Most people agree that summer/winter time is counter-productive. this is true.
- It creates confusion, clock-changing work, disturbed sleep, and missed appointments twice a year.
- It changes the time-zone differences many times a year, because different territories do not all change on the same day.
- It has no advantages. Some people say that the school hours must be shifted to ensure they are always during daylight, but really that’s an argument for shifting the school hours twice a year, not the whole notion of time.
But this is only the first step. Time zones are not needed at all. Just as society quickly changed from imperial to metric one generation, we could switch all of business and society to UTC. Only the old can continue to use the local times if they choose to, by applying the conversion. This solves one extra big problem:
- In small countries and near borders of big countries and international settings, nobody is ever sure what time it is. All the confusion with airport and train schedules, gone.
This sounds nice but it does bring up a problem. Here are four versions and solutions of it.
- The day changes when the clock is at 0:00h UTC. It changes from Tuesday to Wednesday at an arbitrary point during the day. Christmas Day starts and ends at a different time of day in each place. How do bank holidays work then?
- Use UTC but the days don’t change at 0:00h, they change at midnight, whatever time that is locally.
- We keep a few local time zones, maybe one for each continent, so that 0:00h is always during the night.
- We use UTC but also keep some concept of a local time, somehow.
This is the question that must be answered before we can resolve the scourge of time-zone chaos on our global society.
As an aside, I find it mad that we have all these discussions about clock and calendar reform, but the only unit we never try to reform is the week, even though the week is the only truly arbitrary unit. Somehow the week feels right and useful, but the natural units all feel wrong.