for a live discussion by asking them when they would be available for such.
sys_64738 7y ago
It seems New England is the group of state the furthest east that would benefit from Atlantic Time. But why would VW and FL move? It seems like there's no value there, or am I missing something?
- mimixco 7y ago
  It's not really moving so much as staying on daylight savings year round. "AST" is another way of saying EDT.
tedunangst 7y ago
Using gray to indicate no change makes the second map practically impossible to interpret.
- mimixco 7y ago
  The coloring is bad, but I think grey means "don't know yet." See Texas.
  - tedunangst 7y ago
    Ugh, yeah, just saw that. That's even worse?
    - mimixco 7y ago
      Airline scheduling will be as depressing as dentistry, lol.
- deathanatos 7y ago
  I attempted to fill in the areas not making any changes with their original zone: https://i.imgur.com/ZJZwc46.png https://i.imgur.com/ZJZwc46.png (I also made Eastern hues of purple, to clearly show they're separate. Same w/ HI/AK.) Note El Paso becomes an isolated area of what was once America/Denver (Mountain Time), but would probably become America/El_Paso. I have no idea what is going on in Oklahoma in this map, and I didn't bother to change it. I honestly can't imagine that this would last very long; the remnants of ye olde America/Chicago (which is gone, in the new) would probably join America/Salt_Lake? (at which point it becomes America/Houston?) if you're SD/NE/TX/LA. If you're KY/WI, I'd say join America/New_York and let IL/IN feel like timezone weirdos, except IN is probably used to it[1]. America/Lewiston should just rock its new place of power. Seriously people, this is why we can't have nice things. DST was a decent compromise. I for one also don't want to do DST time year round, as one will basically not see sunrise in the winter. Noon should be at noon, modulo reasonable inaccuracies due to the need to have timezones, but this being essentially a zone off bugs the purist in me. But I also kinda like leap seconds, so I'm probably a weirdo. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Indiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Indiana
vermontdevil 7y ago
Indiana needs to be in Central. It’s bloody dark here in the morning because we are the same time zone as NYC etc. not to mention it’s bright till almost 10pm!
Waterluvian 7y ago
The geographer in me has a power fantasy where I draw vertical swaths and each state gets the time zone their centroid lands in. And no more daylight saving time. Elect me as dictator and I'll solve the important problems.
- Klathmon 7y ago
  The insane software developer in me wants to just smear the time across the US uniformly and do away with timezones all together. The New Year's Eve celebration would be a wave of cheering across the US!
  - Waterluvian 7y ago
    No smearing. Just a single time worldwide. Let society adapt. I mean it's all just semantics. Maybe you wake up at 11pm and go to bed at 3pm. Big deal!
    - Klathmon 7y ago
      Where's the fun in that!? I want to watch the software world burn while I demand that the wall clock on my phone shall start going backwards once I go west faster than ~1000mph.
      - sk5t 7y ago
        Or, head to one of the poles, and amble slowly about for the same effect. No need to go supersonic at the equator.
      - toper-centage 7y ago
        No. Deprecate hours and minutes altogether, change to Greewitch Meridian degrees and minutes. This will help with leaving the old system and makes more sense semantically, even though it's essentially an equivalent system. - What time is it now? - It's 258 degrees and 15 minutes. (5:18pm)
ulkesh 7y ago
I know my opinion is unpopular, but I sure would love it if the world would simply rid itself of timezones and stick to a singular time. Does it _really_ matter if it's broad daylight at 0200 Earth Standard Time? Circadian rhythms aren't affected if people still go to sleep at night and wake up at day. It standardizes time relativity on a single scale. And it saves us software engineers a lot of headache.
- telaelit 7y ago
  I 100% agree.
- riantogo 7y ago
  I think Timex or some other company attempted this. Was it Internet time?
  - synack 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
- gpm 7y ago
  China sort of does this, with one timezone that spans 5 geographically correct time zones.
- pfranz 7y ago
  This link often gets posted to rebut proposals to abolish time zones: https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
  - david_ar 7y ago
    > Do normal humans publish "waking hours"? Not typically. It would kind of be great if they did though, it's not necessarily the same for everyone in the same geographic location.
    - 7y ago
tedunangst 7y ago
I hope the DC, and only the DC, change to Atlantic time goes through for maximum hilarity.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
thameera 7y ago
Coming from a different part of the world, this proposed change was news to me. Does anyone have a link to the actual proposal and reasoning?
- macintux 7y ago
  Every change is independent. Each state makes its own rules (well, has the freedom to decide what it wants, although there is apparently some federal oversight).
  - mbreese 7y ago
    The only thing the state has control over is if it observes daylight savings time. Changing to a different time zone requires the Dept. of Transportation to approve of the change. This is one of the things that makes this so complicated... most of the bills are “asking” the state government to petition the federal government to make a change. And it isn’t guaranteed that the DOT will approve the switch. Even more complicated... the state can only control whether or not to observe DST. It can’t control the start/stop of DST, so if California wants to always be at UTC-7 (the current PDT), it couldn’t just decide to always be in PDT. It would need to petition the DOT to be moved to MST and then to not observe DST. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_the_...
