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I don't know what a miles is a certain number of yards I suppose, but what is a yard, a bit more than a m.
Over my life the use of °F on weather forecast has gone, pounds and ounces are not used in shops anymore. I'm 52 I was taught in metric at school. Who are we catering for by using miles in roads? How old do you need to be to know what a miles is? How long will it be before it's ditched, will it ever be ditched?
A yard is less than a meter...
Simple - a yard is 3 feet, or 1/22nd of the length of a cricket pitch.
I still measure rides in miles and feet of elevation, but temperature is C, depth of water is m, dimensions are m or mm. But I think miles are here for a while - the cost of changing every speed limit sign, every traffic sign would be hard to justify for no tangible benefit. And if Nige gets in I expect his supporters would prefer that we revert to pints, pounds, gallons etc to stick it to the EU and their metric system...
Is it, I always thought it was bigger... Be honest who knows how many yards or m is a mile without googling? I do know a mile is a bit more than 1500m but only because my son has run mile races
How long will it be before it's ditched, will it ever be ditched?
in the UK you'd need to wait until the population becomes reasonable.
Imagine the outrage if we switched to km and km/h? We'd see the roundabout painters out in full force painting out the new signs with the equivalent miles/mph...well, after there is a conversion card issued out on social media...
But I think miles are here for a while - the cost of changing every speed limit sign, every traffic sign would be hard to justify for no tangible benefit. And if Nige gets in I expect his supporters would prefer that we revert to pints, pounds, gallons etc to stick it to the EU and their metric system...
I suspect you are correct but it still drives me nuts when I join a group ride and ask how far we are going to be told 45miles or something...what even is that? When I say ok 70km? And I get some bollocks about being English, these people don't even know what a miles is but eh are English so use miles...
Cant we just use a unit that people understand
Well its 1,760 yards, which is 8 furlongs each of 220 yards. A yard being 3 feet, a foot being 12 inches.
The inch is precisely defined as 25.4mm. So its all metric anyway.
What the Wookie said, the cost and outrage isnt worth the effort. Personally Id be happy to change and I'm older than the OP and was also taught the metric system as are the majority of refuseniks.
There's a (to 67 year old me) surprisingly large number of folk still using miles and minutes-per-mile in our running club. We've organised the club by pace groups, all calculated at mins-per-km and I'm regularly asked to do the conversion for them. Now I just refuse 😂
There's a (to 67 year old me) surprisingly large number of folk still using miles and minutes-per-mile in our running club. We've organised the club by pace groups, all calculated at mins-per-km and I'm regularly asked to do the conversion for them. Now I just refuse 😂
Maybe I need to take up running all the local cycling groups to me use miles and mph
The joys of being a millennial cyclist.
You raced time trials in miles
You raced road races in km.
The run club predominantly did miles but when you did triathlon it was all in km.
Just got used to converting automatically these days. (But I do natively operate in KM on the bike or foot) - the only time I've found this skill remotely useful is driving a British car in Europe.
Meanwhile I work in an industry and is multi unit depending on the client and the new grads really struggle with inches and feet and dont get me started on how much the decimalized foot ****s them up.
It’s not unreasonable to use miles when all the signposts are in miles. Then again the countdown markers on the motorway are at 100 metre intervals as well as the count down to road works.
I suspect the main problem is that changing all the signs would be expensive and cars might need the speedometer adapting.
I don’t really give a stuff either way as I cycle miles and walk Kilometres.
It is probable that people who get excited by such things can’t divide by 8 and multiply by five in their head to convert Kilometres to miles.
Time you all went and cycled 20 leagues.
I don't think the UK is weird though in it's use of mixed measurements, even the French still do, you can still see "une livre" in market stalls occasionally. I'm happy with C rather than F these days, my bike computer is metric, although I weirdly still do the conversion just "to check". Running speed was always km - because most club runs are either 5km or 10km.
Given that bikes are a total mash up of Imp and metric, it not a massive surprise that we're all confused!
It depends on your context.
I was at school in the 1960s and 1970s, so imperial and Lsd (the L became the £).
1971 decimalisation so I can convert quickly.
A tachograph has always worked in km (EU legislation) so I've always practiced rough conversions there as well
I know a KM is 1000m but I couldn't actually tell you how far a kilometre is. I couldn't look across a field for example and say "it's 0.8km to that hedge".
I was taught both and clearly remember decimalisation day, the crossing lady showed me a 5p on the way to school.
