General > General Technical Chat
why is the US not Metric
Cubdriver:
--- Quote from: boffin on November 22, 2019, 10:55:49 pm ---
--- Quote from: Cubdriver on November 22, 2019, 06:12:50 pm ---And now I'll repeat it here, yet another time since it keeps slipping past you. What economic benefit would the United States derive from spending unknown billions of dollars to change existing road signs from their current form with archaic miles, feet, and inches to meters and kilometers? What is the cost-benefit of making this major change?
--- End quote ---
Economy of scale.
Right now manufacturers around the world have to produce DIFFERENT cars with MPH on them for the US (and one or two other) markets. having to make separate versions is why it's worth it in the long run. The manufactures know this, that's why cars are (mostly) metric fasteners these days.
The fact that a lot of Americans can't grasp this argument, or are too arrogant to accept it; is why everyone here is banging their head against the wall.
--- End quote ---
And car manufacturers saving a nickel a car because they only need to make one speedometer overlay provides a benefit to the taxpayers who'll be on the hook for billions of needless spending HOW exactly? Isn't the UK still using miles on their roads, too? Oh yeah - they drive on the left as well. If needing mph/kph scales on the speedometer alone is so arrogant and justification for that sort of cost in your eyes, what about them, requiring not only mph markings but also needing the controls to be on the other side of the car? I'd wager that costs a bit more than the speedo overlay... Maybe you should start with lobbying against left-hand drive - much better economies of scale to be gained there than with a relatively small screen-printed plastic gauge face, and I think more countries drive on the right than the left.
Sorry, you're going to have to do better than speedometer markings to justify spending that kind of taxpayer $$ on something.
KL27x:
Maybe America can start marketing cars with metric meters. And offer them at a substantial discount. Like $20.00 off. Or if they want, they can choose to pay full price and donate that $20.00 to Save-a-Road-Sign fund. With this selection, you get a special pink and purple rubber bracelet to wear, so everyone knows how woke you are. It will have cm markings on it, and will say "Got Metric?"
Metrication fund will pay Kim Kardashian a million dollars to post photos of herself in front of her car odometer, and with some cute hashtag #gometric-gohumanity.
With Kardasian power, we will have enough money in no time to begin permanently fucking our road signs like UK.
If you guys think this is a joke, you are mistaken. If Kim Kardashian can't get Americans to care, what chance is there?
bsfeechannel:
--- Quote from: Cubdriver on November 22, 2019, 06:12:50 pm ---Yep. Pretty sure that I've acknowledged that going metric in industry is a good thing. Believe that I've said that a few times in this thread. But I saw nothing in your link that said anything about changing road signs - yet again, you have typed a response but failed to answer my question. For clarity, that question has been bolded, enlarged and changed to red in the embedded post, since the non-answer you provided leads me to believe that you somehow failed to see it when you typed the above reply.
And now I'll repeat it here, yet another time since it keeps slipping past you. What economic benefit would the United States derive from spending unknown billions of dollars to change existing road signs from their current form with archaic miles, feet, and inches to meters and kilometers? What is the cost-benefit of making this major change?
Is there something about my question that you don't understand? It seems pretty straightforward to me. If you're missing something about it, please let me know and I will attempt to rephrase it more to your liking. Or is it simply that you're avoiding it because you don't have a good reason to justify spending what it would cost to make the change?
-Pat
--- End quote ---
Can't you see the forest for the trees? Just extrapolate to the whole country the benefits these companies had from investing in the use of metric instead of imperial and that's it.
It is intuitive.
Cubdriver:
--- Quote from: bsfeechannel on November 23, 2019, 12:46:56 am ---
--- Quote from: Cubdriver on November 22, 2019, 06:12:50 pm ---Yep. Pretty sure that I've acknowledged that going metric in industry is a good thing. Believe that I've said that a few times in this thread. But I saw nothing in your link that said anything about changing road signs - yet again, you have typed a response but failed to answer my question. For clarity, that question has been bolded, enlarged and changed to red in the embedded post, since the non-answer you provided leads me to believe that you somehow failed to see it when you typed the above reply.
