To be fair, high noon is rarely 12:00 even without DST. West Saskatchewan and the Yukon have quite a big mismatch with solar time. The idea behind Sandford Fleming’s innovation was that some mismatch is acceptable if it means you don’t get a different time zone in every stop along the railway.
Personally, I think this system is not really the best for the modern globalized age. I would prefer something like Swatch Internet Time or even just using UTC exclusively everywhere. It’s just a social construct that the sun rises at what we label with numbers between 5 and 9 (usually), and we start working at what’s labelled 9. You could just as easily (more easily in my opinion) shift those labels depending on geography, instead of using the same labels and deciding on an offset. But it will never happen because of inertia. Look how difficult it is to get rid of a dumb idea like the biannual clock shift (not to say DST) because of inertia.
To be fair, high noon is rarely 12:00 even without DST. West Saskatchewan and the Yukon have quite a big mismatch with solar time. The idea behind Sandford Fleming’s innovation was that some mismatch is acceptable if it means you don’t get a different time zone in every stop along the railway.
Personally, I think this system is not really the best for the modern globalized age. I would prefer something like Swatch Internet Time or even just using UTC exclusively everywhere. It’s just a social construct that the sun rises at what we label with numbers between 5 and 9 (usually), and we start working at what’s labelled 9. You could just as easily (more easily in my opinion) shift those labels depending on geography, instead of using the same labels and deciding on an offset. But it will never happen because of inertia. Look how difficult it is to get rid of a dumb idea like the biannual clock shift (not to say DST) because of inertia.