The U.S. Department of Transportation has announced its final plan for time zones in Indiana. Eight counties will be moved into the Central zone to join the 10 already there, leaving 74 counties in the Eastern zone. St. Joseph County's petition to switch from Eastern to Central, the most controversial aspect of the issue, was denied. That seems sensible, leaving Michiana a cohesive unit. Masson's Blog, which has provided the most coverage of the time-zone/daylight-saving-time question, has a different take, though.
Time zones are a little archaic, don't you think? They came about when transportation and communications were a little more problematic than they are today. If you had trouble getting from here to there, and even more trouble talking to people when they were there and you were here, it really mattered what time it was everywere. It doesn't so much these days. Why don't we just go to one worldwide time and be done with it?
Comments
I could go for Universal Time
Not really sure being on the same time would do us much good. I mean, now we have to work within the time zones to figure out that if we call someone in the pacific time zone from what would otherwise appear to be a reasonable time in New York, we'll wake them up. If we all move to the same time, won't we have the same issue ? Gee, let's see, it's 8:30 am everywhere, but what are people doing at their 8:30 am, sleeping or not ? And, if we move to Internet time (now I've heard everything, ...) we'll have a still different problem. I've known for all my life what an hour is, how long it takes me to do something in hours, how long it takes me to get somewhere in hours, how many hours I waste on the internet every day (oops), but now on internet time, I have to convert hours to "beats" which, naturally, aren't an even multiple of anything. I do, however, think 5:00 somewhere should always be 5:00 there, no matter what time of the year. Let's see if we can complicate all this even more, ...
If we adopted Greenwich Mean Time for the planet, our noon would become 5:00 pm, a 7:00 am sunrise would become noon, we'd be eating supper at 11:00 pm and our dates would start around midnight.
When I lived in Los Angeles the difference from Fort Wayne was only three hours, but it was still a benefit to have time that followed the sun.
I like it better this way, for a lot of reasons.