Road Signs: Time to change to Metric?

[heckflosse]

Originally Posted by volvoid

All this is driving me to drink
I fancy a pint. Chased with 1/6th gill for starters, make that a double.
Breakfast tea of course, did you think I was on the booze at 8 am GMT ?
World time follows us, quite rightly.



that chart at the start missed lots of measuers off, is it an American dumbed-down version ?

Should've harmonised American/British measurements back when both of our countries were at their peak.
Still, with a potential duo of mad hair traditionalists running the shows from either side of the Atlantic, anything is possible.
Meanwhile, metric Europe unravels..

[canis]

Can't stand the metric system. It's so confusing, all those tens and zeros, and I never know how many. I guess my mind just doesn't work that way.

Yes, I know, a liter of water weighs a kilogram. Fantastic.

Now, tell me: How many millimeters is a sheet of 8x4? And if you can remember that many obscure numbers (8 of 'em), now compare the price of it to the two sheets of 8x2 at the other end of the builder's merchants. Which is cheaper? You won't have a clue, because you'll never be able to hold all these numbers in your head and perform calculations on them. There are too many. All this stuff can be calculated easily using imperial measures.

Metric has it's uses. It's very good for scientific stuff. But for everyday use in the real world, it's a PITA. When building stuff, we tend to measure from a centre line. Everything has a centre and it's always right in the middle. Halving imperial units is a cynch! 3/8 becomes 3/16, etc. Same with doubling, 3/8 becomes 3/4. It's so easy!

When I was working in a factory producing polythene, we used imperial measurements (this was pre-1992-and-all-that) and writing out the tickets was quick and simple. Once we took on MOD work, who insisted on metric, writing out "mm" a hundred times made my hand ache, and by the end of a shift it was just a crude zig-zag.

I am not a computer. Performing multiplication on four figure numbers just doesn't work out when I'm buying timber for a job.

[ThomasG]

I spent good 15 years getting used to it!
No! No change. Too late.

[Triple-S]

Being a true Englishman brought up on imperial units, I cheered when Brexit seemed to imply we would at last get sensible again and ditch the crazy half-metric system they now seem to teach us here.
True metric (ie European) linear measurement is in mm: I know as had to design equipment to fit large French machinery, and I too found all those rows of noughts after the length of machine beds some 30ft long ridiculous. However, some dumb overpaid clerk decided the UK would be different and use the cm as the unit of linear measurement - acc to British Standards a non-preferred unit. So ever since that seemed to be taught at schools the kids grew up using a non-preferred unit - typical....
Now is our opportunity - dump everything metric (my grand-daughter asked me only last weekend how many grams in the 2 ounces her cookery class demanded...) but I fear that, like so many other necessary and important decisions, this won't be addressed. We will still muddle on: builders will still demand 8' x 4' sheets of ply, stud-walls will still use 3" x 2" studs at 16" centres to suit insulation rolls made that width to suit the millions of homes having rafters of that pitch......
Yes - we have been a very sad spineless bunch these last many years in not organising opposition parties to such rubbish decisions - and we still are.

P

[Sysyphus]

The standardization of everything eliminates a lot of the joy of travel... as an English lad who started school in the mid-sixties we were taught the new-fangled metric system, and prepared for decimalization with TV jingles that stilll haunt my memory from time to time... by the time I grew up and went out into the world, late seventies, most things were still in pounds and ounces, feet and inches, etc....

I feel sad for the youth of today who will never know the joy of getting off a train in Milan at 3am with pockets full of guilders, francs and marks, and then becoming an near millionaire in lire, using the same curly L pound symbol when you paid for two cups of coffee with a hundred dollar travelers check...