    - gpvos 7y ago
      Good that there is some central control, because if this all passed it would become a righteous mess.
- mac01021 7y ago
  People are sick of changing their clocks by an hour twice a year as "daylight saving time" starts and ends. So there are many proposals to settle on permanent summer time or permanent winter time.
Urgo 7y ago
Random thought after reading all the comments about abolishing all time zones and switching to UTC only. The biggest complaint people would have is they wouldn't know what time morning was for example. Morning would be 7am somewhere but 7pm somewhere else. But we already have the same type of situation with the seasons anyway. It's summer in the northern hemisphere while its winter in the southern. We should have month zones if we wanted to operate the same way. So with that being said, I've always been a supporter of switching to DST only and this proposal actually does push my state that way, but I think I actually could support UTC only as well.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
abc617 7y ago
All these separate proposals are a logical nightmare for truckers and people who have to cross state lines. I've heard this proposal before, but seems way simpler: 1) Abolish daylight savings and the 1 hour change and keep things the way they are. So technically daylight savings is right now (from March-Oct). Just keep it as it is this very second 2) Merge the Pacific time zone with Mountain time zone. That way in the continental US we have 3 time zone: Eastern, Central, and Mountain But I can't find the exact resource I got this idea from, but I think this would minimize the headaches and gripes people have.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  The continental US is actually wide enough across to necessitate five time zones. The four we have now aren't good enough. Cutting down to three as you suggest would exacerbate the problem.
  - souterrain 7y ago
    Well, barely though. Only a tiny fragment of Maine would be in AST using standard 15° wide time zones, the boundary being 67.5° W.
    - CydeWeys 7y ago
      The overall point is that if 4 isn't quite enough, then 3 is definitely way too few.
imoverclocked 7y ago
Why do we even have time zones? DST is a seriously broken concept but timezones on their own are almost as bad. The worst part is that people don't really understand how much simpler the world would be without timezones altogether. Just use UTC or anything consistent across the board. The disjointness of the proposed zones on this map proves the point that the offsets are arbitrary. Why not lead internationally by example by uniformly adopting a modern clock everywhere. Let's standardize time for the whole country.
- ycombobreaker 7y ago
  It's not other people failing to understand. We just disagree. A world without timezones would not be simpler, it would just shift complexity around. Beyond that, it is tilting at windmills to suggest this sort of international coordination. Theres no need for international "leadership" or guesswork here. China has already adopted a single clock for the whole nation. Maybe somebody living there can advise how a nation with such a wide longitudinal spread operates with a single time reference.
  - imoverclocked 7y ago
    Can you be specific about what would be more complex without timezones?
    - ycombobreaker 7y ago
      sorry for the the delayed response, but people will always have a need to communicate in terms at least approximating local solar time (e.g. dawn/noon/dusk). right now everyone can use "time" for that. force everyone to a global reference clock and they will just have to make up some new, local, nonstandard concepts and terms to reflect what was once just "time".
tricolon 7y ago
What I can't get over is how Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, and Arkansas would be ahead of Illinois. That's just confusing.
- strange_quark 7y ago
  This map is wrong. Illinois is considering staying on DST year-round. http://ilga.gov/legislation/fulltext.asp?DocName=10100SB0533sam001&GA=101&SessionId=108&DocTypeId=SB&LegID=116470&DocNum=0533&GAID=15&Session= http://ilga.gov/legislation/fulltext.asp?DocName=10100SB0533...
chirau 7y ago
You seriously could not find a color to separate the East and West Coast? DOA for me. Confusing, especially since these are the hubs of most activity. Now you diagram just makes it seem like they are in the same time zone. Sorry, nice try, but it is a no for me.
bgdnyxbjx 7y ago
This is pretty dumb. In what world should Boston and New York City be in different time zones? And Long Island in a different time zone than Connecticut.
Taniwha 7y ago
The people who manage TV scheduling, especially from satellites are royally screwed, I wonder if there are enough spare transponders to double up where required
- Izkata 7y ago
  And 10 years later, people ad-hoc invent a solution to the time zone problem: "Let's meet at 3pm Comedy Central time." "Wait, I usually use Discovery Channel time, when is that?"
  - Taniwha 7y ago
    there's all sorts of cultural stuff here - 'prime-time' on the broadcast networks has traditionally been off by one hour from the coasts (local time) - presumably originally to reduce the satellite demands when broadcasts first went national
Kyragem 7y ago
95% of Nevada’s population lives 30 minutes from the California border where it would be one hour later. Super impractical
gpvos 7y ago
