The best tool for dividing the state into time zones is the 120th meridian-120 degrees west.
![time in california time in california](https://s.hdnux.com/photos/74/07/30/15758854/9/rawImage.jpg)
In summer, the city of Blythe, on the Colorado River, sees the sun set an hour earlier than Cape Mendocino, on the northern coast.
![time in california time in california](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/5f/27/d2/5f27d208486e5f0bfafc648cd8b3d964.png)
San Francisco can experience sunrises and sunsets more than a half-hour later than San Diego. These distances mean that even though California is one time zone, it’s not really the same time wherever you are in California. Our eastern border with Arizona is more than 10 degrees east of our northwest corner. San Francisco, after all, is more than five degrees’ longitude west of San Diego. While Californians think of our state’s geography as running on a north-south axis, look at a map and you’ll see we’re a diagonal shape with a west-east orientation. This might sound crazy, but multiple time zones fit our peculiar geography. For five years, let’s divide into three time zones and see what happens. In my experiment, different parts of California would live under different times-while researchers study the effects. I propose that California conduct a time experiment on itself, much the way Silicon Valley shows different groups of people different versions of the same website in a ritual called A/B testing. How? By choosing all three time options, at the same time. Instead, I wish to emphasize the chance California now has to settle the question of what time policy is best-for the state and the world. The debate about daylight saving is worldwide, and includes many competing arguments I don’t want to spend precious time on. The third option would be to make daylight saving permanent, which would require a two-thirds vote of the legislature and federal approval. The second option would be to end daylight saving completely and return us to standard time year-round. So supporters raise the possibility of a second or third option, either of which would give our state its own time zone. The first is status quo: We could leave current daylight saving time in place, and continue to set our clocks an hour forward in spring and an hour back in fall.īut some Californians want to end those biannual clock shifts, in part because they correlate with increases in heart attacks, traffic accidents, and workplace accidents. One of Prop 7’s legislative sponsors, Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, says that the measure’s passage would present the state with three options. That’s an opportunity we should embrace in California, which has a paradoxical relationship to time: We are a place that runs ahead of the rest of the world in culture and technology even as our clocks spend every day running hours behind the rest of the world. But if it passes, Prop 7 would open a big conversation about how Californians set our clocks and live our lives. Most ballot measures seek to close debates. That would only be a dawn, not a dusk, in this tale of time, because Prop 7 is a rare and beautiful thing.