As an ex-pat now in the USA it’s not just the metric that confuses... every pint I buy is three mouthfuls short, but that is eclipsed by the joy of finding the odd pub that serves “real” imperial pints that suddenly seem almost too heavy to start with... I wonder why my MPG is so poor before realizing I have 20% smaller gallons but the same miles, then shake my head trying to figure out how long it’s going to take to get to the road works 2,000 ft ahead, when clearly thousands of feet is a measurement of vertical distance...

And then there’s the trips to Canada... Americans struggling with the concept of exchange rates wondering how much richer or poorer they have become because of the difference in dollar values, the pure lizard-brain excitement of seeing 100 in a red circle before your intellect reminds you it’s kilometers, the amazement that the original 478 on the sign to Montreal seems to be dropping so quickly, the utter bewilderment resulting from the effort of attempting to convert Canadian dollar priced liters per 100km into miles per US gallon... and my favorite: my cousin works for the Ontario agriculture department and tells me the officially recognized measure for fertilizer/pesticide application is kilograms per acre... “because no farmer has the slightest idea what a hectare is”

[Simmy]

Originally Posted by 850Chris

I know this will be a controversial one, but;

Given that we're all now taught in metric (and have been for some 20 years), isn't it high time that road sign distances and speed limits were updated from imperial to metric units?

no brexit

[wimorrison]

I started seniors school (that is what we called secondary in Scotland then) in 1965 and was taught using the KMS system (kilograms, meters, and seconds) which is. Is knows as the Metric System and I find it strange how many people younger than me still hang onto imperial measurements as they must (or should) have been brought up at school using metric measurements.

I can honestly say that I have no desire to go back to inches, feet, yards, chains, furlongs and miles though I do use and understand miles. Similarly ounces, points, stones, hundredweights and tons doesn’t make sense with 16, 24, 8 and 20 being the operative numbers for weight - decimal is so much easier

The anomaly would appear to be time but it isn’t as all measurements in calculations are done in seconds only, plus as they are a function of the earth and sun we are kinda stuck with them

[green van man]

When I was in collage in 1969 the SI or System International was just becoming an option in exams. As I was more conversant with the imperial system I used that, continuing to do so throughout my apprenticeship.
I have never found the imperial system difficult. Halving and halving again gives a logical progression of length and division, 1/2 1/4 1/8 1/16 1/32 1/64.
Even thousandths of an inch I found easily visualised, .025" was easily visualised when gapping plugs and invariably close enough when checked with feeler gauges and .015 for points
Weight was again simple, 16 oz to the 1lb 14 lb to the stone and 112lb to the cwt, 20 cwt to the ton, or 2240lb to the ton.
1760 yds to the mile or 2000 yds to the nautical mile.

These all mean a lot more to me than mm,cm,m or km 1 km is .6 of a mile and 4.6 litres are a gallon or 8 pints, a gallon of water weighs 10lb while a gallon of petrol 8lb.
Barometric pressure is 14.5lb to the square inch and I run my Volvo tyres at 41 psi.
Torque measurements in ft lbs are simplicity itself and I can visualise a force of x lbs at a radius of 1ft, NM are just a number to set on the torque wrench.

Paul.

[The Landshark]

We changed here about 15 years ago, it was easy enough but I have been using metric for a long time anyway, 8x4 sheets are 2500mm x 1250mm and have been for a good while before we changed the road signs.
Ditching imperial units made a lot of calculations easier anyway, i work in process engineering and working out pipe volumes is way easier in metric.
It was long past time to get rid of some more of the legacy of the British Empire and join the rest of the world.
Imperial is too confusing anyway, i could never figure out all the different ounces, gallons, hundredweights tons and miles.

[DaveNP]

Originally Posted by The Landshark

We changed here about 15 years ago, it was easy enough but I have been using metric for a long time anyway, 8x4 sheets are 2500mm x 1250mm and have been for a good while before we changed the road signs.

Aah but we're British and we'll never bow to those eurocrats who want us to buy metric wood, we'd rather have our independence and buy it in American sizes (even if it's actually sold in sheets 2440mm x 1220mm)