Funny, I was just thinking about this earlier today. Specifically, I was comparing the sunrise/sunset times for A Coruña, Spain and Niš, Serbia, two cities that share a time zone despite over 1500 miles between them. (I chose these cities because they're at approximately the same latitude near one of the widest points of the CET zone.) Their respective sunrises are a whole two hours apart:
The Central European time zone could probably use a bit of fragmentation.
A more extreme example is China, which has been "unified" under one single time zone since 1949, despite the fact that the country's over 3000 miles wide. That makes for a four hour difference in sunrises between east and west. Of course, this is a bit problematic for the west:
http://www.gaisma.com/en/location/a-coruna.html
http://www.gaisma.com/en/location/nis.html
The Central European time zone could probably use a bit of fragmentation.
A more extreme example is China, which has been "unified" under one single time zone since 1949, despite the fact that the country's over 3000 miles wide. That makes for a four hour difference in sunrises between east and west. Of course, this is a bit problematic for the west:
http://www.wisegeek.org/why-does-china-have-only-one-time-zo...