Transcription
A map of the world with vertical lines marking the time zones from UTC-12 to UTC+12. It has a legend:
Wrong Time
"Natural time zones" are 15° in longitude. Land in red observes a time other than the zone it lies within. Smaller islands depict their 12 nautical mile territorial sea, for visual effect. In some cases this includes a state's archipelagic waters.
Plate Carrée projection, WGS-84 datum. December 2018 © International Mapping, all rights reserved.
Lets just do a single time zone
I prefer the current way
I can be in another state or another country and I know that 7am is a good time for breakfast, around noon is a good time for lunch, and so forth. (If you don't change latitude sure, just go outside to figure this out, but it's complicated if it's overcast, or the latitude isn't what you're used to, or...)
Time has a number of meanings
UTC is great for machines, local time is (IMHO) a good concept for humans.
I think local time would work pretty much the same with a single time zone.
Single time zone: You get to a new place and look up what time is good for breakfast here
Many time zones: You get to a new place and look up what time zone you're in.
Either way you need to look up what the local time is. But with a single time zone, i think the breakfast time and work hours would be a bit better attuned to sunrise/sunset at your location.
To me, the main difference is more philosophical. I think it'd encourage a more global perspective.
Edit to add: it's more of a pie in the sky wish. I dont think it would be worthwhile to actually remove time zones. It would be very expensive for not a lot of gain. In the same vein, I'd like to:
sort out our calendar (evenly sized months, dates corresponding to weekdays, and not have prime number of weekdays),
sort out our time units. Lets keep it all in the same base (not 24h days and 60min per hour)
transition to a base-12 numeric system. It's just much more satisfying.
Well, sorta
but it's no effort at all because my timekeeping device (phone) does this automatically.
For me, the time of day is internalized in a way that I think is hard to switch. Same as how I was raised with imperial units
even though I prefer (and use professionally) metric, the intuition can be a little harder to get. But to each their own of course :)