It’s baaaaaack! The idiocy of us setting our clocks forward to “save” something other than stress, sleep, time, etc. Once again it is my bi-annual diatribe on why this shit needs to end but I did do some poking around with the records on how much the sunlight variation Austin receives over a year. Arizona and Indiana (used to) to do it right, they “stood still” because their global position was perfect for where they are. So I thought about pitching four additional time zones for the US which would make more sense from an energy conservation stance, a major reason why this DST crap got pushed in the Seventies.
Firstly, the US Eastern Zone is way too large. It extends from Maine/Florida all the way out to Indiana and much of Tennessee. It’s rather ridiculous. By splitting the Eastern Zone in half and make the demarcation around the border between Ohio and Pennsylvania with a difference of 30 minutes would be smarter. Many think, 30 minutes? Rather weird. Not really. Australia has their Eastern Zone (really two divided by the north-south borders of those two states), then the next zone to the west is only 30 minutes followed by their western-most region be another 90 minutes. It does get confusing when they implement DST yet Australia is a continent stretching up into the Equator (the perfect balance of sunlight).
Back to my idea though…
Energy would be saved since there wouldn’t be all those people in the “East” and East Coast coming online all at the same time. The grid would have less stress put on it too. The tricky part would be where the dividing line should be for Central Time. It definitely should be along the border between Illinois-Wisconsin and Michigan-Indiana which does show my bias of having grown up there. Off the cuff, I’d pitch it ends on the western border between Iowa-Minnesota and the Dakotas. Texas could split up too since Austin doesn’t quite fit in well with Central as is and this is what I’m tripping up on. Between the solstices, there’s a difference of almost FOUR HOURS in sunlight. Ouch! Checking Milwaukee to see…oh good grief, over SIX HOURS, how did I live with such an awful contrast? Blech! Milwaukee being on DST for good makes more sense as I look at the sunrise/sunset times. Looking over Austin, we’re in a crappy in-between spot on the East-West axis. I would still stand by my push to have us 30 minutes behind Central DST. It’ll be pretty dark in the Winter mornings in exchange for having a little more light in the late afternoon.
Secondly, our recent cultural shifts on working (more people toil on weekends and crap hours since some people gotta’ have their crap 24/7) and TV viewing make my pitch viable. When the VCR became affordable in the Eighties, people could watch their favorite shows at their convenience. DVRs and now Streaming have made “time-shifting” normal. There’s only two types of programing locked down to live/in-the-moment, the News and Sports. CNN and the Internet tackled the former and the latter we can adjust on. For example, say the Dallas Cowboys (I picked at random) have their home kickoff at 12 PM Central. We in Austin will be fine and their fans here can handle/adjust to it be at 11:30 AM…what should we name my new home time zone? So far, going from East to West, I have East Coast Time (NYC), Eastern Time (Cleveland), Central Time (Chicago), Mountain (Denver) and Pacific Coast (LA). For the Dakotas, you could call it Prairie although our climate it nothing like it. Plains Time? Hill Time? Send me your suggestions.