Bizarre Time Zone Proposal Puts Michigan in Awkward 1/2 Hour Time

Ask anyone around the times we change clocks twice a year and they're sure to have an opinion one way or another about Daylight Saving Time.

There's always some lawmaker raising the vitally important issue of ending the clock changing and staying on Standard Time all year - or maybe that's staying on Daylight Saving Time all year.

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One proposal few would likely get behind is to adopt a 'half' time zone that puts a region 30 minute ahead or behind a neighboring zone. It's not wholly uncommon around the world. The likely best known occurrence of a half-time zone would be the Canadian island of Newfoundland. There it's 30 minutes difference from neighboring zones. So if it's 1:00 Atlantic Time and 2:00 Eastern time, it would be 1:30 in Newfoundland.

A proposal for a :30 minute time zone was floated on social media for an area between Eastern and Central time including Michigan.

The proposed time zone, -5:30 from Greenwich Mean Time, would mean while it was Noon in New York and 11:00am in Chicago, it would be 11:30 in Detroit and Grand Rapids.

Odd? Without a doubt.

The proposed zone would keep all of lower Michigan in the East-Central (our made-up name) zone but instead of just the 4 western Upper Peninsula counties that border Canada being in Central Time, roughly two-thirds of the UP would break from the rest of the state. The diving line in the proposal would roughly be M-77, so everything west of a line from roughly Grand Marais, through Seney to Manistique would be Central Time.

Reddit u/gus_in_4k

The time zone keeps Michigan aligned with most of Indiana, all of Ohio stretching down to the tip of Florida.

There may be some merit to the idea if one lives in the far western parts of Michigan. Being on the western end of the time zone, sunlight lingers well into the evening on summer nights. A half-hour time zone proposal pushes that back by 30 minutes.

Is it likely to happen, nah? It's just a fun social media thought exercise. But think of this next time you hear a story about someone proposing to abolish Daylight Saving Time and realize how much more confusing it could be.