Metric is best in every way I can think of with the exception of when I say to myself "I wonder how much ground I have ploughed with my horse today?" Ah ha! An acre!!
Grid lines on OS maps (remember them?)are at Km. intervals so it makes perfect sense to me to work in Metric. And it makes it sound like you went further 👍🏼 ...but not higher 👎🏼.
I was taught cm and m in primary school in '77. I can still picture Miss Muggeridge with that metre stick and 1cm cubes that you could stick together like lego and make a metre stick. And fuel has never been priced on the pump in anything other than metric since I got my provisional in '89.
I can't picture either a mile or a km if I look across a field, except I know one is 1.6x the other.
Annoys me when I'm back in uk and see a distance on a road sign, and then remember (in an "are we nearly there yet?" impatience) that I'll have to wait 1.6x as long to get to the destination.
I couldn't look across a field for example and say "it's 0.8km to that hedge".
Depending on your natural pace - it takes roughly 10-12 mins to walk a kilometer, and leisuely cycling speed on the flat (15km/h, about 9-10mph) a Km should take you about 3-4 mins, that's generally what I use to measure - how long do I think it's going to take to get to that hedge?
It annoys me they messed up the metre though. Metres are very slightly too short.
At school maths and science were metric, the metalwork shop was imperial. As a civil engineer in the 70s and 80s I was regularly mangling imperial and metric (brickwork and pipes tended to be spoken of in inches even though they had been metricated). I did baulk somewhat at having to do structural calcs in imperial when working for an American consultant overseas. Kips anyone?
So I don't really care much about units. My height and weight are metric (W/stone just doesn't work) but distances are in miles. In the butcher's I buy my meat in pounds and pay for it in kgs.
Apart from 5 & 10k's I've always run & cycled in miles, all my work is in mm & m and remember my pocket money going "up" from 6d to 5p, don't really see any need for change especially since km in cycling seems like cheating 😜
Time doesn't work as a decimal so whatever we use our progress through space and time its all a daft mix, 100kph is not a 1:1 division or we have light years to measure space.
The maths of miles - as in how many feet or yards in a mile - don’t really matter as there isn’t a meaningful relationship between them
We describe the size of things in feet- you know your height in feet but you wouldn’t express it in yards. We describe distances we can see in our yards.
But instead we really experience miles in time. It’s an approximate measure of how long it will take to get somewhere - a walk measured in miles really just tells you what the walk will feel like. A drive of hundreds of miles is measured in bags of tangfastics and / or podcasts
On a previous project we had a tape recorder, which was probably about the only non-metric thing.
That was weird set of units. Oz-force, feet per second, and drag torque/drive torque was soemthing wierd too, not ft-lb.... maybe inch-lb ? I remember it being almost exactly 1 mile of tape. PSI I could handle (it was pressurised sealed unit),even though Bar would be more normal.
We did have an ex US army guy in the team. It was all normal to him and made sense.
it still drives me nuts when I join a group ride and ask how far we are going to be told 45miles or something...what even is that?
It's a very common measurement since always : ) divide by 0.62 - no I can't do that in my head but just remember that 100km is 62 miles, so 45 miles is 3/4 of 62, approx, about 75km. Rules of thumb are good enough usually.
I still do tyre pressures in psi. I looked recently at adapting to bar but not got my head around it yet.
Also, I saw that Josh Kerr recently beat the 26 year old one mile running record and it occurred to me that the mile isn't run competitively very often which might explain why it has stood for so long.
Miles <==> Km has always been fairly simple for me, as most analogue car speedos have been marked in both for decades. Even with a digital speedo, you can often switch between 'on the fly'.
With mountain height, since 3000ft = 914m (or close enough) I can work in either, using a factor of 3 as the rough approximation. Or get the phone out and use 3.2808....
Buying fuel in litres, I've always been able to convert to gallons where needed (4.54) But since cars and their apps now generally give you an indicative consumption figure in mpg, there's little need to do it in your head.
I love that we use a mash-up system in the UK.
Long may it continue.
It's 3 miles to the pub, up 4 metres of steps, where I'll have an AF pint before going to B&Q to pick up 500ml of undercoat and an 8x4' plywood sheet, via the petrol station to fill up with 12 litres of fuel for my bike which does 80mpg. . 😊👍
Linear distances are easy enough to convert. Sometimes having the ability to use inches, feet, yards, miles with fractions is more user firendly when estimating or approximating than mm, m, km. Although only if the person you are talking to is of a similar mindset.
Volumes and Areas most people start to struggle with.
Farenheight is bloody useless whatever the yanks say.
