The UK Metric Association (no, I’d never heard of them either) are using the 2012 Olympics as an excuse to call for the UK to convert its road signs to the metric system. If it happens (which it won’t) it would mean that we, at least, get something positive from the Olympics.
The history of metrification in the UK is long and tortuous. The BBC news story says
The UKMA says conversion of road signs was originally intended as part of metrification when it started in 1965 and should have been completed by 1973.
But it was put on hold in 1970 and never restarted.
I’m pretty sure that this stop-start approach to metrification went far beyond just road signs. I started school in 1967 and from what I remember we were just taught metric measurement at the time. I suspect that’s partly because it’s so much easier to teach than imperial units but mainly because people genuinely thought that imperial units wouldn’t be around by the time we left school. Then in 1970 it all changed (the government changed from Labour to Conservative in the 1970 General Election) and we were being taught imperial units again. But the damage had been done. Having been introduced to kilogrammes, metres and the like it was very hard for me to go back to the confusion of imperial units. Even today I have to stop and think how many ounces there are in a pound or how many pounds in a stone. And I really have no idea how long a mile is or how big an acre is. Whereas there are people both older and younger than me who were introduced to imperial units as soon as the started school and feel completely comfortable with them.
The UK is still slowly converting to the metric system. The currency changed in 1970, all groceries are now weighed in kilograms and you buy petrol by the litre. The only things I can think of that are still generally measured in imperial units are pints of milk and beer and distances. I’ve probably missed a few.
There’s no need for the transition to drag on. According the original plan it should have been over thirty years ago. The Olympics give us a good excuse to tick off another milestone (see what I did there?)
It won’t happen though.
I don’t think it’s worth the hassle. We all know how far it feels to drive 100 miles, or what driving at 30mph is like.I always buy meat and fruit from the market in pounds. An 8oz steak or 10oz steak makes sense to me, but I wouldn’t order a 300 gram steak because it sounds silly. And I’m 26.There’s more important stuff than this to think about, people should just leave it alone.
Well an acre is the area one man can plough in one day with one ox & plough.
Alisatir Darling on the Today programme this morning said that the government had better ways to spend £700million than on changing all the road signs so it wasn’t going to happen.
So expect it to be policy this time next week :-)
I remember hearing plenty of people saying similar things about decimalisation. But 35 years on would you honestly want to go back to shillings?
Of course you still weigh people in stones, which I think will be the hardest thing for me to get used to when I move to London in May.
But nobody is confused. What’s the problem?(OK, so perhaps foreigners are confused, but it’s probably not worth changing the law for that.)
Ian,I’m not saying that people are confused. Well, ok, I sometimes get a bit confused but that’s not really important.What I’m saying is that the metric system is better than the imperial system. I’ve never seen a convincing argument again that. I’m also saying that people will, of course, object to the new system in the same way as they did about decimalisation, but that any objections will be short-lived as they were in 1971.I’m also saying that our current mixed system is crazy. You buy petrol in litres and beer in pints. How can that be considered sane.Moving completely over to the metric system will makes things much simpler. But, as I said in the original post, it won’t be happening any time soon.
Am I the only one who buys petrol by the ‘tankfull’? I put the petrol in the car until it is full. Other people by it by the quid. I’ve yet to see someone want an exact measurement.More worrying that beer is sold both in imperial and metric measurements. Some bottled beer is 330ml (or 440ml).
It’s a fair point. I don’t often buy petrol (not having a car or, indeed, a licence) but on the rare occasions when I’m filling up a car the most common approaches are a) just fill it up and b) put thirty quid’s worth in.Maybe I should have said that petrol is _priced_ by the litre.
Maybe we have missed something important about driving distances; The reason kilometres are no easier than miles is that there is no ‘higher’ unit they need to be divided into. We just get more and more miles. The only reason money is easier in metric is because we have a nice ratio of pennies to pounds, both of which we use daily. Similarly with weight we have a simple ratio from grams to kilograms.
But when driving, we never need to divide miles into anything. So there is no big advantage in going over to kilometres for driving signs.
In fact, there is some advantage to miles because on long distance roads you normally end up driving at about 60mph average (legally) so you get a simple calculation of 1 mile = 1 minute travelling time. So you can use the road signs to directly estimate roughly how many minutes you have to your destination.
Just my 2 shillings and sixpence anyway.
I’ve only just come across this and am a little late commenting, but just to comment on some of the comments here.First, I am British and was educated in metric. I AM confused, I just don’t know how much liquid is in thge 32oz drink at my local Subway and I don’t know what the logic is in putting 10ths of a mile on my odometer when it refers to 176 yards… what good is that when you see a sign that says “Road works, 800 yards”?Metric is easier in all areas. It’s all base 10. Kevin Littlefield says “there is no ‘higher’ unit they need to be divided into” when refering to miles… same with km mate! The only difference is that if you see a sign that gives a distance of “100 metres” to something, it’s 1/10 of a km. And as for speed, when you’re in urban traffic at, say, 40mph… that’s about 60km/h so 1km per minute so it’s reasonable to say you’ve travelled 30km in 30 minutes. Ok, so the maths changes if you’re doing 100km/h, but the same would apply to 70mph, 50mph, etc.Oh… and all our cars are made in metric, so a sign that gives a height limit in feet and inches is utterly useless these days!And as for weighing ourselves in stones… no wonder our kids are obese when they can’t see the link between the weight of their food and their own weight. I’m 77kg and so I know that’s the equivalent of 77 bags of sugar or 77 litres of water. How many of you could do that with stones and lbs without having to break out a calculator?Not changing is costing the country money… lets get it done!
I think units in this country are a complete mess. In junior school in the 1960s we learned dreaded long multiplication and division with £sd, stones/pounds/ounces, miles/furlongs/yards, etc.It was a relief in the 1970s that we switched to metric. I was actually able to calculate something!We have two systems in this country: a) the modern map-makers, highway engineers, scientists, divers, mountaineers etc who use metric and b) the stuck in the past imperialist politicians and tabloid journalists.The current situation just wastes education, confuses things and wastes money. A classic example is hiking. The OS map has used the kilometre grid reference system since WW2. Yet regulations require footpaths to be market in miles and yards. What a waste of maps!