Has someone calculated the optimal unique timezone for the EU given population distribution and the goal to minimize the sum product of number of people and solar time difference?
If I've done the math correctly (and this was very quick and dirty) you get something like +0:40 / 10 degrees E, roughly the longitude of Hamburg or Milan. Ultimately there's gridded population data that could be used to get a better answer but I suspect it's in this neighborhood.
Centers of population of each country: https://cs.baylor.edu/~hamerly/software/europe_population_we...
Country populations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_state_of_the_European_U...
If I've done the math correctly (and this was very quick and dirty) you get something like +0:40 / 10 degrees E, roughly the longitude of Hamburg or Milan. Ultimately there's gridded population data that could be used to get a better answer but I suspect it's in this neighborhood.