July 15, 2013: The westernmost highway entry into the Eastern Time Zone, MI 28 in the Upper Peninsula, is farther west than a lot of Illinois. Longitudinally, it’s roughly on par with Sterling, less than 30 miles from Clinton. It’s a good deal farther north, of course, but does this really look like 5:30 to you?
Once again, but this time with some additional politicians on board, they want to mangle clocks in the United States even more.
It is bad enough to have Daylight Saving Time spread across March and cover Halloween (now much of trick-or-treating is done in dusk or even daylight hours). It would be much worse to run it all year.
Sunrises would be exceptionally late in Iowa during winter under permanent DST — an entire month after 8:30, according to KCRG. Any state above 40° North latitude should oppose the idea. But there’s another argument against such a move: Significant portions of the country are in time zones that do not match their geography.
If time zone lines hewed closer to where they should, in 15-degree longitudinal increments with the “solar noon” in the middle, the contiguous United States would have dividing lines at 82.5° W, 97.5° W, and 112.5° W. Instead, they are up to hundreds of miles west.
This pair of tweets shows when “solar noon” happens across North America with and without DST. All the parts that are in orange are, quite honestly, in the wrong time zones. That includes huge swaths of Texas and the Great Plains, a good chunk of Idaho, the eastern part of the Florida Panhandle, eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, half of Ohio, and all of Indiana and Michigan.
DST puts solar noon more than an hour and a half behind clock noon in some places; permanent DST would make that a year-round problem. Florida’s House tried to make it even worse with a bill that would have put the rest of the Panhandle in Eastern Time.
(You know who would really be screwed with permanent DST? Canada.)
The change that is needed is not permanent DST. It’s smart DST, which would mean restoring pre-2007 (at least) calendar changes — something more difficult to regulate with a couple zillion more computers in Americans’ pockets and purses than there were then — and realigning time zone boundaries to better match the sun. Yes, I’m still in favor of changing the clocks.
At the very least, the Louisville area, Indiana, and much of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (if not all of Michigan) need to be wrenched into God’s Own Time Zone where they belong. Move the lines all the way over up and down the country and maybe we can get broadcasters to acknowledge that a world exists outside of Eastern Time.