It's fascinating to see that almost everyone wants to move a zone eastward (except Indiana, apparently the state with the smartest people). This is similar to many of the original recent proposals for abolishing the twice-yearly time change in Europe, where many countries wanted to stay with summer time instead of going to permanent standard (or "winter") time. For most countries, this would be bad, especially in winter, when children would have to go to school in total darkness. Luckily in several European countries there is some grass-roots activism now to move to standard time instead. (In fact, I and many others think that France, the Benelux and certainly Spain should move a time zone westward, and move to permanent standard time.) Russia moved to permanent summer time a few years ago, but it was a disaster and they moved to permanent standard time a few years later.
- RankingMember 7y ago
  > For most countries, this would be bad, especially in winter, when children would have to go to school in total darkness. School start times themselves can (and possibly should) change to be later anyways. https://www.cdc.gov/features/school-start-times/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/features/school-start-times/index.html I personally much prefer sticking with summer time, as I like getting out of work and still having some time to do things in the light during the winter months.
  - rootbear 7y ago
    If school start times can change, so can work hours. If one has the flexibility, one can go into work early and leave early when it's still light outside. Employers should be encouraged to allow this.
    - gpvos 7y ago
      The entire reason why we have twice-yearly time changes is that it is apparently harder to change school and work times.
      - burfog 7y ago
gumby 7y ago
Why should the federal government regulate time zones? Why shouldn’t states do as they will (as Arizona and even more extremely Indiana do)? Some states, or portions of states, could go on 1/2 hour offsets if they are too far from local noon (as other TZs do). We all walk around with computers in our pockets that can manage it. I can see there might have been a justification back when computation was difficult and the government felt it had a stake in trains being built, but nowadays those factors no longer apply.
- nemothekid 7y ago
  >We all walk around with computers in our pockets that can manage it. The computers in our pockets can barely manage the timezone mess today.
- ptah 7y ago
  timezones are a pain in the ass for computers
  - gumby 7y ago
    You mean for computer programmers but that's no excuse: our machines are there to make life easier for users, not the other way around. I still think Spain made a mistake when they changed their alphabet in the 1990s to make life easier for computer programmers. This is really no different.
    - ptah 7y ago
      making things easier for programmers can make most things cheaper for everyone else
- 0x5002 7y ago
  Purely from a technical perspective and ignoring the political implications, I don't think that phones are helping all that much. I travel quite frequently and work with a lot of people across the US (as well as Europe and India), who also travel frequently. I keep tab of who is - or might be - where on any given day, simply to be able to coordinate schedules and not call folks who are in PST at 6am by accident (or have people call me at 9pm). A system for messengers (Skype, Slack, Teams, Text ...) where people could share their current time zone would make my life so much easier sometimes.
S_A_P 7y ago
hoping the TX bill passes. I hate having jet lag every spring for a week.
icedchai 7y ago
Some of this looks nonsensical. For example, Illinois. Do these states even talk to each other?
devy 7y ago
I obviously didn't get the memo, neither did the proposed time zone map mention about the reasons for changes. So here is the big question: why each state are proposing their own time zone now? The proposed changes look like a mess to be honest.
- knz 7y ago
  Many States (or at least some legislators in those states) are pushing for permanent DST because of the perceived benefits. I live in the north and the concern about DST always makes me laugh - the relationship between the time and diurnal patterns is meaningless up here for at least a third of the year.
  - MuffinFlavored 7y ago
    What are the perceived benefits?
    - knz 7y ago
      People usually cite benefits to farmers, energy savings, declining crime/traffic accidents, happiness due to more sunlight etc. The first Google result for me implies that these are largely myths (https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/03/05/the-5-reasons-to-keep-daylight-saving-time-have-no-science-to-back-them-up/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/03/05/the-...).
      - HelloMcFly 7y ago
        The only reason I've heard anyone in reality desire it is for when the sun is present i.e. later in the day. It's why I prefer DST of standard time as a permanent thing. More sunlight in the evening, that's all there is to it for me. But I'd rather standard time with no DST than the switching we do today.
      - amanaplanacanal 7y ago
        Another data point: Later sunsets lead to lost productivity, more obesity, more diabetes, and more breast cancer. Probably due to fewer hours of sleep. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/04/19/how-living-wrong-side-time-zone-can-be-hazardous-your-health/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.14e8f21f9d50 https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/04/19/how-livin...
SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
Not only is this patchwork idea dumb, but many of these have already failed in their legislative sessions.
thetimbanks 7y ago
This would be a disaster for people living in Kansas City. There is so much cross state commuting going on that I wouldn't think this would ever pass.
fredgrott 7y ago
Good..Indiana and IL finally on one time zone..yeah!
todd8 7y ago
I think we should try something simpler first, get rid of daylight savings time.
- magduf 7y ago
  That's exactly what this is all about. Many states want to have "permanent Daylight Saving", which is the same thing as just jumping to the next timezone to the east, and no longer observing DST.

