No Spring, No Fall

You may have enjoyed your extra hour of sleep this last night, but there are plenty of people who would rather do away with Daylight Savings Time altogether. Economist Allison Schrager suggests going one more step and getting rid of two whole time zones, leaving the United States with just a Western and an Eastern time zone.

It's an interesting idea, but what struck me was that even the creation of four distinct time zones came about because of technological advancement in travel. Before the current zones were made in 1883, cities pretty much set their own time, based on when they knew it was noon. But the ability to travel fairly rapidly between cities, brought on by the railroad, made that impractical. So the U.S. was split into four zones.

Schrager has a point in that the world today moves much faster than it did in 1883, so an adjustment is probably in order. Allowing the coasts to be only an hour apart would make many things more convenient that pushing them three hours apart.

She does use a silly analogy, though, noting that Alaska is almost as "long" from east to west as is the continental U.S., and it gets by with just a single zone. Since the continental U.S. has something 300-plus times the population of Alaska, the comparison suffers a bit. And I also don't really know why I should have to have a potentially weird sunrise-sunset schedule just so people on the east and west coasts can travel more easily.

But it's not really that big a deal. The Daylight Savings thing, on the other hand, may be a problem, because otherwise how will we know when to change our smoke alarm batteries?