Why do roadies insist on using km’s all the time. I’ve never understood it. I started my trade with MTB and only recently started roading to increase fitness but really dont understand the need to talk km’s when last time i checked, the UK is an imperial based country and I think every distance marker is in miles.
Non of my riding mates can give a sensible explanation but still insist on km’s. I point blank refuse!! Miles it is for me.
Is it something to do with those tongue in cheek rules from the keepers of the cog? Enlighten me. Please!
Probably because that is what all road races are measured in so it is easier to compare their riding to the pro's.
I only use miles. Can’t see the point in measuring distance on the road (or off road) in KM at all, maybe it feels like it’s longer?? 100k sounds a bit better than 62k. I reckon it’s just attention grabbing.
I am assuming those people who use KM also use it when driving.
road racing is in km.
It’s the same with running and triathlons and other such events etc
5km, 10km etc.
I don’t go for a 6 mile run, I do a 10k.
I also use kilos,CMs and other such metric measures.
Except in golf. But that’s just silly and confusing. I have no idea how many meters I hit a 9 iron.
It's cos it's considered a 'French sport' therefore everything's in 'foreign'
A few other French terms, like 'bidon' for example.
the UK is an imperial based country and I think every distance marker is in miles.
Is it? Despite the Conservative's best efforts we are at best a very odd mix of imperial and metric.
I think road cycling uses kilometres because it's quite a continental sport, all the biggest races are on the European mainland and all distances/speeds etc. are quoted in Kms.
...but yeah, I stopped using miles once I stopped riding 'proper' imperial centuries regularly. Am much happier seeing 100km than 65miles 😎
Bigger numbers is a more impressive ride. A century definitely sounds better than 62 miles.
UK is an imperial based country and I think every distance marker is in miles.
Checks calendar.
Its been metric since the sixties?
Its high time we drop the nonsense!
Because more of anything sounds better.
1972 for the coins.
Everything road is metric. Distance in km, weight in kg, size in cm, tyre width in mm. It’s MTB that’s all messed up. Tyres, wheels and frames are imperial. Suspension, seatposts, bars and stem are metric. Total mess.
the UK is an imperial based country
You are BoJo and I claim my £5 😉
I measure distances in Kms.
Makes more sense, seeing as I measure things in mm, cm, and m, and weigh things in g and kg (though I occasionally lapse into ft and inches for human height)
Height and elevation on a ride makes far more sense in metres (feet climbed...uh?) So distance should be in km too.
SI units came into use in 1970, the first year of my apprenticeship. Metric first on drawings with imperial in brackets. Miles/Km has always been the odd one out.
Well, if you look at the road signs & speedos in cars, then its pretty clear that the UK is not entirely a metric country. I still think of distance in miles and speed in mph, but like others I'm happy to claim a 100k ride.
Why would anybody want to cling to imperial?
This used to do my head in with fell runners talking about feet of elevation and miles when the OS maps they are mandated to carry at races are metric.
I hope you aren't using those dreadful statute miles you see on road signs, a johnny-come-lately of the unit world AND worst of all defined only relative to SI units of m. A hellish mix of transatlantic interference and EU popery in our traditional British units.
My mates a roadie and only uses miles, I’m mainly off-road but I’ve always used kms, couldn’t tell you why it’s something I’ve always done.
Because it’s 2022
Why would anybody want to cling to imperial?
Because that's what we think in.
Yes, I know a kilometer is 1,000m and that's all very logical but I can't think/estimate/visualise it.
I know how far away everything is in miles, I know my speeds in mph, etc.
Some friends use km and metres but I have to a quick bit of mental arithmetic to understand is that a long way, was that fast?
And runners, mins/km, what is that? What's wrong with mph, I can understand that.
.
Anyway, not all roadies use these weird foreign units. Standard time trial distances are 10 miles, 25m, 50m, 100m, and then distances achived in 12hr and 24hrs are quoted in miles.
Runners mix it up too, 5k, 10k, 13.1m, 26.2m
I've lived and worked all over the world so prefer km now TBH. It feels very old-fashioned and quaint to use miles.
It's whatever you are brought up with. I know that 20mph =32kph, but it is only the former which means something to me. I certainly don't have a clue when it comes to fuel consumption in metric.
I worked in aviation. Runway dimensions are metric. Speed is in knots and height is in feet. Everyone seemed to get along with it just fine because that is how they are trained. In any case, aircraft flying at 10,000 ft is far neater than one flying at 3,300m
I know how far away everything is in miles
I used to know distances before google maps and Sat nav, not so much anymore. For car journeys I think more in how long to get there as that is what Google maps presents, and is a far more useful piece of information.
I've come to realize lately I'll probably never be able to run 41.84294 km.
Also, roadies are good at one thing (if even that): riding road bikes. I just don't get the attraction. The ideal roadie would just be a pair of legs and a head.