167 points by synack 7y ago

Interesting that so much of the country seems dissatisfied with their current time zone. Being in WA, I'm certainly hoping that it moves forward for us.

aiiane 7y ago
The linked page is a bit misleading, because it's not necessarily so much that people are dissatisfied with their current time zone as they are dissatisfied with it changing for half the year. The linked page portrays it as e.g. CA moving to "MST" but that doesn't actually accurately represent what's proposed, because the lack of a DST switch is meaningfully different from just moving to the same timezone as current Mountain time states.
- rrix2 7y ago
  MST is Mountain Standard Time is UTC-7. California wants to change their clocks such that their time is PDT, which is Pacific Daylight Time which is UTC-7. Rather than have different colors for daylight times versus standard times, they're effectively colored by UTC offset. This does not seem misleading to me. The page is trying to provide a visual for how "off" our maps and tzdata are going to be if laws like these pass without a unified vision of the move. What sort of reasonable thing is California and western Kansas being in the same time zone but not Utah? EDIT: And after all that, there will still be states that will observe daylight savings time.
  - aiiane 7y ago
    It would be more accurate if the left hand map had 2-color stripes to indicate both the summer offset and the winter offset, e.g. if CA were striped blue and red on the left, and solid red on the right.
- jml7c5 7y ago
  Is there any difference between saying "PDT all year round" and "MST"? Though I do agree that the graphic could be better, as the important information is really just: will the winter time move/not move 1 hour, and will the state observe/not observe daylight savings time. They need to add crosshatching or similar to indicate the latter info.
  - bsder 7y ago
    Yes, a legal one. Current federal law does not allow you to stay on "Daylight" time year round while you can stay on "Standard" year round.
jcranmer 7y ago
The colors are really hard to understand. Essentially, gray means "would stay on daylight savings time," i.e., follow the time to their left in winter and to their right in summer. The colors mean "would stay on this time year-round." So if a state changes color, it means "drop DST and use summer time", and if it stays the same, it means "drop DST and use winter time." The states that would stay on winter time are ID, AZ, CO, NM, ND, KS, OK, HI, AK, IL, MI, OH, NY, PA. The states that would stay on summer time are WA, OR, CA, MT, WY, UT, MN, IA, MO, AR, TN, MS, AL, FL, SC, NC, WV, DE, CT, RI, VT, NH, MA, ME, DC. Some are undecided as what to do (i.e., GA, TX and VA), while IN proposes to move to the Central Time winter time rather than stay in either Eastern summer or winter time.
- lscotte 7y ago
  Except that AZ is gray in the right graph and we already do MST year round with no plans to change. And then Nevada is listed as N/A for proposed time zone which makes no sense. So, yes it is confusing, and a bit incomplete - thanks for your efforts to decode it!
- chrismcb 7y ago
  I don't know what gray means, undecided maybe. It certainly doesn't mean stay on dst. Texas is saying no more dst, but unsure of which time to stay on. Same with GA.
Gene_Parmesan 7y ago
My time zone's fine (EST), I just hate having the clocks shift so the sun is setting at like 4:20 pm during the winter. Leave it the way it is the rest of the year and help out my seasonal depression!
snarf21 7y ago
As someone else said, everyone is kinda okay with their time zone but hate changing twice a year. If they get to pick from the two, they'd rather have more "time" and sun after work than before it.

leemailll 7y ago

this will make travel for long-distance extremely painful

new_realist 7y ago

In the age of smart phones and smart watches, we have the ability to define two dimensional time zones and skew the time each night by a minute or so, in order to achieve the ultimate goal: the sun always rising at a constant time (e.g. seven a.m.). That is how we evolved to live: human time, optimized for our circadian rhythms.

chrisseaton 7y ago
> in order to achieve the ultimate goal: the sun always rising at seven a.m. That is how we evolved to live: human time. What's so magic about seven?
- new_realist 7y ago
  Seven is arbitrary. The point is that the dawn is always at a fixed time of day, which allows human activity to be synchronized to daylight: just as humans and proto-humans had lived for half a million years.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    > Seven is arbitrary. So, not the 'ultimate goal' at all then?
    - DJBunnies 7y ago
      It was an example.
    - p1necone 7y ago
      You're being needlessly pedantic. I'm sure you can understand what new_realist is saying.
      - chrisseaton 7y ago
        They literally said 'the ultimate goal: the sun always rising at seven a.m' giving a precise specific time! I thought since they highlighted that exact time as as being the 'ultimate goal' is was important to what they were saying!

doorty 7y ago

Tldr; Allows California to set the standard time to year-round daylight saving time if federal law authorizes the state to do so. Move from current PT (pacific time zone) to MT (mountain time zone) year-round

halfway 7y ago

Perhaps missing something obvious, but what's the advantage of having time zones over everyone using UTC/GMT?

