What if we got rid of time zones?

What if we got rid of them altogether?

Ilearn from the National Post’s faithful daylightsavings-time correspondent Colby Cosh that Alberta has elected to preserve the traditional semi-annual ritual of turning the province’s clocks forward an hour in the spring and back an hour in the fall.

Opposition to the practice, as Cosh notes, divided fatally on the question of which time should be the norm from which the province no longer deviated: should it remain at the current daylight time the year round, or should it be permanently fixed at what is now standard time?

Should it, that is, synchronize watches with (most of) Saskatchewan, which is on Mountain Daylight Time (or if you prefer Central Standard Time) year round? Or should it allow B.C. to catch up with it in the warmer months, while remaining an hour ahead at other times? You see the dilemma.

As fascinating as this debate is — and there is no more controversial subject in some parts than daylight savings time — it opens the way to consideration of a much larger issue, which is the need to get rid of time zones altogether. Much of the confusion over daylight savings time, after all, arises from a basic misapprehension: that the time of day has some meaning independent of what we give it.

So it is with time zones. The premise underlying the division of the world into 24 time zones is that there is or should be some fixed relationship between solar time — how far you are along the earth’s daily axial rotation at any given moment, relative to the sun — and clock time. The sun should be at its zenith, in this model, at noon, wherever you are; the night should likewise end and the day start at 12 a.m., in Mumbai or New York. But since solar time will vary at different points on earth depending on which line of longitude they are on, so must the local clock time.

So universal is this assumption that we accept the current profusion of time zones as natural and inevitable. But of course there is only one time in reality: wherever you are, at this instant, it is the same moment in time. We are simply assigning different names to the same thing — with much resulting complexity and confusion.

Sorry, did I say there were 24 time zones? In practice there are many more, depending on the accidents of geography, custom and local politics. Canada, for example, is divided into five time zones, an hour apart — plus another in Newfoundland, 30 minutes ahead. Nepal is 15 minutes ahead of India, which is half an hour ahead of Pakistan. Places on the same line of longitude will nevertheless frequently fall into different time zones: Chile is due south of Peru yet an hour ahead, while Paraguay is an hour behind Argentina despite being to its east.

Every so often some place or other will elect to change time zones, further confusing matters. To say nothing of the mind-bending weirdness of the International Dateline, about which the less said the better.

It’s all a recipe for missed connections, misunderstandings and uncertainty. If you travel about this country on business, you will no doubt have had occasion to curse your computer calendar, having carefully scheduled an 8 a.m. meeting in Toronto the week before in Vancouver, only to find (too late!) the time had been helpfully “updated” to 11 a.m. en route. Airlines know the havoc this could cause, which is why the world’s airlines all set their clocks to the same Coordinated Universal Time, the former Greenwich Mean Time.

Hence the movement in recent years, spearheaded by two American professors, physicist Richard Conn Henry and economist Stephen Hanke, to adopt the same policy more generally: to abolish all time zones, in favour of a single Universal Time, worldwide. That, after all, was why time zones were first invented (by Sir Sandford Fleming, a Canadian), in 1883 — not to differentiate time between zones, but to standardize it (“standard time”) within each.

Before then every town had its own (sun-based) time, a quaint local peculiarity that became intolerable with the advent of the railroad, and railroad schedules. A similar phenomenon now argues for making the whole world a single time zone. Indeed, in an age of instantaneous global communications, when people are working together in real time in offices half a world apart, it already is. As Hanke told the Washington Post last year, “the railroad annihilated distances and made reform necessary. Today the agency of the internet has annihilated time and space completely, and set us up for adoption of worldwide time.”

At first this sounds like it would create its own confusion. You mean when it was 9 a.m. in London, it would be 9 a.m. everywhere — from Vancouver to Toronto, from New York to Mumbai? Wouldn’t it be the middle of the night in Vancouver? Yes, it would — which is why it would be silly to carry on with the same old schedule as if we were still reckoning time by the sun’s height in the sky. Rather than start their workday at 09:00 (Universal Time), Vancouverites would start at 5 p.m. — or rather, 17:00. They might knock off for a beer after work around 00:30 — it is Vancouver, after all — and turn in for the night at 08:00. Before long it wouldn’t seem so strange.

This wouldn’t entirely eliminate the daylight savings issue. People in the higher latitudes would still debate how to adjust to the lengthening and shortening of the days with the seasons. Only rather than adjust their clocks, they’d adjust their schedules. You say it’s too dark in winter for kids to go to school at 14:00? Fine — start the school day at 15:00. 15:00 in the morning.