Hanke urges US to adopt UTC after House daylight saving vote
A Fortune columnist says ending clock changes would not fix the bigger problem: US time zones, which he argues should give way to UTC.
By Daniel Okafor · Business Editor
3 min read
The U.S. House voted 308-117 this week to pass the Sunshine Protection Act, a measure that would end the twice-a-year clock switch if it clears the Senate and is signed by President Trump. Fortune columnist Steve H. Hanke argues the bill would leave a larger problem in place: the country’s use of time zones.
Hanke, a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in Fortune that the United States should replace its existing time-zone system with Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC. Under his proposal, clocks across the country would show the same time, while local schedules would shift to match daylight.
From local sun time to railroad time
Hanke traced the current system to the period before standardized time, when churches, city halls and railroads kept local solar time. He wrote that cities set clocks according to the sun’s position, creating more than 300 local “sun zones” in the United States in the early 19th century.
Railroad expansion pushed the country toward standardization, according to Hanke. He wrote that in 1875 the United States had 75 railway times, including three in Chicago and six in St. Louis, a patchwork that caused scheduling problems, passenger confusion and deadly rail accidents.
Hanke said the time zones used today began in 1883 as Standard Railway Time. He wrote that Congress later gave legal status to the country’s current five time zones, excluding Hawaii, through the Standard Time Act of 1918.
How UTC would change daily schedules
UTC, also known as Greenwich Mean Time, would put every U.S. clock on the same hour, Hanke wrote. The visible difference would be the sun’s position at a given clock time in different parts of the country.
Hanke gave New York and San Francisco as examples. In New York, the moment now called noon would be 5 p.m. under UTC, while in San Francisco it would be 8 p.m., he wrote.
That would not mean workers would start before sunrise, according to Hanke. Instead, businesses would reset their hours: a New York business that now opens at 9 a.m. would open at 2 p.m. UTC and close at 10 p.m. UTC, while a San Francisco business with the same local schedule would open at 5 p.m. UTC and close at 1 a.m. UTC the next day.
Hanke cites health, aviation and markets
Hanke argued that adopting UTC would amount to a return to solar time because people would still organize life around daylight where they live. He wrote that such a shift would better align daily routines with circadian rhythms and reduce what he described as social jet lag and its health effects.
Hanke also pointed to fields that already use UTC. Pilots use it for safety, he wrote, while Wall Street timestamps global stock and commodity trades in UTC.
Modern technology has also moved in that direction, according to Hanke. He wrote that the internet, GPS and other systems already rely on UTC, which he described as a common time reference for much of the global economy.
Hanke is a senior contributing columnist at Fortune and co-founder, with Johns Hopkins physicist and astronomer Richard “Dick” Henry, of Hanke-Henry On Time. Fortune notes that views in its commentary pieces belong to the authors and do not necessarily reflect the publication’s views.
This story draws on original reporting from Fortune.