sithadmin 7y ago
Predictability for travellers. It's helpful that no matter where you are, one has a relatively stable point of temporal reference to sunrise and sunset.
- mimixco 7y ago
  This map throws predictably out the window, rather violently.
  - pfranz 7y ago
    Most of these states are motivated by ridding themselves of DST. Shifting time zones is just a byproduct here. The benefit of time zones (that roughy correlate to local solar time) is that I can get a good idea about their day without any other info; (1am they're probably sleeping, 12pm they're probably at work but might take lunch). If I need to convert between time zones I use my handy lookup table that any computer/phone or back of the envelope math can do. If I want to have a meeting at 1pm in some new fancy Internet Time I have to do some gymnastics to figure out if my friends in India are even awake, let alone working. If I'm flying to Japan and my flight lands at 6am Internet time--should I find my hotel to sleep or go watch the sun rise?
aasasd 7y ago
As an example: I got up at 1 am today. I bet you're able to understand that time point without me supplying the location. Weirdly enough, this advantage is more pronounced in the age of globalization.
mimixco 7y ago
Because it's weird for planning purposes. I'd be eating breakfast in a "morning" hour in one country while someone else eats breakfast at a "night" hour somewhere else. Just kinda goes against the grain.

fencepost 7y ago

The map visualization is pretty terrible, since the color codings between the maps have different meanings - the first map shows what time zone states are in, the second map shows what time zones states will be in if they're changing. Having the second map show what the actual proposed final time zone layouts would be would be much more useful. It is interesting that Montana, Wyoming and Utah are (considering?) jumping onto Central, with most other western states moving to Mountain (except Nevada, which likely won't last long), but it's not clear from the map or descriptions if they're jumping to CST or CSTCDT.

deleted 7y ago
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mimixco 7y ago
Agreed! And if the time zone borders are literally all over the map like this, who will be able to keep track of what time it is where?
- fouronnes3 7y ago
  tz maintainers
- tantalor 7y ago
  https://www.iana.org/time-zones https://www.iana.org/time-zones
BorisMelnik 7y ago
I really tried to remain objective and open minded, but this is pretty bad. Not that this matters, but it also doesn't "match" the rest of the world, wich pretty much have (somewhat) straight lines running down the center of the globe.
- test6554 7y ago
  We are going to need computers to tell us what time it is and to remind us when a specific time arrives.

quickthrower2 7y ago

Remember if you store local date times in your DB it may be hard or impossible to get back the UTC later.

deleted 7y ago
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koliber 7y ago
It should be possible in most practical situations. This is assuming you are storing the timezone correctly. You can always look at the date component of the timezone, look it up in a DB like the Olson DB to see what the UTC offset was on that date, and then apply that offset to get the datetime in UTC. There are a few relatively small periods in time when that mapping is not one-to-one. Then it is not possible without additional information. That being said, do everyone a solid and store your date times in the DB in UTC, in a field type that explicitly supports date times with timezones.
- jsjohnst 7y ago
  > field type that explicitly supports date times with timezones So as a string then in MySQL? ;)
gpvos 7y ago
You should store local date-times. But also the timezone name (not just the time offset!). Unless you are logging, then you can store UTC.
jrockway 7y ago
UTC is not a good format for storage either. It has leap seconds, resulting in some seconds that happen twice or some seconds that happen never; you can't just subtract two times from each other and get the duration, for example. Use TAI.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

A little history: Clocks used to be on local time. You typically had a town clock tower and noon was when the sun was overhead. Then we invented trains. We introduced standard time zones so you figure out when the train would be at the station. I'm not a fan of daylight savings time, but this proposed patchwork is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

noobiemcfoob 7y ago
Then we invented everything else and along with that UTC. Which works until we have colonies on another planet. We should go ahead and move to a galactic time standard.
- imoverclocked 7y ago
  We already have Mars time which is based on Mars Sols. Once we get to the point that we have to worry about galactic time, society will (hopefully) have a better understanding of relativity and how time isn't really linear anyway. Also, at the point that we have scheduling issues between planets, we'll have some pretty crazy infrastructure in place! By then, we should have figured out that timezones are pretty silly inventions to keep bringing forward. It would be really cool if we could just skip to that step.
- snarf21 7y ago
  We just need to bite the bullet and move everything to UTC. In the short term, just post both EDT (e.g.) and UTC on websites and signs and then eventually drop UTC. The math of knowing what time to call your uncle halfway around the world doesn't change, you still know their normal day runs at an X hour offset.
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    Knowing when to call a relative involves more than knowing their time zone. It also involves knowing a bunch of other details about their life, like their work schedule, if they have the kind of job where it is okay to call them at work if you keep it brief (eg overnight security guard who walks around once an hour and otherwise watches video feeds from cameras), whether they are a morning person or a night person, what non work activities they regularly attend (church, hobbies) and when they attend them, etc. In practice, if you keep in touch on a regular basis, you don't actually need to remember their time zone at all. You can remember the correct time to call in relation to your own schedule: "Got to call Grandma as soon as I get home from work. If I wait until after I eat dinner, she will be asleep." In actual practice, that's how most people seem to handle long distance relationships where they keep in touch regularly. (Or maybe that's just me.) Plus, it's the relatively rare Luddite that you can only contact by phone these days. A lot of people keep in touch with long distance relatives via email, Facebook or text messages, all of which allow you to send the message whenever you feel like it without worrying if the other party is currently available for live interaction. If you can contact them via such a method, you can arrange an appointment for a live discussion by asking them when they would be available for such.

