Back on the legislative matter – as I mentioned elsewhere, what should be really considered is a redrawing of the time zone boundaries. We no longer have to accommodate that the railroad’s home office is in the East Coast so therefore Indiana/Michigan/Ohio should be on Boston time – and for that matter, save for Pacific, the way they are drawn the reference longitude for each time zone is towards the east edge of the zone, rather than down the middle of it.
You have seen the maps, the “winter sunrise too late” band cuts across the NW end of each time zone in a diagonal – so, adjust that: move those states/counties over to the earlier-hour zone, and rename the zones. But of course, that would require someone at the responsible committee actualy sitting down and designing (or requesting the CRS and Naval Observatory to sit down and design) those new boundaries which would result in any number of congressmen arguing that their hometown needs to be as close to DC time as humanly possible and we’re back to where we started with the railroads.
Which brings up a part of the issue you can’t really legislate: what private businesses do about their business hours. Back in the early 20th Century someone figured the best times for office work in the East Coast were 9-to-5 EST, and it then became a matter of everyone becoming expected to have office hours 9-to-5 local regardless of conditions. Someone elsewhere mentioned that if most businesses changed their times to be an hour after latest sunrise, eventually people would start to complain “but I still want 5 hours of sunlight after quitting time!”
(One could imagine a rational world in which schools and businesses change their hours so you clock in at 8 or 9 between May Day and Halloween and then change that to 9 or 10 for “winter” – but part of the matter is that (a) we expect to have everyone be at work more or less at the same time as us (and the Transit Authority counts on that to schedule the buses) and (b) we have made non-agricultural work independent of non-extreme conditions – we have air conditioning, artificial lights, and now online connectivity that creates the expectation that I will answer a business e-mail 24/7 anywhere on the planet.)