Earlier this week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the “Sunshine Protection Act” by a 308-117 margin. If it passes muster in the Senate and is signed by President Trump, the semiannual clock-changing exercise would stop. Daylight saving time would reign supreme. While this is a step in the right direction, it doesn’t go far enough. We would still be left with troublesome time zones.
Before the adoption of standard measures of time, churches, city halls, and trains kept solar time. Every city, depending on its location, observed its own solar time, once referred to as “true time” in the United States. In the early 19th century, there were more than 300 “sun zones” in the U.S. alone. It wasn’t until the proliferation of railways that time standardization arose to resolve logistical and scheduling nightmares and passenger confusion, not to mention fatal railroad accidents. In 1875, there were 75 different railway times in the United States, with three in Chicago and six in St. Louis alone. In 1883, the time zones we know today were introduced as Standard Railway Time. It wasn’t until 1918, with the passage of the Standard Time Act, that our five current time zones (excluding Hawaii) were enacted into law.
It’s time to scrap our current system of time zones in favor of the adoption of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), also known as Greenwich Mean Time. This would mean that everyone’s watches in the United States would be set to exactly the same time. The only difference they would notice, depending on where they are located, would be where the sun is in the sky at a particular hour. Midday would be as it is today in all parts of the USA, when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky. What would be different under UTC is the time on your watch. In New York, midday would no longer be 12:00 p.m., but rather 5:00 p.m. (17:00 UTC). In San Francisco, midday would no longer be 12:00 p.m. but rather 8:00 p.m. (20:00 UTC).
The adoption of UTC would not mean that people would be going to work in darkness in certain parts of the country. Business hours would be adjusted to UTC. For example, in New York, under UTC, what is now a 9:00 a.m. opening would become 2:00 p.m. (14:00 UTC), and businesses would close eight hours later at 10:00 p.m. (22:00 UTC). In San Francisco, what is now a 9:00 a.m. opening would become 5:00 p.m. (17:00 UTC), and businesses would close eight hours later at 1:00 a.m. (01:00 UTC) the following day.
Adoption of UTC would allow for a return to “true time” — that is, solar time. With that, everyone in the U.S. would rise with the sun in the morning and go to sleep when it’s dark at night, according to their natural circadian rhythm. Social jet lag and its negative health effects would become a thing of the past.
Pilots, for the obvious benefits of safety, already use UTC. Wall Street uses it, too — all global stock and commodity trades are stamped in UTC. And that’s not all. Virtually all modern technologies, including the internet and GPS, have spontaneously adopted UTC. It’s time for the rest of us to do the same. After all, UTC is the thread that already ties most of the global economy together.
Steve H. Hanke is a Senior Contributing Columnist at Fortune and a Professor of Applied Economics at The Johns Hopkins University. He is also a cofounder with Richard “Dick” Henry, a Johns Hopkins colleague and Professor of Physics and Astronomy, of Hanke-Henry On Time: http://hankehenryontime.com/.
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