Time zones in the US suck for a couple reasons right now:
- They abritrarily cut through state lines
- Eastern and Central time are way too large, skewing the time away from actual solar time
- Daylight Saving Time, which is useless. Check out the CGP Grey video on it.
There's some things we have to consider to make time zones better. Nobody would want more time zones, and we all like having time zones which only add a whole number of hours (e.g., we don't want Pacific Time to be 12:00 while Central is at 12:30.) There's a simple three-step solution that solves all these issues.
1. Kick Daylight Saving Time. Simple enough.
2. Re-divide the country into four new time zones between different meridians. When time zones were first implemented, it was obvious that there should be 24, one for each hour of the day. If you divide our 360-degre globe into 24 portions, you get portions of 15 degrees each. It turns out that the lower 48 occupies about 60 degrees, so it's easy to split into 15 degree sections like so.
Those are ideal boundaries for our time zones, but we don't want the lines cutting randomly through the states. So...
3. Make the time zones involve only whole states by placing each state that is cut by the lines on the side of the line where the state is most densely populated.
This creates a beautiful map of ideal time zones like so. Hawaii and Alaska stay on their own time zones because they're so far away.
Now we just need new names for the zones. Perhaps, going from left to right, Western Time, Frontier Time, Heartland Time and Appalachian Time.
12:00 pm Western Time is
1:00 pm Frontier Time,
2:00 pm Heartland Time,
3:00 pm Appalachian Time