sys_64738 7y ago

It seems New England is the group of state the furthest east that would benefit from Atlantic Time. But why would VW and FL move? It seems like there's no value there, or am I missing something?

mimixco 7y ago
It's not really moving so much as staying on daylight savings year round. "AST" is another way of saying EDT.

tedunangst 7y ago

Using gray to indicate no change makes the second map practically impossible to interpret.

mimixco 7y ago
The coloring is bad, but I think grey means "don't know yet." See Texas.
- tedunangst 7y ago
  Ugh, yeah, just saw that. That's even worse?
  - mimixco 7y ago
    Airline scheduling will be as depressing as dentistry, lol.
deathanatos 7y ago
I attempted to fill in the areas not making any changes with their original zone: https://i.imgur.com/ZJZwc46.png https://i.imgur.com/ZJZwc46.png (I also made Eastern hues of purple, to clearly show they're separate. Same w/ HI/AK.) Note El Paso becomes an isolated area of what was once America/Denver (Mountain Time), but would probably become America/El_Paso. I have no idea what is going on in Oklahoma in this map, and I didn't bother to change it. I honestly can't imagine that this would last very long; the remnants of ye olde America/Chicago (which is gone, in the new) would probably join America/Salt_Lake? (at which point it becomes America/Houston?) if you're SD/NE/TX/LA. If you're KY/WI, I'd say join America/New_York and let IL/IN feel like timezone weirdos, except IN is probably used to it[1]. America/Lewiston should just rock its new place of power. Seriously people, this is why we can't have nice things. DST was a decent compromise. I for one also don't want to do DST time year round, as one will basically not see sunrise in the winter. Noon should be at noon, modulo reasonable inaccuracies due to the need to have timezones, but this being essentially a zone off bugs the purist in me. But I also kinda like leap seconds, so I'm probably a weirdo. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Indiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Indiana

vermontdevil 7y ago

Indiana needs to be in Central. It’s bloody dark here in the morning because we are the same time zone as NYC etc. not to mention it’s bright till almost 10pm!

Waterluvian 7y ago

The geographer in me has a power fantasy where I draw vertical swaths and each state gets the time zone their centroid lands in. And no more daylight saving time. Elect me as dictator and I'll solve the important problems.

Klathmon 7y ago
The insane software developer in me wants to just smear the time across the US uniformly and do away with timezones all together. The New Year's Eve celebration would be a wave of cheering across the US!
- Waterluvian 7y ago
  No smearing. Just a single time worldwide. Let society adapt. I mean it's all just semantics. Maybe you wake up at 11pm and go to bed at 3pm. Big deal!
  - Klathmon 7y ago
    Where's the fun in that!? I want to watch the software world burn while I demand that the wall clock on my phone shall start going backwards once I go west faster than ~1000mph.
    - sk5t 7y ago
      Or, head to one of the poles, and amble slowly about for the same effect. No need to go supersonic at the equator.
    - toper-centage 7y ago
      No. Deprecate hours and minutes altogether, change to Greewitch Meridian degrees and minutes. This will help with leaving the old system and makes more sense semantically, even though it's essentially an equivalent system. - What time is it now? - It's 258 degrees and 15 minutes. (5:18pm)

ulkesh 7y ago

I know my opinion is unpopular, but I sure would love it if the world would simply rid itself of timezones and stick to a singular time. Does it _really_ matter if it's broad daylight at 0200 Earth Standard Time? Circadian rhythms aren't affected if people still go to sleep at night and wake up at day. It standardizes time relativity on a single scale. And it saves us software engineers a lot of headache.

telaelit 7y ago
I 100% agree.
riantogo 7y ago
I think Timex or some other company attempted this. Was it Internet time?
- synack 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
gpm 7y ago
China sort of does this, with one timezone that spans 5 geographically correct time zones.
pfranz 7y ago
This link often gets posted to rebut proposals to abolish time zones: https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
- david_ar 7y ago
  > Do normal humans publish "waking hours"? Not typically. It would kind of be great if they did though, it's not necessarily the same for everyone in the same geographic location.
  - 7y ago

tedunangst 7y ago

I hope the DC, and only the DC, change to Atlantic time goes through for maximum hilarity.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

thameera 7y ago

Coming from a different part of the world, this proposed change was news to me. Does anyone have a link to the actual proposal and reasoning?

macintux 7y ago
Every change is independent. Each state makes its own rules (well, has the freedom to decide what it wants, although there is apparently some federal oversight).
- mbreese 7y ago
  The only thing the state has control over is if it observes daylight savings time. Changing to a different time zone requires the Dept. of Transportation to approve of the change. This is one of the things that makes this so complicated... most of the bills are “asking” the state government to petition the federal government to make a change. And it isn’t guaranteed that the DOT will approve the switch. Even more complicated... the state can only control whether or not to observe DST. It can’t control the start/stop of DST, so if California wants to always be at UTC-7 (the current PDT), it couldn’t just decide to always be in PDT. It would need to petition the DOT to be moved to MST and then to not observe DST. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_the_...
  - gpvos 7y ago
    Good that there is some central control, because if this all passed it would become a righteous mess.
mac01021 7y ago
People are sick of changing their clocks by an hour twice a year as "daylight saving time" starts and ends. So there are many proposals to settle on permanent summer time or permanent winter time.

