Not exactly an established fact, the above, but perhaps a tenable opinion.
DST is not necessarily antiquated and ridiculous. Many folks in the US are quite content to trade an hour of pre-wakeup daylight for an extra hour of daylight in the evening. Additionally, the energy savings of DST are measureable.
OTOH, there are also, indeed, quite a few costs associated with DST.
YMMV
As someone who lives in the northern part of the contiguous USA, I love DST.
Without it, sunrise in summer would be around 4:30am, and sunset around 8pm.
Having sunrise at 5:30am and sunset at 9pm makes much for sense for those of us who work non-farm related jobs. It let’s us make the most use of daylight hrs, and still work standard business hours (usually 8am-5pm in this area)
So there are people who get up, drive a half hour to work, and when they get there it’s an hour and a half later? And when they drive home they arrive an hour earlier than when they left? Ugh. I think I’d lose my mind.
Doesn’t anyone remember the Conan O’Brien skit for several years running where he had a party boy stationed in western Indiana ready to jump in his car and cross over to the next county so he could celebrate New Year’s twice?
IIRC, the final time he did it, the party boy headed south instead of west and wound up still on eastern time.
I just recently moved to IN and I think the time thing is weird. We have one teacher at our school who lives in an area that does not do DST, while we do here. She also lives an hour away. So she gets up at 4:30 to get herself and the kids ready for school, in order to leave by 5:30, to drive an hour to school and get there by 7:30!!! Of course, she also leaves school at 3:30, drives an hour home, and it’s still only 3:30 when she gets there.
It’s a large, urban center right across the border from Indiana. Therefore, there are a number of people in southern Indiana who commute to St. Louis to work, just as I commute across the the Illinois border every workday. If you clicked on the linked provided earlier in the thread, you’ll see a couple of counties downstate near St. Louis also follow Central time, including Daylight Savings.
As I mentioned before, it’s not that Indiana “did away” with it - they never adopted it in the first place except in a very few places.
More or less, yes. Then again, if the entire state was on the same clock it would most likely be Eastern time (majority rules, I’m assuming). In which case I would be doing just that for at least six months of the year, since Chicago, where I work, isn’t going to move off Central time.
Quick note: St. Louis is right across the border from Illinois, not Indiana.
See post #7 above.
Picky, picky, picky…
Language evolves over time. Clearly, we have an instance were a number of people use one term, and others use a variant of that term.
Apparently, there is some confusion even among those who should know better (from the earlier website - scroll way, way down):
It doesn’t matter enough to me for me to get worked up over it, and I’m unlikely to exert myself to change, just to please you.
You are probably not aware of it, but that font you used to highlight the offending term is just about invisible against the default background to those of us who have red/green color vision deficiencies. So I’ll make you a deal - YOU post in a font color I can actually see, and *maybe * I’ll consider mending my ways when refering to seasonal time changes.
My bad - you are correct (obviously I don’t spend much time in that area) but I think Evansville may be close enough to St. Louis that there are strong enough economic ties to influence the decision to follow St. Louis time habits.
Broomstick,
I’m originally from Evansville, in the southwestern part of Indiana that is in the central time zone, and I would say it’s definitely reaching a bit to say that there’s even a small contigent of daily commuters to St. Louis for work. It’s over 160 miles & 2.5 hours away. To me, there’s no rhyme or reason why that part of the state differs in time from the remainder because there are no large population centers nearby. Louisville, 100 miles to the east is the closet. Nashville, Indy, & STL are all 160-180 miles away. It’s hard to define which of those areas would have the strongest economic ties but my guess would be Indy. I always chalked up the time zone difference to the general backwardness of the area, actually.
Well, OK, I’ll go with “backward”, too, or “stubborn” or “ornery” - I’m not about to argue with someone from Evansville when I don’t think I’ve ever been there myself.
Indiana has three things going on at the same time, and it is important to understand each of the three things to understand what happens to the state as a whole.
Part of Indiana is in the Central Time Zone, most of it is in Eastern Time. This is not the only state divided by a time zone change; Idaho, Kansas and Kentucky are similarly divided, and that is just off the top of my head. The parts on Central Time are in that zone because they wish to remain connected economically to the neighboring states that are on Central Time. For the Gary, Indiana area, this makes much sense (staying on time with Chicago). For Evansville, it makes much less sense, but one presumes they wanted to remain tied to the general region that includes Western Kentucky and Southern Illinois. These counties stay on the Central Time Zone plan, all year round.
Part of Indiana is economically tied to Cincinnati, so it stays on Cincinnati time, including Daylight Saving Time.
The rest of Indiana sees no point to changing its clocks for half a year. The main rationale asserted for this is that animal farmers don’t derive any benefit from changing the clock; tied as they are to a schedule based on the movement of the sun, all DST does is force them to get up an hour earlier by the clock. Indiana is already so far west that it barely makes sense to have it be part of Eastern Time to begin with; so there is no overwhelmingly strong argument in favor of clock changing for most of the state. Eventually, one suspects that the developing urban centers in Indiana will overcome this inertia in favor of staying put, though if they don’t, it isn’t like this would be the only way Hoosiers would be identifiably different from the rest of our nation. 
Texas and Oregon each have small sections in a different time zone from most of the state, just as Kansas does. In these three cases, the dividing line is not really close to major population centers of those states.
Nebraska and the Dakotas have larger divisions.
Don’t forget that those counties in Michigan that border Wisconsin are in Central, while the rest of the state is in Eastern.
I lived in Evansville, too. I think the strongest economic ties are not with Indianapolis, but with Henderson (right across the river) and Owensboro (just up river) in Kentucky. That part of Kentucky is in the Central time zone. In that case, it would have made perfect sense to jigger the time zone line a few counties east.
Whatever timezone we are in, are we all to spring forward at 2AM?
If so, then in Indiana it seems that one hour each year all clocks in the state should read the same hour and one hour each year there will be three different readings.
The “Indiana solution” is absurd. If there are timezones in the world, every zone will have people living on the boundary edge and some will have to travel back and forth frequently. That oddity is part of system, trying to undo it makes things more complicated not less.
“I’m also at a loss to understand what possible benefit there is for them to not observe it.”
what possible benifit is there to the system in the first place?
once a year for an entire week the accident rate shoots through the roof as the entire work force shows up running on an hour less sleep.
there is no extra hour of daylight, what the hell is this? does setting your clock to a different time really yank a free hour out of some magical time zone we dont know about?
wouldnt we see virtually the exact same benifits if all clocks were moved 30minutes in the appropriate direction and just LEFT ALONE?
really any state that dumps dst is on the right track if you ask me. it takes the human body 30 days on average to adjust to a new sleep schedule and the government has the entire country jumping through some imaginary hoop twice a year for a benifit that apperantly noone can explain or quantify.
really what are the benifits of dst?
You’re saying the average person spends one month geting used to DST? That common jet lag takes a month to overcome? It takes me and everyone I know more like one day per hour of difference.
I’m gonna need a cite for that, it seems rather preposterous to me.
I agree with this statement. The Evansville area and western Kentucky are tied together much stronger than Evansville is with the rest of the state. I would venture a guess and say that perhaps the SW part of the state choose to stay in the central time zone because Evansville is the regional economic hub for the area and preferred a common timezone with its markets in KY & IL.
As an aside, I always thought that SW Indiana was much more southern in culture & mentality anyway. I didn’t call it Evantucky for nothin’.