One of the last bastions of imperial units is our road network and hence car manufacturers’ marketing campaigns. Ronnie Cohen has been looking at some their promotional material.
Tag: Road signs
M-days in Australia
UKMA has recently acquired two pamphlets from the 1970s Australian metric conversion programme. One about the switchover to metric units for weather reports, and one about the switchover for motoring.
DfT has done no cost-benefit analysis on metrication of road signs
Ronnie Cohen draws some conclusions from a recent Freedom of Information (FoI) request that he made to the UK Department for Transport (DfT).
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Could London bus accident have been prevented?
This weekend we heard the sad news that 26 people were injured when a double-deck bus hit a low bridge in Tottenham, north London. But could this accident have been prevented?
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Measurement units and the European Economic Community
In the third of our series of articles we look at EU involvement in the UK’s prolonged metric conversion.
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The link between muddled units and verbose traffic signs
Successive UK governments have retained imperial units exclusively for distance and speed on road traffic signs. Ronnie Cohen argues that, as a result, we have been unable to take advantage of universal unit symbols, a feature of the metric system but not of imperial.
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Signs of the past in Southend-on-Sea
There has been an exchange of views on Facebook recently about alterations to signs in Southend-on-Sea carried out by “activists” over a decade ago. This has provided an opportunity for Metric Views to restate the legal position and to discuss other related issues.
Dying embers and a few flying sparks
The concluding article of this series looks at the ignominious end of the UK’s attempt, began fifty years ago, to make the transition to a single, simple and universal measurement system.
50 years on
Sunday 24th May will be the 50th anniversary of the announcement by the British Government that the UK was to “go metric” within 10 years. However, 50 years later we are still little more than half way there. Why has it taken so long? and when will it end?
Signs of the times
We compare the Government’s different approaches to two separate proposals for new road signs.
Metric Views 