Time in Indiana

Time zones used in Indiana

The U. S. state of Indiana is divided into Eastern and Central time zones. The official dividing line has generally moved progressively west from its original location on the Indiana–Ohio border, to a position dividing Indiana down the middle, and finally to its current location along much of the Indiana–Illinois border. In April 2006, several southwestern and northwestern counties reverted to Central time. As much of Indiana is on the western frontier of the Eastern time zone, there was opposition from many in the state to observing daylight saving time there for decades. In 2005, the Indiana General Assembly reached a decision to implement daylight saving time state wide beginning in April 2006.

The most extensive study of time zone history in Indiana was published in The American Atlas (1978) by Thomas G. Shanks, in which the author identified 345 areas in the state with a different time zone history for each.

Before 1883 in the United States, most towns and cities set their own local time to noon when the sun was at its highest point in the sky. Since the sun reaches "high noon" four minutes later for every degree of longitude traveled towards the west, the time in every town was different. In Indiana, local mean time varied from GMT 5:39 in the east to GMT 5:52 in the west. With the emergence of the railroads, hundreds of miles could be traveled in a much shorter time, causing a train passenger to apparently experience several slight changes in time over the course of even a short rail trip. By 1883, the major railroads in the US agreed to coordinate their clocks and begin operating on "standard time" with four "time zones" established across the (then 38 state) nation, centered on the 75th, 90th, 105th, and 120th meridians west. On November 18, 1883, telegraph lines transmitted GMT to major cities, where each city was to adjust their official time to their proper zone. The state capital in Indianapolis lies at approximately the 86th meridian (U. S. Census Bureau), closer to the center of the Central Time Zone at the 90th meridian than the center of the Eastern Time Zone at the 75th meridian.

Time zones were first adopted by the United States Congress with the Standard Time Act of 1918. All of Indiana was located in the Central Time Zone. It was at this time the dividing line between Eastern Time and Central Time was moved from the Pennsylvania Ohio and West Virginia Ohio state lines. The Ohio Indiana state line became the time zone line in 1927 (north of US Route 40) and 1935 (from US Route 40 to the Ohio River). Daylight saving time (DST) was included in the original Standard Time Act. A year later, Congress repealed daylight saving time from the Standard Time Act of 1918, though some communities continued to follow it. In 1991, Starke County petitioned the USDOT to move it from the Central Time Zone to the Eastern Time Zone for the third time. This time, the petition was granted, effective October 27, 1991 (see and ).

On April 29, 2005, with heavy backing from Governor Mitch Daniels' economic development plan, and after years of controversy, the Indiana General Assembly passed a law stating that, effective April 2, 2006, the entire state of Indiana would become the 48th state to observe daylight saving time. The bill was also accompanied by Senate Enrolled Act 127, which required Governor Daniels to seek federal hearings from the USDOT on whether to keep Indiana on Eastern Time with New York City and Ohio or whether to move the entire state back to Central Time with Chicago. Independent from the situation facing Martin County, Pulaski County also formally petitioned for a return to the Eastern Time Zone. Pulaski County Commissioners and County Council both voted unanimously on February 6, 2006, to declare home rule and stay on Eastern Time if a federal agency did not grant an appeal to change the time zone ruling. However, the county conceded on March 27, 2006, officially accepting Central Time and switching time zones on April 2, 2006. After some residents pledged to unofficially continue observing Eastern Time, the county changed work hours for most county employees so that they were in sync with Eastern Time work hours. Dubois, Daviess, Knox, and Pike counties also decided to ask the federal government to return them to the Eastern Time Zone, and Dubois did so on April 27, 2006. The confusion involving the time status of these counties led to their being dubbed the "seesaw six." St. Joseph, Marshall, and Fulton counties overtly expressed interest in making another attempt to be changed to Central Time as of the end of 2006. Pulaski County returned to Eastern Time on March 11, the date when daylight saving time resumed. When standard time resumed on November 4, the five southwestern counties (Daviess, Dubois, Knox, Martin, and Pike) returned to the Eastern Time Zone. A petition from Perry County to move to the Eastern Time Zone was denied. With the exception of Perry and Starke counties, all counties that were moved to the Central Time Zone in 2006 were moved back to the Eastern Time Zone in 2007.

The decades long Indiana time zone debate remains controversial. Some argue that the entire state should move to Central Time, while some others would prefer to have the state return to the non observance of DST. The confusion caused to outsiders featured prominently in the plot of an episode of The West Wing in which presidential aides unfamiliar with Indiana's non observance of DST miss their return flight to Washington, D. C., on Air Force One and express consternation with the variances in the state's time measurement. Detractors of daylight saving time claim that scientific studies assessing the impact of the time policy change to DST in Indiana have identified a significant increase in energy usage and spending on electricity by Indiana households. Indiana households paid an additional $8.6 million in electricity bills according to University of California, Santa Barbara economics professor Matthew Kotchen and Ph. D. student Laura Grant, while supporters of Daylight Saving Time point to studies such as Professor Kotchen, the Department of Transportation and organizations such as the California Energy Commission claim that the United States saves approximately 1% of energy when Daylight Saving Time is being observed. Another wrinkle in the issue is the unnatural geographic location of this Eastern Time Zoned region. In the western Indiana counties where Eastern time is observed (South Bend and Lafayette south to Terre Haute and Vincennes), around the summer solstice, the sun neither sets until after 9:20 p. m., nor does it reach solar noon until almost 2:00 p. m. During the winter months when standard time is observed, school buses in western regions lose a valuable hour of the sun's rays as they pick up children in the morning. Another notable observation is that schools in the Eastern Time Zone of Indiana tend to have far more 2 hour delays, mainly due to the fact that sunlight is required for many road de icing components to work. With the sun rising as late as 8:20 a. m. in some areas, available sunlight is inadequate to safely thaw the roads for school buses to pick up all their passengers on time. The argument is that if the same area were in its geographically natural Central time zone, the sun would be up an hour sooner, and it would have an additional hour to thaw the roads every morning.