Driving presents an odd dilema. Miles traveled, mph speed, and mpg are all in reality fairly meaningless amounts. Most users wouldn't know what to actually do with the data. But you get a nice integer between 1 and 100 that is easy to remember and compare.
Mountain bikes are even more of a mess. I'll put my 650b x 2.5" tyres on my 30mm rims and inflate to 22psi. Then apply power via my half inch-pitch chain by pushing down on my 165mm cranks.
At least we have got away from describing frame sizes in seat tube inches.
Mixed use is everywhere. Aviation is another prime example.
A yard is less than a meter...
It depends how large your meter is. I have a Fluke multimeter that will easily fit in my pocket. The gas meter on the side of my house won't though. 😉
A metre on the other hand is 3' 3".
Being of a certain age and in school from the late '60's until the early '80's I can happily work in both systems. The Imperial system though is just a nonsense. No uniformity to it. The metric system makes sense and has a logic to it.
Like others in this thread I regularly use mixed units - bike rides are in km but driving distances are in miles for example.
1609m, obvs. How do you not know that?!
Couldn't tell you the yards mind
Imagine the outrage if we switched to km and km/h? We'd see the roundabout painters out in full force painting out the new signs with the equivalent miles/mph...well, after there is a conversion card issued out on social media...
There's (semi-)famously an old bloke who has a signpost near his home giving distances to nearby towns in km. Every time the council replaces it he paints over it and changes it to miles.
If you're happy with an accuracy of "about,"
5km is about 3 miles.
1m is about a yard.
1 square metre is about 10 square feet.
15cm is about 6"
1L is about 2 pints.
1kg is about 2lbs.
"Metric is too hard."
It’s not unreasonable to use miles when all the signposts are in miles. Then again the countdown markers on the motorway are at 100 metre intervals as well as the count down to road works.
This is a fun one. The countdown signs to roadworks still read "200 yards" or whatever, but the distance will actually be 200 metres.
Buying fuel in litres, I've always been able to convert to gallons where needed (4.54) But since cars and their apps now generally give you an indicative consumption figure in mpg, there's little need to do it in your head.
MPG is just a measure of relative affordability- we don't buy fuel in gallons or know what a gallon costs - and the price of fuel is always changing anyway. We don't need to calculate what fraction of a gallon we'll have consumed on a 14 mile journey - it's a number we do nothing with normally. It just a comparative measure of running costs between one car and another that only matters at the moment when you are choosing what car to buy and won't matter again until you replace it with something else. What if gives is a number with enough intervals to discern between cars that are expensive to drive and ones that are cheap. You could do away with the letters and just say one car is rated '25' and another is rated '50' and know one will use a lot more fuel that the other.
It's a very common measurement since always : ) divide by 0.62 - no I can't do that in my head
Multiply by five divide by eight is however quite straightforward.
The maths of miles - as in how many feet or yards in a mile - don’t really matter as there isn’t a meaningful relationship between them
Of course there is.
3 feet in 1 yard, 22 yards in 1 chain, 10 chains in 1 furlong, 8 furlongs in one (statute) mile. Which of course equates to the easily memorable 5280 feet in 1 mile. Simple.
I wrote about this ages ago:
A South African friend was bemoaning that she found the differences between American and British English really confusing, particularly around weights and measures and the British interpretation of Metric, so I tried to explain.
The British approach to the Metric system also confuses the British. We’ve got this messed-up hybrid approach where we’re technically Metric but back in the 1970s we took to change like a duck to custard.
Examples:
We buy petrol (gas) in litres, no exceptions. But we measure fuel efficiency in miles per gallon. No-one under the age of about 45 knows what a gallon is, but we know how many miles we get out of one.
We buy milk in litres, except we can’t quite let go of the concept of “a pint of milk” so a small bottle of milk is 568ml. (The UK pint is bigger than the North American pint because a fundamental core of the Imperial System is “bollocks to consistency”.)
Beer is also served in pints because if we suddenly decided to change to half-litres that’d be a 68ml smaller measure and there would be a civil war and I’m not even joking.
Compare with buying beer in the US, I was once asked “would you like a small or a large?” and I was like WTF does that even mean?
(Aside: there’s a new pizza place just opened local to me and they offer small, medium and large pizzas. I have no idea what this means, I don’t know what to order. I’ve seen small pizzas the size of a drinks coaster and large ones that had to be tipped at an angle just to fit through the door, throw me a bone here. Don’t you have a tape measure? It shouldn’t be this difficult.)
