Monday, December 2, 2024

Daylight Savings Time Reimagined

A few weeks back, we in almost all of America said goodbye to the 2024 iteration of Daylight Savings Time, that curious artifact of government-mandated time control that provides more daylight later in the evenings, at the expense of daylight in the early hours of the day.

Naturally, there were outcries -- these are annual complaints, mind you -- both about the unpleasant, sudden adjustment to a different clock for the day, and the loss of evening hours of daylight, to where a gloomy depression sets in for weeks after the fall time change back to Standard Time.

The "solution", such as it has always been proposed, has been to eliminate the change of time, and simply have Daylight Savings Time all year.  Or Standard Time all year. One of the two, I forget which.  Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) has been a consistent forth-putter of a law that would do one or the other, I forget which, but the bill has never gone anywhere.

"Why it has never gone anywhere" is part of the issue. 

I would contend that a solution has not been generated, not because a lack of perception of the problem but because of lack of definition of the problem.  

I've lost count of the number of times I've written here, about all manner of situations, that you have to decide what you are trying to accomplish, or else all pathways are equally valid -- or invalid.  In this case, much like with global warming, you need to define an acceptable end state.

In this case, the end state has to be defined in terms of the shortest date of the year for daylight (i.e., the winter solstice, December 21), and then where we want to "place" sunrise and sunset.  In other words, whatever we do needs to be grounded on the placement of daylight, with a start time and end time for the light of day.

I'm going to make an assumption for the sake of argument.  Obviously, deciding what that time is, is something that can be worked out.  

Where I live (latitude about 33 degrees north), on December 21, the shortest-daylight day of the year has about nine hours and 50-55 minutes between actual sunrise and sunset.  Let's say "ten hours of daylight" for argument's sake, and there are maybe 25 minutes on either side where there is usable daylight, before sunrise and after sunset.

So let us assume that we want to center the ten hours between sunrise and sunset on the shortest day of the year as being between 7 AM and 5 PM.  That would leave some kind of daylight from about 6:30 AM to about 5:30 PM.  That would seem reasonable to me.

OK?  Good, that's the goal, and remember that we want to have a time system for the United States (we don't really care about the rest of the world, they can figure out their own problems) that never changes, no Standard Time or Daylight Savings Time, just Regular, Ordinary, All-Year Time.

Now let's factor in the other thing that causes all manner of problems in the whole time-change issue.

Time zones.

At the Equator, the earth is about 24,900 miles around. It takes 24 or so hours for one rotation, so on average, each time zone should be about 1,000 miles wide at the equator.  At the 33rd parallel, which is only about 20,000 miles around, time zones average around 800 miles wide -- enough for maybe three and a half time zones across the continental US.  

If you look at the four current time zones our lower 48 states fit into, you'll see that the lines are pretty erratic, as if the people who decided where the boundaries are, used a combination of state lines and splitting states where they had to, in the most rural areas possible.

As a result, we have oddities like Terre Haute, Indiana and Eastport, Maine, 1,350 miles apart, being in the same time zone, even though the sun rises and sets an hour and five minutes later in Terre Haute than in Eastport.  So I guarantee you that there is nothing magical about where the time zones are located -- the sun doesn't rise until 8:00 AM in Terre Haute at the shortest day of the year, and that's nowhere near our target.

Think about the solution -- if our goal is to do the best possible shot at the "7-to-5 daylight on the shortest day of the year" goal, then the actual center of the time zone should be where that spread falls, not at one end or the other.

And that, friends, will be how we arrive at a solution -- move the time zones.

Unfortunately for our purposes, the sun doesn't really care where people actually live and create cities, so we have to center our time zone in wherever the 7-to-5 sun pattern on December 21 is, and extend roughly 30 minutes for sunrise and sunset, east and west of that.  

In the Eastern Time Zone, for example, that center is around Worcester, Massachusetts.  That means that the rough western border of such a time zone would be around Wheeling, West Virginia -- just west of Pittsburgh -- not western Indiana or anywhere close to it,

If you have followed all this, I really don't need to explain a whole lot more.  Based on actual sunrise and sunset times, and with the goal of centering the shortest days of the year in a reasonable window relative to daily lives, again, here is the solution:

Relocate the time zones according to the sunrise/sunset schedule!

This is the most logical solution.  You figure out the longitude where the sunrise and sunset are that 7:00 AM and 5:00 PM window, and determine an eastern and western border -- the longitude where the sunrise is a half-hour east of that, and a half-hour west -- and voila, you have a time zone.

Obviously, you're not going to use a straight longitudinal line for those borders.  For example, you have to make allowances for cities, such that their suburban areas are in the same zone, and would likely want to run the borders of the zone through the least-populated areas.  And if you can follow state borders, that works really well too.

Here's how it works -- the new Eastern Time Zone (remember, "Standard" and "Daylight Savings" go away since you never change time) is based on its center being roughly the vertical line going through Worcester, MA. So all of New England and the Mid-Atlantic states, they fit right into Eastern Time.

But instead of extending all the way to western Indiana as it does now, the new Eastern Time Zone would only go as far as about Wheeling, WV to the west.  In fact, given the borders, it makes sense for all of Ohio to be in the new Central Time Zone (stay with me) and, if you look at a map, for Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky and Michigan, which currently are all or mostly on Eastern Time, to move to the new Central Time Zone.  

In such a line, the states of West Virginia and North Carolina would be split, with Charleston and the western half of West Virginia moving to Central Time, along with mountain North Carolina west of Charlotte.  The western tip of Virginia would also be Central Time, west of the greater Roanoke area.  South Carolina could be entirely in the Eastern Time Zone but, better, the portion west of the SC-side suburbs of Charlotte, NC probably ought to be moved to Central Time, including the Greenville/Spartanburg area. Then the area of the state west of greater Columbia would move as well.

I could obviously project this to define the western border of each remaining time zone all the way out to the Pacific coast, now that you've seen the logic.  

But there's nothing magic about those lines.  What is important is that we could achieve the two end goals -- (1) logical time zones relative to the daylight hours, and (2) no need to change times twice a year -- simply by adjusting the time zones to make sense based on daytime.

If you read this and have some influence with your congressman or senator, I urge you to forward a link to this piece.  Politicians have been proposing the end of Daylight Savings Time, or universal Daylight Savings Time, forever.

This plan accomplishes the goals with the least intrusion -- figure out the logical borders, reset the time zones accordingly, and you never have to change time again.

Feel free to call it the "Sutton Time Zone Plan."  I'm happy to take credit.

 Copyright 2024 by Robert Sutton.  Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com and, after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

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