You want clarity. That is good.

So why do you want a mess of units like miles, yards, feet, inches and miles per hour? Why so many, especially when they relate to each other with awkward numbers like 12, 3, 36, 1760, 5280, 63360?

The obvious alternative is to use metric only for both the highway code and road signs. All that would be needed is the metre, kilometre and kilometre per hour. When you consider that kilometre just means 1000 metres it is even better.

You say British people prefer Imperial. I say they are confused over measurement because of the way things are in Britain. For example I often hear people talk in metres for short distances and lapse into miles for longer distances. How clearly are they thinking?

Yes we want clarity. For that we need a single system that everybody can understand and use. We need metric!

Given that this blog is on the UK Metric Association website, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear me say that I think that the Highway Code suffers tremendously by continuing with it’s referral to Imperial measures. The yard, foot and inch are not referred to anywhere.

Everything else on their website seems “proper metric,” with no mention of Imperial equivalents.

In the US, we would call this cider, and the fermented beverage, hard cider. Apple juice is a filtered, clarified amber liquid (which has the unfortunate effect of removing most of the flavor). We would regard the “3lbs of apples” as an advertising claim and pay it little attention as long as net contents, ingredients, and nutritional info were OK.

Such a suit would be tossed out of court and the person striking the bridge could easily be found guilty of criminal action if it is proved that they indeed learned metric in school. If they claimed they forgot it then that is their problem and fault.

It would be interesting if Irish driving tests now require a proof of a working knowledge of metric units. Such a test would deny driving privileges to those that don’t and no license would be given until a satisfactory knowledge of metric units is demonstrated. This would eliminate any need to justify dual unit confusing signs based on such an argument.

By the same logic, do Irish drivers who speed and cause accidents claim they thought the speed signs mean miles per hour? I remember one case of a speeder getting a light sentence some years ago because even the judge claimed he understood miles better. But wasn’t that travesty put to rest already or is that excuse still used?

The UK’s biggest problem with completion of metric is getting the public to think metric outside work. This is isn’t helped by the fact that as we share a common language with the USA, the UK broadcasters don’t have to dub or subtitle measurements on US TV Shows, of which there is a massive amount on British TV. Any watcher of CSI will know that they constantly refer to imperial measurements as do most UK tv shows – a new prime time quiz called ‘The whole 19 yards’ is a good example.

By comparison, in mainland Europe, broadcasters always convert any reference to measurements to metric before broadcasting. Weightwatchers, another US concern, refers to British measurements on its website, and in the home a lot of people refer to feet and inches, stones, pounds and ounces when referring to their own body.

Interestingly all the TV chefs refer to metric measurements – Delia Smith refused to for a long time but seems to have relented now. All cookery books are metric so I am guessing that most people are happy using metric measurements in the kitchen. It makes it a lot easier when shopping as all of the supermarkets are metric, with very little reference to imperial measurements. There is a move in the UK to rational metric measures, although there was, I believe some restriction as to the pack sizes of certain products which I expect was to prevent unscrupulous producers selling smaller pack sizes of the commodity to customers at the same price as its Imperial predecessor.

I really don’t think that there is any industry pressure to revert to Imperial measures in the workplace – its in the home and on the street that we need to make the transition. In the UK at the moment, any attempt to change the way people do things is immediately attacked as being ‘politically correct’, ‘attacking the British way of life’ or ‘removal of personal freedom’. That’s why I really think we need the help of an independent figure, perhaps like Digby Jones or one of the ‘Dragons’ Den’.

The problem was that the US didn’t change of course, and as the US was Canada’s biggest export market by far, Canadian manufacturers had to set up parallel production lines. This proved uneconomic, and the metric sizes quietly disappeared, leaving a number of ‘orphan’ houses built to hard metric modules, and today no way today of procuring hard metric panel sizes when alterations have to be made. The construction industry in Canada wished that the US had gone metric as well, but has to deal with the USC reality.

Industry, especially the construction industry, in the UK is almost totally metric. That will not change. A whole generation of workers have only ever worked in metric (even if they do use occasional Imperial outside of the workplace). Going Imperial for them is not ‘reverting’ – it is a whole new experience (and a more difficult one than converting TO metric).

So for the UK to cater to the US, it will have to do what Canada had to do – set up parallel production lines, as there are far too many metric markets to ignore metric production. If I were in UK manufacturing, I would not bother to cater purely to a US USC market at the expense of my world metric market.

To revert to Imperial measures, as the questioner has suggested, would remove the one thing the UK still possesses – a world-wide outlook, that other countries do not see as being hostile in terms of doing business with them. To abandon metric would change this – for little advantage. It would send the UK into a downward spiral economically.

Read more: http://oocities.com/yankaic/?201022#ixzz0uO5VIXzG”

This is a 2009 opinion, but there is no reason to believe it has changed for the better. Maybe that trend has to to with politics and Hong Kong does everything to differentiate itself from Big Brother??