Miles are better by miles.
You never hear anyone say, ‘this new bike’s kilometres better than my last one’ do you?
I’ll stick with miles thanks.
Anybody pump up their tyres using anything other than PSI ?
And runners, mins/km, what is that? What’s wrong with mph, I can understand that.
That's a simple one, by using pace in km you get more pace updates, one every every km Vs every mile, so you get more of them.
Also it's easier to work out pace for the common run distances. Want to run a 25 min 5k? That'll be 5:00/km pace. 30 min? 6:00/km.
In miles, well I'd need a calculator for that.
I’ll probably never be able to run 41.84294 km.
Why would you want to? If you got that far you might as well do another km and do a complete marathon...
After 25 years in Spain I only use kms - I have no real feeling any more for how far a mile is.
I have swapped over to km as a result of using my Garmin etc. for running. Running training tends more around Kms or portions thereof.
I changed my settings to km and that's about it.
I actually prefer them as they tick by faster 🤣 so even though there's more of them, they seem to go nice & quick.
It's not like their hard to convert between so not exactly a big problem.
Metric is better for engineering calculations but on the whole imperial units are more convenient sizes for humans in the real world.
MTBs are a ludicrous mix of the two!
I wish we'd just go fully metric, hanging onto imperial just feels all gammony
Why would you want to? If you got that far you might as well do another km and do a complete marathon…
Don't you mean Snickers?
I worked in aviation. Runway dimensions are metric. Speed is in knots and height is in feet. Everyone seemed to get along with it just fine because that is how they are trained. In any case, aircraft flying at 10,000 ft is far neater than one flying at 3,300m
fuel is in kg. visibility is in metres. This side of the Atlantic at least.
on the whole imperial units are more convenient sizes for humans in the real world.
That's just familiarity.
when last time i checked, the UK is an imperial based country
You were cryogenically frozen in the 1960s and have only just been defrosted and I claim my £5!
I use km because I don't really know what a mile is, never run a mile but have run 1500m, don't even know how many feet or whatever a mile is made up of, but ai do know what 1m looks like. always seems odd to me we use miles on road signs...they mean nothing to me outside of a car or motorbike.
I can’t think/estimate/visualise it.
You could with a bit of practice.
I wish we’d just go fully metric, hanging onto imperial just feels all gammony
You’d want a metric calendar?
The simple answer is that the default setting on Strava is km. That probably sways it for most people!
I wish we would change over to kilometres.
I use it because hill navigation.
I use km because I don’t really know what a mile is
If you come to Edinburgh and walk down the Royal Mile, it’s about that long. But, that’s a Scots Mile which is longer at about 1984 yards (apparently).
Hopefully it will be reintroduced following independence 😀 (not really).
Cos the world works in SI units for most things. The US is one of only 7 countries that have not adopted SI units.
SI units make life so much easier (and stop you losing spacecraft) so why wouldn't you
Why are people trying to make miles and pints some kind of kin sovrinty is beyond me
Can I get a half litre of beer please ?
No I don't think so . It never even sounded right when I worked in Holland
The rest of imperial can do one but I do like a pint.
I run cycle swim in meters .....most races I do are in meters or kilometers. Popular time trial distances in the UK are in miles because of historic reasons where by time trialing was the only racing you could do in britain (underground) we adopted it as our version of cycling.....
fuel is in kg. visibility is in metres. This side of the Atlantic at least.
fuel is measured in both kg and lbs depending on where you fuel up. It’s led to many accidents.
I'm 63. Since 1974 I've been using km for navigation as the OS introduced metric mapping. For a while, I stuck to miles for road stuff and metric for off road but my brain is still ok for quick imperial:metric calculations on the go.
So what's the deal with miles? Why do people use them?
@matt_outandabout I’m with you
I’m 56 and my whole life OS maps have had 1km squares on them. Most of my life OS maps have had 10m contour intervals.
So when I set up my first bike computer I set it in metric to fit in with os map navigation. So rides in km has stuck
I also teach physics for a living and of course that is all metric
Not much sport is imperial. The Marathon isn’t a round number of miles. The mile isn’t really used. I can’t think of anything that’s metric in tens of race length
I’d say road signs are about the last bit of the imperial system hanging on
If you want to measure rides in miles that’s fine. Just leave me space to do mine in metric
OS maps are metric.
For measuring other things I'll use football pitches for length, London buses for height, whales for weight Tec
Ok time trials distance are imperial.
Why would you use miles? Metric measurement of distances makes way more sense.
