Jeff Sagarin, of Sagarin sports rankings fame, has prepared All 92 Indiana Counties: Sunrise/Sunset Day-By-Day Charts for 2006 which include day-by-day entries, for each county, of the time for dawn, sunrise, true noon, sunset, and dusk under both eastern time and central time.
He has more information on Indiana’s proper placement in the Central Time Zone here. Unlike me, he doesn’t simply spout off. He backs it up with numbers. I particularly enjoyed this passage:
Things such as 8:06 am sunrises and 1:51 pm noons are the kinds of bad consequences that manifest themselves when people begin to feel that they can override the immutable facts of astronomy with legislative strokes of a pen. Our clocks are at their closest to the sun-earth relationship when we’re on Central Standard at all times and furthest from reality when on Eastern Daylight.
(Makes this debate somewhat reminiscent of the Indiana General Assembly’s efforts to legislate pi back in the 1800s.)
Mr. Sagarin also argues an economic model that has the Central Time Zone being most advantageous to Indiana.
[The economic model] assumes that we want to maximize the business to be done by Indiana firms with the other states in the six time zones of this country: EASTERN, CENTRAL, MOUNTAIN, PACIFIC, ALASKAN, HAWAIIAN_ALEUTIAN. And that potential business in a region is proportional to the population of that region. And it then assumes that the “coverage” of that region is proportional to the number of common hours of the business day that Indiana would share with that region. The reasoning being that the number of hours of common business hours is the number of hours when you can do business with that time zone.
Based on those arguments, central time wins. And, it wins going away because the population in the U.S. continues to shift westward.
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