Letter to the editor 1 Dec 2005, local time vs clock time

I recently had an e-mail exchange with an Indiana state representatives who strongly favors Eastern time. He wonders why so many people have such a strong preference for having their clocks somewhere near noon when the sun is overhead. This preference seems to be particularly strong among Indiana residents who favor Central time.

We could adjust to just about any time zone if there were some compelling reason to do so. Our whole country could set their clocks to local mean time (aka local time) of Los Angeles, or New York City, or (splitting the difference) even Sioux City, Iowa. For that matter, the whole world could decide to use Greenwich Mean Time.

Most people would figure out a schedule to sleep when it's dark, be awake when it's light, eat breakfast somewhere near sunrise, supper somewhere near sunset, and lunch somewhere in the middle, regardless of what the clocks may say.

There are some places in the world that have actually learned to tolerate having their clocks significantly different from local time like this -- Western China and parts of Alaska, for example.

While I don't have an airtight explanation why so many prefer having their clocks set close to local time, I do see a couple of pieces of evidence that indicate pretty strongly that it is so.

First, when the time zones were instituted in the 1880's, why did they choose one-hour-wide zones? Fewer wider zones might have been even more convenient for commerce. I surmise it was at least partly because many people are willing to set their clocks up to 30 minutes faster or slower than local time for the sake of convenience of commerce, but not a whole lot more. I elaborated on this thought further in my DOT docket comments of 20 November 2005 (tinyurl.com/88nnw).

Second, when I look up "noon" in the Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, it says "midday; twelve o'clock in the daytime", indicating that midday and noon are strongly associated. The American Heritage Dictionary reinforces this association with "the time or point in the sun's path at which the sun is on the local meridian; the highest point". The further our clocks deviate from local time, the weaker these traditional associations become, and the more compelling a justification is required.

Granted, dictionary definitions may offer an overly simplistic explanation, but they give substantial empirical evidence of just how deeply ingrained these conventions are in our collective cultural psyche. Anybody who proposes that it's worthwhile to deviate significantly from these norms has a pretty uphill battle cut out for them, as is readily observed in Indiana now.

Making this more specific to Indiana, when Indianapolis last observed Central Standard Time, the clocks were only 15 minutes behind local time (our eastern and western borders are only about 5 minutes different from Indy). When we observed year-round Eastern Standard Time (aka Central Daylight Time), the clocks were only 45 minutes ahead of local time. Although exceeding the 30-minute threshold, this seemed a reasonable compromise to many Hoosiers -- 45 minutes or so of morning sunlight shifted to the evening year-round.

If we observe Eastern Daylight Time in 2006 and 2007, the clocks in Indy will be 105 minutes ahead of local time (110 in Terre Haute) for 7 and 8 months of the year.

This apparently sounds like a near-unequivocal benefit to those who support Eastern time, but, to those who support Central, having the clock so skewed from local time doesn't sound that great at all. Absent a statewide referendum, it's just anybody's educated guess, at best, which view predominates among Hoosiers.

Perhaps this helps to explain why the northwest and southwest counties seem largely content to remain on Central time, why so many other counties have petitioned to join them, and why so many Hoosiers in the rest of the state (based on docket comments and hearing reports) are clamoring for their elected legislators and governor to seize the opportunity in the January 2006 legislative session to petition the DOT to reunite at least 95 percent of Indiana's counties in the Central time zone.

cc: Indiana legislators, Governor Daniels, Mayor Stephen Luecke