Urgo 7y ago

Random thought after reading all the comments about abolishing all time zones and switching to UTC only. The biggest complaint people would have is they wouldn't know what time morning was for example. Morning would be 7am somewhere but 7pm somewhere else. But we already have the same type of situation with the seasons anyway. It's summer in the northern hemisphere while its winter in the southern. We should have month zones if we wanted to operate the same way. So with that being said, I've always been a supporter of switching to DST only and this proposal actually does push my state that way, but I think I actually could support UTC only as well.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

abc617 7y ago

All these separate proposals are a logical nightmare for truckers and people who have to cross state lines. I've heard this proposal before, but seems way simpler: 1) Abolish daylight savings and the 1 hour change and keep things the way they are. So technically daylight savings is right now (from March-Oct). Just keep it as it is this very second 2) Merge the Pacific time zone with Mountain time zone. That way in the continental US we have 3 time zone: Eastern, Central, and Mountain But I can't find the exact resource I got this idea from, but I think this would minimize the headaches and gripes people have.

CydeWeys 7y ago
The continental US is actually wide enough across to necessitate five time zones. The four we have now aren't good enough. Cutting down to three as you suggest would exacerbate the problem.
- souterrain 7y ago
  Well, barely though. Only a tiny fragment of Maine would be in AST using standard 15° wide time zones, the boundary being 67.5° W.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    The overall point is that if 4 isn't quite enough, then 3 is definitely way too few.

imoverclocked 7y ago

Why do we even have time zones? DST is a seriously broken concept but timezones on their own are almost as bad. The worst part is that people don't really understand how much simpler the world would be without timezones altogether. Just use UTC or anything consistent across the board. The disjointness of the proposed zones on this map proves the point that the offsets are arbitrary. Why not lead internationally by example by uniformly adopting a modern clock everywhere. Let's standardize time for the whole country.

ycombobreaker 7y ago
It's not other people failing to understand. We just disagree. A world without timezones would not be simpler, it would just shift complexity around. Beyond that, it is tilting at windmills to suggest this sort of international coordination. Theres no need for international "leadership" or guesswork here. China has already adopted a single clock for the whole nation. Maybe somebody living there can advise how a nation with such a wide longitudinal spread operates with a single time reference.
- imoverclocked 7y ago
  Can you be specific about what would be more complex without timezones?
  - ycombobreaker 7y ago
    sorry for the the delayed response, but people will always have a need to communicate in terms at least approximating local solar time (e.g. dawn/noon/dusk). right now everyone can use "time" for that. force everyone to a global reference clock and they will just have to make up some new, local, nonstandard concepts and terms to reflect what was once just "time".

tricolon 7y ago

What I can't get over is how Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, and Arkansas would be ahead of Illinois. That's just confusing.

strange_quark 7y ago
This map is wrong. Illinois is considering staying on DST year-round. http://ilga.gov/legislation/fulltext.asp?DocName=10100SB0533sam001&GA=101&SessionId=108&DocTypeId=SB&LegID=116470&DocNum=0533&GAID=15&Session= http://ilga.gov/legislation/fulltext.asp?DocName=10100SB0533...

chirau 7y ago

You seriously could not find a color to separate the East and West Coast? DOA for me. Confusing, especially since these are the hubs of most activity. Now you diagram just makes it seem like they are in the same time zone. Sorry, nice try, but it is a no for me.

bgdnyxbjx 7y ago

This is pretty dumb. In what world should Boston and New York City be in different time zones? And Long Island in a different time zone than Connecticut.

Taniwha 7y ago

The people who manage TV scheduling, especially from satellites are royally screwed, I wonder if there are enough spare transponders to double up where required

Izkata 7y ago
And 10 years later, people ad-hoc invent a solution to the time zone problem: "Let's meet at 3pm Comedy Central time." "Wait, I usually use Discovery Channel time, when is that?"
- Taniwha 7y ago
  there's all sorts of cultural stuff here - 'prime-time' on the broadcast networks has traditionally been off by one hour from the coasts (local time) - presumably originally to reduce the satellite demands when broadcasts first went national

Kyragem 7y ago

95% of Nevada’s population lives 30 minutes from the California border where it would be one hour later. Super impractical

gpvos 7y ago

It's fascinating to see that almost everyone wants to move a zone eastward (except Indiana, apparently the state with the smartest people). This is similar to many of the original recent proposals for abolishing the twice-yearly time change in Europe, where many countries wanted to stay with summer time instead of going to permanent standard (or "winter") time. For most countries, this would be bad, especially in winter, when children would have to go to school in total darkness. Luckily in several European countries there is some grass-roots activism now to move to standard time instead. (In fact, I and many others think that France, the Benelux and certainly Spain should move a time zone westward, and move to permanent standard time.) Russia moved to permanent summer time a few years ago, but it was a disaster and they moved to permanent standard time a few years later.

