The fun trick is that on the western edge of the Eastern time zone, kids have to travel to school in the dark. It's probably reasonable that we defer to population though.
I live in Atlanta. Central time starts about sixty miles west of me at the Alabama line. Sunrise was at 7:54 this morning. That means when I woke up at 7 there was no visible light.
The solution to this would be for Atlanta to be on Central time (which it actually was, historically) but that won't happen - time zone boundaries generally shift west over time, and this one overshot the mark.