And now I'll repeat it here, yet another time since it keeps slipping past you. What economic benefit would the United States derive from spending unknown billions of dollars to change existing road signs from their current form with archaic miles, feet, and inches to meters and kilometers? What is the cost-benefit of making this major change?
Is there something about my question that you don't understand? It seems pretty straightforward to me. If you're missing something about it, please let me know and I will attempt to rephrase it more to your liking. Or is it simply that you're avoiding it because you don't have a good reason to justify spending what it would cost to make the change?
-Pat
--- End quote ---
Can't you see the forest for the trees? Just extrapolate to the whole country the benefits these companies had from investing in the use of metric instead of imperial and that's it.
It is intuitive.
--- End quote ---
So, like me, you cannot come up with a good reason to spend all that money to change out all the highway signs. Cool.
-Pat
CatalinaWOW:
--- Quote from: bsfeechannel on November 23, 2019, 12:46:56 am ---
--- Quote from: Cubdriver on November 22, 2019, 06:12:50 pm ---Yep. Pretty sure that I've acknowledged that going metric in industry is a good thing. Believe that I've said that a few times in this thread. But I saw nothing in your link that said anything about changing road signs - yet again, you have typed a response but failed to answer my question. For clarity, that question has been bolded, enlarged and changed to red in the embedded post, since the non-answer you provided leads me to believe that you somehow failed to see it when you typed the above reply.
And now I'll repeat it here, yet another time since it keeps slipping past you. What economic benefit would the United States derive from spending unknown billions of dollars to change existing road signs from their current form with archaic miles, feet, and inches to meters and kilometers? What is the cost-benefit of making this major change?
Is there something about my question that you don't understand? It seems pretty straightforward to me. If you're missing something about it, please let me know and I will attempt to rephrase it more to your liking. Or is it simply that you're avoiding it because you don't have a good reason to justify spending what it would cost to make the change?
-Pat
--- End quote ---
Can't you see the forest for the trees? Just extrapolate to the whole country the benefits these companies had from investing in the use of metric instead of imperial and that's it.
It is intuitive.
--- End quote ---
There is a reason engineers and accountants use equations, calculators and computers rather than intuition. Car industry wanted to export cars. They could calculate sales from exports, and scale savings from having one worldwide set of parts. And converted as a result. So did HP/Agilent and AFAIK Tektronix and most other industries. Are you proposing that America can export its roads after remarking them in metric. Or are you proposing that some portion of the world is not visiting the US for fear of driving with different units than they are used to, thus depriving us of tourism dollars. I can assure you that the national parks are already filled to capacity with tourists from Japan, Germany, France and other fully metric countries as well as from India, England and Australia to name a few incompletely or recently metric countries.
What Cubdriver and I are asking is a specific, quantifiable advantage of switching US road markings to metric. The only savings thus far identified is elimination of a few lines of software in the speedometer and perhaps a print mask for the same. This is weighed against the cost of changing signage, documentation (the myriad of laws associated with vehicle sales and operation) and vehicle accidents resulting from either honest or duplicitous confusion (honest officer, the sign said the curve could be taken at 120 and I was only doing 115. I forgot that those numbers aren't mph). The legal costs are probably the real issue. A mile is internationally defined as 1609.344 meters. So when you convert to metric how do you convert the 18 cents/mile tax for vehicle class X? Do you convert the rate to metric (11.18468146027201145311381531854 cents per kilometer) and then multiply by kilometers? Can you round the rate to the nearest cent, or the nearest millicent? Or convert kilometers to miles and use the old (obsolete) units to determine cost. If you don't think this is a difficult question you have never played with politicians and/or lawyers. And if you don't think that is an economic issue you have never paid for a lawyer or looked into the real cost of politicians.
The benefits of metric are often subtle or even non-existent. The Mars Orbiter failure is repeatedly and widely touted as an example of why everyone should use metric. But it is a single failure in a Mars project. The Mars area is littered with failures that occurred in programs that used solely metric units (or perhaps all the failures are due to use of traditional units and no one else has owned up to it.)
The only remotely engineering related field I am aware of is audiophoolery, where intuition and BS rules. Perhaps that is where you have received your training?
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