We use metres and yards pretty much interchangeably if the quantity is “about…” Countdown markers to motorway exits could be in Metric or Imperial but who cares when you’re doing 70mph and who the frak over here even knows what 70mph is in Metric.
I know my height in feet and inches, no clue in metres. Similarly, my weight is in stones and pounds. We weigh nothing else in pounds and I don’t know as any other country uses stones. We don’t use stones even, other for that one thing.
Someone in the US may say “this guy weighs 200lbs” and I have to convert it to stones in my head to work out whether he’s a fat bastard or not despite it being the same gorram system 🤷♂️
Buying timber, you might get a plank 3m long and 4″ wide. No, me neither. Don’t even get me started on plumbing standards.
The height of a horse is measured in hands. Because of course it is.
In cooking and baking we don’t measure dry ingredients by volume because that’s the sort of bottled insanity likely to summon Cthulhu.
A US Customary cup, a US Legal cup and a Metric cup (yes really, that’s a thing, I’m looking at you now Canada) are all different things.
(Whilst we’re on the subject of cooking: a pack of cake mix is not a recipe ingredient, doubly so if it’s a specific brand which is unheard of outside of North America. Please stop.)
Many older people here still haven’t worked out Metric, I think by this point it’s just wilful stubbornness. The old boy next door to me (in his 70s?) was getting a gutter repaired a couple of weeks back, he wanted a short replacement piece and the roofer told him “I can only buy them in five metre lengths.”
He replied, “I don’t know what that is.”
Oh come on mate, you’ve had FIFTY YEARS to grasp that a metre is about the same as a yard, this isn’t rocket surgery. I chipped in, “it’s about 16 feet, Richard” and he looked at me like I was some sort of witch doctor.
Oh, and on spelling, it’s “metre” and “litre.” It just is. I’m not one to rag on Webster’s English (Simplified) revisionism and the US can happily keep it’s “color” et al, no-one really cares beyond friendly teasing, but “liter” is flat out wrong.
Sorry America, you know I love you but we need to talk about this. They’re French units, if you can cope with Notre Dame (even if you can’t pronounce it) then you can deal with metres. Get with the programme.
TL;DR – Here Be Dragons. Use Metric. Hope this helps. 😁
Imagine the outrage if we switched to km and km/h? We'd see the roundabout painters out in full force painting out the new signs with the equivalent miles/mph...well, after there is a conversion card issued out on social media...
There's (semi-)famously an old bloke who has a signpost near his home giving distances to nearby towns in km. Every time the council replaces it he paints over it and changes it to miles.
Mogg?
Anyone who hasn't retired yet was taught metric.
Chains anyone?
Reminds me of when I was working for the NHS. During a Multi-disciplinary meeting in 2020, we were discussing individual patient care when one of the younger nurses reported his patient as being, "five foot ten and weighing fourteen-and-a-half stones"!
WTF?! Where did that come from? This nurse had never known the imperial system, and the NHS has used SI units since 1975... so about 20 years before this nurse was born! One of the best laughs we ever had around that table!
(long) distance is miles. I know, on foot, on bike or in the car, what a mile feels like. Don't have that feel for a km. Height in metres, as thats what maps and my garmin use.
Mass I'm mostly metric, but grew up weighing myself in stones.
Volume - metric, especially when it comes to kitchen stuff. WTF is a fl.oz???
Length I'm agnostic. I work in an industry that uses both imperial and metric interchangeably. Sheet timber and stage modules are imperial, some truss is imperial, some metric, some brands do versions of both which gets annoying when you ask for 2.5m lengths and get given 8'. (and for reasons lost to history a 1' piece of Slick Minibeam is 390mm c-c!)
Chains anyone?
I'm old enough that we had schoolbooks with Chains, Furlongs and Rods in a conversion table.
There's a (to 67 year old me) surprisingly large number of folk still using miles and minutes-per-mile in our running club. We've organised the club by pace groups, all calculated at mins-per-km and I'm regularly asked to do the conversion for them
Interestingly we're in miles at my run club, but are increasingly translating to KM's to cater for the younger audience!
I'm old enough that we had schoolbooks with Chains, Furlongs and Rods in a conversion table.
To be fair, it wouldn't exactly be wild to be working from 20-year old textbooks.
I know, on foot, on bike or in the car, what a mile feels like. Don't have that feel for a km.
I'm the opposite. I can easily picture 100 metres and it's simple to scale up to 1 km. 100 yards might be quite similar but then it's hard for me to picture 17.6 of them.