I only use metres for ascent and this works better with kilometres 🤷♂️
I'm on Kms as that's what OS use. It just makes everything simpler. I only use Mph as that's what all the signs are in, but I cab drive in Kph just as easily, I mange not to speed every time I drive in France or Canada for instance
I use miles for road and MTB but might just have to switch to km - just feels like you’re going faster and further. Driving on the continent is great because the km just tick down so much faster. I did that Frontier 300 there’s a story about, bit for me it was the Frontier 183 and a bit (Well, actually 310/190ish as I forgot my waterbottles at a feed stop and had to nip back 🤦♂️). Anyway, I’m sure it would have been easier to ride in km.
@paladin - presumably also Wales for area?
Forgot about my least favourite unit ...
The decimal foot/tenths Or the oil field foot...
It's a foot split into 10 pieces.....
Makes less sense than voting for Boris....
I do like a pint though. Although if drinking at home then you'd very likely be drinking metric.
Never understood the fascination with miles. I grew up in the 70s so we only ever learnt metric in school. I have no idea how many feet there are in a mile. And having lived on the continent it seems even more pointless now on return. Of course I still talk in that annoying mix of inches feet, millimetres and metres. But I don't think I have ever used a yard as a measurement, or pounds and ounces. And there is no way I can tell you the freezing point or boiling point in Fahrenheit. Just one more thing holding this country back from its' full potential. Just a case of English exceptionalism to think that imperial is anything other than a useless nod to a bygone era.
It makes it seem like you've ridden further.
It's in "the rules"
But most important of all it annoys my europhobe parents.
None of you metric fans seem to be pushing for decimal time
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time
Why? Because you are familiar with 24h60m60s, why would you want to change something which works and which you understand and can think in, even if decimal time is far more logical and the maths is much easier.
Same reason the rest of us want miles. It sis less logical and the maths is harder but we understand it, that's how we think.
I'm ancient and a mtber.
I've always used kms and metres because that is what OS maps are. The squares a kms, the little wiggly lines are metres. Easy peasy.
I have car sat nav in metric. I can't stand it when it says 1/2 mile, 1/4 mile. In metric it counts down in metres.
I've always done my height and weight in metric as well because of skiing in Europe.
And weights, how the hell are you supposed to remember how many ozs in a pound and how many pounds in a stone.
I did almost get caught out driving at a (very) high speed on a German motorway and forgetting that the junction signs were in km. I don't think my Ducati ever had to slow so quickly from so high a speed.
I've recently shifted to km, I'm not a roadie.
Reasons...
Distance in km is less annoying than climbing in feet.
To get my head around km's...I tend to translate speed and distance into imperial during a ride so I'm getting better at just reading km's and knowing what they are.
Also my employer has been using metric since the 70's...I have a 20 metre tape measure from 1972 that is only metric, no imperial nonsense on the back 😁
Same reason the rest of us want miles. It sis less logical and the maths is harder but we understand it, that’s how we think.
So how do find working off a metric OS map? Do you think os maps should go back to inch to the mile and 30 foot contour intervals?
Do set your car thermometer to read in Fahrenheit to make it easier for you to tell if the roads might be icy
Would you have us teach science with acceleration in feet per second squared and energy in calories. Making the maths harder and cooperation with the rest of the works harder?
All Genuine questions
If you are used to travelling significant distances on roads (in the UK) you will have an intrinsic grasp of what a mile is and how it relates to road travel.
I know a km is 1000m. I know what a metre is. But ask me to picture a km and I am imagining 2.5 laps round the school running track. Doesn’t relate to anything useful.
Also, the true measure of how difficult a mtb ride is, can be determined by its elevation. So feet gives you a better number.
None of you metric fans seem to be pushing for decimal time
Most of the world already runs on decimal time, using base 16 instead of 10.
It is then converted so the wetware can understand it.
Metres climbed, and km travelled for me. I am not a roadie. I also still only know my weight and height in imperial.
Can't we disuss something different? We've had this topic in another bike forum in the past week or so! 😆
Outdoors I use miles. Indoors on Zwift I use Km because the XP rate is better. At least once I've had a conversion fail while absolutely knackered and failed to complete the monthly 100Km Strava Gran Fondo challenge by fractions. 😳
If you are used to travelling significant distances on roads (in the UK) you will have an intrinsic grasp of what a mile is and how it relates to road travel.
I know a km is 1000m. I know what a metre is. But ask me to picture a km and I am imagining 2.5 laps round the school running track. Doesn’t relate to anything useful.
Sounds like we need to change the road signs to km then
Actually to be honest road signs are hopeless for understanding distance in any units. south town 5 miles. Drive an amount south town 5 1/2 miles. Drive the same distance again south town 3 miles. Drive the same distance again you hit the edge of south town. 20 minutes of stop start later you reach the centre of south town. Honestly whatever the units I’m baffled
Seems that even the French had feet and inches one times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Units_of_measurement_in_France_before_the_French_Revolution
This again..
I'll use whatever I feel like. Being as I drive everywhere with all the distances marked in miles, miles work. Kilometers also work.
