Time zones and Daylight Saving time

[Choirboy622]

Does anyone think that the time zone boundaries in the United States should be moved to the west, to allow for the cities and states in the eastern parts of the time zones to have more daylight in the evening hours rather than in the early morning hours?

Along the East Coast, as well as in Wisconsin, Illinois, western Kentucky, western Tennessee, Alabama, and the panhandle of Florida, the sun will set before 5:00pm in early to mid-December, and rise between 5:00 and 6:00 in the morning during the summer. The latest sunset in Wisconsin would be about 8:30 or so in the summer. The same goes for the states along the East Coast. If these states would be granted petitions to switch time zones to the east, then these times would automatically be one hour later.

[monsoon]

They don't need to move the border. They can just make daylight savings time year round instead of ending it in the winter. (it was just lengthened by congress for 2007)

However the downside of this is that it stays darker much longer in the moring in the winter. In the 1970s, President Nixon ended the transition to regular time the theory being that it would save energy. However after a number of school kids got killed by waiting on school buses in the dark, they decided to change it back to pretty much the plan we have today except it was a couple of months longer. DST was lengthened in the 1980s to what we have now.

[hood]

Does anyone else find it odd that congress just basically changed what time it will be next year? This whole time zones thing is weird anyways, we actually used to have more accurate time in the past when a local clock would keep the time individually in each city based on the sun, maybe we should just go back to that.

[Rural King]

^ That worked when we weren't such a mobile society, today to keep modern nation and national/international operations going we have to have much broader regions on the same time in order to facilitate business and orderly lives for the citzenry of the nation.

[hood]

I sort of said that without being serious, but I do think that we have to come up with something better than the current set up, maybe not anytime soon, but eventually.

[Cotuit]

^ That worked when we weren't such a mobile society, today to keep modern nation and national/international operations going we have to have much broader regions on the same time in order to facilitate business and orderly lives for the citzenry of the nation.

Well we don't really need time zones. We could just have one and people could live according to their local solar time as they please. When It's noon at GMT it would be the middle of the night on the other side of the world, the people on the other side of the world would just get used to the fact that they are on a different schedule than the clock. That's what China does, it's 3-4 time zones wide, but uses Beijing time nationwide.

I guess that would get confusing for when the day started/ended for people that had midnight in the middle of thier local afternoon, so we could have two or four time zones.

The Soviets moved all of their time zones permanently over 1 hour because god did not decide what time the sun was at it's zenith, the Communist Party did.

[Choirboy622]

Well we don't really need time zones. We could just have one and people could live according to their local solar time as they please. When It's noon at GMT it would be the middle of the night on the other side of the world, the people on the other side of the world would just get used to the fact that they are on a different schedule than the clock. That's what China does, it's 3-4 time zones wide, but uses Beijing time nationwide.

I guess that would get confusing for when the day started/ended for people that had midnight in the middle of thier local afternoon, so we could have two or four time zones.

The Soviets moved all of their time zones permanently over 1 hour because god did not decide what time the sun was at it's zenith, the Communist Party did.

I think much of western Europe actually has daylight saving time in the winter, then advances their clocks another hour in the spring to have double-daylight time. Perhaps someone knows for sure.