Why I prefer Indiana in the Central timezone

Indiana's Governor Daniels signed Senate Bill 127 into law on May 13. This act requires Indiana to observe daylight saving time (DST) throughout the state, beginning in 2006.

In addition, this act also requires the governor to petition the United States Department of Transportation within ten days to initiate proceedings to hold hearings on the location of the boundary between Eastern and Central Time in Indiana.

Now that we will be observing DST, I would very much like to see as much of Indiana as possible on Central Time.

State Representative Jackie Walorski of Lakeville says, "If we do nothing, we'll end up in Eastern Time. If we're proactive and do something, we can probably petition to be in Central Time.

"Several of the counties are going to go together and give a resolution to the governor in a couple of weeks and say we're petitioning to be on Central time. I really want us to be in this consortium of counties that makes a presentation to the governor, because we have a lot more power when we come together, as separate counties in a region instead of being all by ourselves on the issue..."

A "Central Time coalition... plans to make a presentation to the governor in a few weeks, which is well in advance of the federal hearings that will probably take place this summer."

I would like to see as many counties as possible be part of this consortium or coalition.

Because most localities prefer to have their clock read 12:00 at local noon, the earth has been divided up into 24 natural time zones, each 15 degrees wide on the average. This results in approximately the same number of hours of sunlight in the morning (before noon) as in the evening (after noon) in the middle of each zone. The Eastern zone is centered on 75 degrees and the Central on 90. This puts the natural boundary between Eastern and Central time at 82.5 degrees.

If you look in the atlas, with Fort Wayne at 85 degrees in the northeast and Evansville at 87 degrees in the southwest, you can see that all of Indiana lies well within the natural boundary of the Central timezone, as well as virtually all of Kentucky and Michigan, and the western half of Ohio.

Over the years, the statutory boundary has gotten moved quite a bit west of the 82.5 degree line in the U.S., especially north of Kentucky. I would like to see this boundary moved back closer to the natural boundary in Indiana by being drawn up our eastern border, aligning our time with our neighboring states to the west rather than those to the east.

Because most of Indiana has been observing Eastern time, and since Indiana is well within the natural boundary for Central time, there is already plenty of daylight in the evening to suit me. Even as we have been from 1966 until now (year round Eastern Standard) we already have anywhere from nearly an hour (November) to nearly two hours (February) more daylight in the evening than in the morning.

If Indiana successfully petitions to go to Central time, this would stay the same in the summer. If we continue on Eastern time, the sun would rise in July about 6:40 am and set about 9 pm, giving us only 5.3 hours before noon and 9 hours after noon, or a whopping 3.7 hours more sun in the evening than in the morning. Our clocks would read 1:50 pm at local noon. This just seems excessive to me.

I find it helpful to be able to wait until twilight before trying to get the family to bed. I find 8:45 pm already late enough for that in the summer months. It would be even tougher to get children to bed at a decent hour if we had to to wait until 9:45 pm for twilight on Eastern Daylight time.

Central Daylight Time, which most of Indiana effectively observes now in the summer, would still give us nearly two extra hours of sunlight in the summer evenings. Observing Central Standard Time in the winter would give us one more hour of morning sunlight than we have now. Having the sun up by 7am instead of 8am in December would be a nice help to dispel the mid-winter gloom.


Ref: http://www.wndu.com/news/052005/news_41952.php (3 May 2005, Jackie Walorski quote)
Ref: http://www.astro.ufl.edu/~oliver/ast3722/lectures/CoordsNtime/time.htm
Ref: http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/us_tzones.html (timezone history)
Ref: http://www.mccsc.edu/time.html (more Indiana time history)


Following are some of the e-mail addresses and websites at which Indiana citizens can contact politicians and bureaucrats who are likely to have some influence on Indiana's timezone.

http://www.dot.gov/ost/ogc/subject/faqs/regulation/timezone.html
- joanne.petrie@ost.dot.gov { U.S. Department of Transportation }

Governor Mitch Daniels
- http://www.in.gov/gov/contact.html

Indiana state legislators
- http://www.in.gov/cgi-bin/legislative/contact/contact.pl

U.S. legislators
- senator_lugar@lugar.senate.gov
- http://bayh.senate.gov/LegForm.htm
- http://www.congress.org/congressorg/home/