If I'm unfortunate enough to be riding on the road between two points, a road sign will tell me how many miles it is to wherever. So why wouldn't I use miles?
Metric is indeed easier to work with but from a work point of view, pipe fittings are in imperial, the gas cylinders we use are sized in litres and quantity of gas is in kg or M3. The pressure the gas is stored at will usually be Bar.
The tyres on your car will also be imperial/metric except maybe an Austin metro iirc? Can't recall which cars had metric tyres, which you'd almost certainly inflate in PSI.
Anybody pump up their tyres using anything other than PSI ?
Well the pros seem to talk in bar.
Because more of anything sounds better.
So distance in km elevation in ft?
Ok time trials distance are imperial.
In the UK.
Imperial units are garbage.
How many yards in a mile?
How many feet in half a mile?
Life is too short to use brain cells to figure that kind of nonsense out.
I might consider using Imperial if they sort out the units. Perhaps we could have 1000 yards in a mile, and ten feet in a yard. Then I might use it.
So how do find working off a metric OS map? Do you think os maps should go back to inch to the mile and 30 foot contour intervals?
Do set your car thermometer to read in Fahrenheit to make it easier for you to tell if the roads might be icy
Would you have us teach science with acceleration in feet per second squared and energy in calories. Making the maths harder and cooperation with the rest of the works harder?
All Genuine questions
I'm not bad at using OS maps, but I tend to have to do mental arithmetic. For example, I want to go 2.5km along there. OK, that's 2.5 divide 8, just over 0.3, times five so just over a mile and half, now I know how far to go. The Km makes more logical sense, but I have to convert to miles to be able to estimate when I've done that distance. Same with the heights. That hill says 620m. Is that a big hill? Times three and a bit, 1,900ish ft, ok, I know how tall that is now. Inch to the mile and 30ft contours would just cut out the working things out stage in between, they would just be there nice and clear on the map.
.
I don't have a car thermometer, I've got a rusty old Transit🤣 But temperature is the one thing where I do think in metric and have to convert imperial to metric to make sense of it, the opposite of what I described above. Which is also odd in that centigrade is the one metric scale which makes no sense at all, we should all use Kelvin.
.
Ft per second. I know the acceleration due to gravity is 32ft/s/s, that's just something I know, same as I know that the speed of light is 186,282 miles per second. No idea what the metric equivalents are (9.8m/s/s rings a bell and sounds about right? No idea of the speed of light. Is 9.8 an easier number to work with than 32?)
Calories do make sense, we can all relate to food, who knows how jules are in a Mars bar, or how many jukes they need need eat in a day? Or how many Watts their car engine makes? We all know whether a number of horsepower is a big number or not. Is a 45kw engine in a moped or a Ferrari?
Which would have a 450hp engine?
Oddly enough I'm only 40 and was taught in metric at school so I can do the maths in metric easily enough (A levels in maths and chemistry and then a finance degree) The maths isn't the issue, and I agree that it's easier with metric. It's visualising what the answer looks like which I can't do. The answer is 8,800m? No idea what that is. About five and half miles, ah, OK, I can picture that.
Metric was just a weird thing we did at school when I was little, just in maths class. Everything I was taught elsewhere was in imperial, my dad taught me woodwork in feet and inches my mum taught me to bake in pounds and ounces, my bike tyres need to be this many psi, everywhere we went was so many miles away, the field at the top of the garden was so many acres (anyone here know what a hectare is? I can visualise an acre, no idea what a hectare looks like. 100mX100m maybe?) Anyway, metric made sense in maths, but everything I was taught in the real world was in imperial and so that's how I think.
It's an international sport and only 4 decent-sized countries still use miles: Liberia, Myanmar, UK and US.
Republic of Ireland has moved to kms, as have Canada, Australia and NZ.
Grid squares in km, orienteering background and a science teacher. Fine with miles if motorised but they mean very little if walking or riding. Have always converted and still mentally convert road signs if out on the bike. Feet are even more of a mystery other than for some reason 3000 of them seems significant to some.
I ride in miles as I don't race internationally and all the roads when I live are in miles, my car is in miles, I think in miles, i.e riding at 18mph.
Would happily change to KM across the country but can never see that happening. Just thinking about changing all the speed signs is enough.
Anybody pump up their tyres using anything other than PSI ?
I tend to use a track pump
Given OS maps have been metric for donkeys it’s probably time we brought the road signs in line with the maps.
So what’s the deal with miles? Why do people use them?
It's just down to the environment I'm in, I set my Garmin/strava to miles because UK road signs are in miles, same with my car oddly enough.
I'm not in europe, and I'm not racing so there's little point in my stubbornly using km to fit some sort of racing derived cycling tradition.
I've got no issue with km, I'd prefer it if we used them in this country, but we don't so I'll use miles. mundane I know, but that's the only reason I have.