Time Zones – The Map Room

The Evolution of U.S. Time Zones

Jonathan Crowe — Wed, 08 May 2024 15:49:53 +0000

A short video from Vivid Maps showing the evolution of time zone boundaries in the United States. (The trend was inexorably westward: Michigan started out completely CST.)

Mapping Daylight Saving Time

Jonathan Crowe — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 00:27:03 +0000

Daylight saving time has been in the news again, with the U.S. Senate voting to make it permanent year-round. So it’s worth looking at maps that explore the impact of standard time and daylight saving time, and time zones in general, on the time of sunrise and sunset. And as far as the United States is concerned, that means looking at some maps by Andy Woodruff, who’s been exploring this question since at least this 2015 blog post. Which was supplanted in 2019 by this so-called gripe assistant tool to help you quantify your whining about the biannual change.

Andy Woodruff, Axis Maps (Twitter)

Andy Woodruff, Axis Maps (Twitter)

Finally, last week Andy produced the above infographic to illustrate your ideal time zone based on when you think your ideal sunrise and sunset is.

See also CityLab’s coverage (now subscriber-only), which is pretty Woodruff-heavy.

xkcd’s Time Zone Map

Jonathan Crowe — Wed, 15 Feb 2017 15:35:01 +0000

Randall Munroe, “Bad Map Projection: Time Zones,” 15 February 2017. xkcd.

Randall Munroe, “Bad Map Projection: Time Zones,” 15 February 2017. xkcd.

Randall Munroe is a bad man who is back with another bad map projection to make our eyes bleed. (If he does this often enough he’ll have enough for a book. Heaven forfend.) This one is, like his other maps, fiendishly subtle: it stretches and compresses countries to fit where their time zones ought to be, longitudinally speaking.