RankingMember 7y ago
> For most countries, this would be bad, especially in winter, when children would have to go to school in total darkness. School start times themselves can (and possibly should) change to be later anyways. https://www.cdc.gov/features/school-start-times/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/features/school-start-times/index.html I personally much prefer sticking with summer time, as I like getting out of work and still having some time to do things in the light during the winter months.
- rootbear 7y ago
  If school start times can change, so can work hours. If one has the flexibility, one can go into work early and leave early when it's still light outside. Employers should be encouraged to allow this.
  - gpvos 7y ago
    The entire reason why we have twice-yearly time changes is that it is apparently harder to change school and work times.
    - burfog 7y ago

gumby 7y ago

Why should the federal government regulate time zones? Why shouldn’t states do as they will (as Arizona and even more extremely Indiana do)? Some states, or portions of states, could go on 1/2 hour offsets if they are too far from local noon (as other TZs do). We all walk around with computers in our pockets that can manage it. I can see there might have been a justification back when computation was difficult and the government felt it had a stake in trains being built, but nowadays those factors no longer apply.

nemothekid 7y ago
>We all walk around with computers in our pockets that can manage it. The computers in our pockets can barely manage the timezone mess today.
ptah 7y ago
timezones are a pain in the ass for computers
- gumby 7y ago
  You mean for computer programmers but that's no excuse: our machines are there to make life easier for users, not the other way around. I still think Spain made a mistake when they changed their alphabet in the 1990s to make life easier for computer programmers. This is really no different.
  - ptah 7y ago
    making things easier for programmers can make most things cheaper for everyone else
0x5002 7y ago
Purely from a technical perspective and ignoring the political implications, I don't think that phones are helping all that much. I travel quite frequently and work with a lot of people across the US (as well as Europe and India), who also travel frequently. I keep tab of who is - or might be - where on any given day, simply to be able to coordinate schedules and not call folks who are in PST at 6am by accident (or have people call me at 9pm). A system for messengers (Skype, Slack, Teams, Text ...) where people could share their current time zone would make my life so much easier sometimes.

S_A_P 7y ago

hoping the TX bill passes. I hate having jet lag every spring for a week.

icedchai 7y ago

Some of this looks nonsensical. For example, Illinois. Do these states even talk to each other?

devy 7y ago

I obviously didn't get the memo, neither did the proposed time zone map mention about the reasons for changes. So here is the big question: why each state are proposing their own time zone now? The proposed changes look like a mess to be honest.

knz 7y ago
Many States (or at least some legislators in those states) are pushing for permanent DST because of the perceived benefits. I live in the north and the concern about DST always makes me laugh - the relationship between the time and diurnal patterns is meaningless up here for at least a third of the year.
- MuffinFlavored 7y ago
  What are the perceived benefits?
  - knz 7y ago
    People usually cite benefits to farmers, energy savings, declining crime/traffic accidents, happiness due to more sunlight etc. The first Google result for me implies that these are largely myths (https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/03/05/the-5-reasons-to-keep-daylight-saving-time-have-no-science-to-back-them-up/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/03/05/the-...).
    - HelloMcFly 7y ago
      The only reason I've heard anyone in reality desire it is for when the sun is present i.e. later in the day. It's why I prefer DST of standard time as a permanent thing. More sunlight in the evening, that's all there is to it for me. But I'd rather standard time with no DST than the switching we do today.
    - amanaplanacanal 7y ago
      Another data point: Later sunsets lead to lost productivity, more obesity, more diabetes, and more breast cancer. Probably due to fewer hours of sleep. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/04/19/how-living-wrong-side-time-zone-can-be-hazardous-your-health/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.14e8f21f9d50 https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/04/19/how-livin...

SlowRobotAhead 7y ago

Not only is this patchwork idea dumb, but many of these have already failed in their legislative sessions.

thetimbanks 7y ago

This would be a disaster for people living in Kansas City. There is so much cross state commuting going on that I wouldn't think this would ever pass.

fredgrott 7y ago

Good..Indiana and IL finally on one time zone..yeah!

todd8 7y ago

I think we should try something simpler first, get rid of daylight savings time.

magduf 7y ago
That's exactly what this is all about. Many states want to have "permanent Daylight Saving", which is the same thing as just jumping to the next timezone to the east, and no longer observing DST.