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What Distance/Speed Measurement do you officially use in the UK? Imperial or Metric?

UK is metric for most things. Special exclusions apply for certain things such as; beer sold 'on licence' may be sold as a pint (568ml) or half pint, road signs must give distance in imperial, speed signs are in mpg. Perversely braking distance is given in metres :confused:

Milk is sold in metric - some places just sell 568ml or 1136ml cartons. Food is sold in kg but again may be sold using the same trick.

Most younger people are fully metric now. Personal weight seems to be the last stumbling block. Very few people know their weight in kg, or how to convert it.

All to the best of my knowledge.
 
BBC B 32k said:
Most younger people are fully metric now. Personal weight seems to be the last stumbling block. Very few people know their weight in kg, or how to convert it.

All to the best of my knowledge.
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Younger people up to middle aged (me) are taught metric yet they still have to cope with stones, miles, inches, feet, pints, mpg and acres. Any time I need to convert I have to look it up. I can remember that an inch is 25.4mm, a kilo is 2.2 pounds and that there are 12 inches in a foot but thats all I am able to remember. People end up using some weird measuring system with both units. It's probably why our industry is in such a poor state no-one can measure accurately any more.
 
Canadians do an admirable job switching back and forth due to some many of our household "things" actually made for the American market.

For example, the weather office reports in C degrees, but thermostats are in F degrees. So you will hear conversations like "Brrr, its cold out there - must be 9 or 10 degrees. Think I'll bump the thermostat up to 72." I saw at the supermarket a sign promoting "Buy 5 lbs of roast, get 250 grams of potato salad."

A real estate agent will tell you the square footage of the house - and the lot size in feet, but that the house is X number of metres from the school. When we were applying for insurance on our house we were asked if we were a certain number of metres from a hydrant, and then a certain number of miles from the fire hall.

I guess its what you get used to, eh?!
 
snberk103 said:
Canadians do an admirable job switching back and forth due to some many of our household "things" actually made for the American market.

For example, the weather office reports in C degrees, but thermostats are in F degrees. So you will hear conversations like "Brrr, its cold out there - must be 9 or 10 degrees. Think I'll bump the thermostat up to 72." I saw at the supermarket a sign promoting "Buy 5 lbs of roast, get 250 grams of potato salad."

A real estate agent will tell you the square footage of the house - and the lot size in feet, but that the house is X number of metres from the school. When we were applying for insurance on our house we were asked if we were a certain number of metres from a hydrant, and then a certain number of miles from the fire hall.

I guess its what you get used to, eh?!
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Eh?! How do they measure Maple Syrup up there?? :p;):D
 
Feet, Inches etc are confined to old people, I was taught Centimetres, Metres & Kilometres. My Satnav tells me everything in KM's and kmph. The roads here are stupid they really need to make it metric.

Outside of the roads and beer (pints) everything is metric.

The only exception is weight most people will tell you in Stones (14 lbs = 1 stone) but goto ANY gym etc and they will tell you in Kg's.
 
garybUK said:
Feet, Inches etc are confined to old people, I was taught Centimetres, Metres & Kilometres. My Satnav tells me everything in KM's and kmph. The roads here are stupid they really need to make it metric.

Outside of the roads and beer (pints) everything is metric.

The only exception is weight most people will tell you in Stones (14 lbs = 1 stone) but goto ANY gym etc and they will tell you in Kg's.
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What do you class as "old people"?

I'm in my forties but can still remember pre-decimal currency and was taught both metric and imperial at school.

I just think it would be an incredible waste of the billions of pounds which it would cost to convert the road network to metric measurement.
 
In the building trades we use a peculiar chimaera, the "metric foot", which is 300mm instead of 304.8mm. Therefore 3.6m is 12 metric feet, but 57.6mm short of 12 Imperial feet. OSB board and plywood (generally supplied from Canada) is sold in 8' x 4' sheets, plasterboard (wallboard, generally supplied from continental Europe) is sold in 2400mmx1200mm sheets - or sometimes 8' long and 1200mm wide. You really have to keep your wits about you to avoid expensive mistakes.
 
It's the same in engineering. We use metric as a standard measurement but when I'm designing press tooling I still have to work around the imperial sizes which the raw materials are supplied in.
 
BBC B 32k said:
Most younger people are fully metric now. Personal weight seems to be the last stumbling block. Very few people know their weight in kg, or how to convert it...
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Young people in Canada still know how to use feet and pounds mainly because of their parents and grandparents who still have not entirely made the conversion.

I know my height both in feet and meters, but only because I had to convert it for a phys ed class - same for weight. I would be pleased to use only metric units, but for most people, 1.82m doesn't mean much, as opposed with 5' 10.5"...
 
garybUK said:
My Satnav tells me everything in KM's and kmph. The roads here are stupid they really need to make it metric.
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It's not going to happen soon, we've been given an indefinite exemption to carry on using them. :p

As of today (1st January 2010), an amended EU directive has come into force which has removed the requirement for the UK & Ireland to fix a date for the ending of the exemptions they were granted to carry on using 'pints', 'miles' and 'troy ounces'.

Council Directive 80/181/EEC(3) requires the United Kingdom and Ireland to fix a date for ending the exemptions, where they are still being applied, in respect of the units of measurement known as ‘pint’ for milk in returnable bottles and beer and cider on draught, ‘mile’ for road signs and speed indications, and ‘troy ounce’ for transactions in precious metals. However, experience has shown that, given the local character of those exemptions and the limited number of products concerned, maintaining the exemptions would not result in a non-tariff barrier to trade and, as a consequence, there is no longer a need to put an end to those exemptions.
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'Acres' have been removed from the exemption list because they are no longer used for land registration in the UK.
 
OllyW said:
But the Republic of Ireland isn't in the UK. Perhaps Scotland can go metric on it's roads when you get your independence. ;)
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Hence why I separated the Republic of Ireland from Great Britain in my post. My attempt to avoid confusion without sacrificing information obviously failed.

Let's keep the political discussions to the appropriate forum, although you should be careful in your assumptions.
 
We use both.

For measurements we'd use centimeters and meters, but if you're talking about distance for traveling (as in, city A to city B, or, my house to the shop) we'd use imperial.
 
...but in the US

...even though this is not the basis of the thread, sometimes metric is the standard in the USA.

Cars and motorcycles usually go by liters (such as a Ford Mustang 5.0 liter engine) or a 1200 cc. motorcycle.

In track, American runners usually refer to the metric system.

In my sport of skateboarding, we sometimes use inches for truck measurements, such as a 5.0 or 5.5 truck as in inches, but the vast majority of American skaters refer to numbers such as 129 mm. trucks or 139 mm. trucks. And wheels are always put in terms of mm. such as 50s, 51s, 52s, etc.
 
davidjearly said:
Hence why I separated the Republic of Ireland from Great Britain in my post. My attempt to avoid confusion without sacrificing information obviously failed.

Let's keep the political discussions to the appropriate forum, although you should be careful in your assumptions.
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Northern Ireland isn't in Great Britain either.
 
Academia in the UK is much simpler...

....well only relatively. We use "SI" units (almost the same as metric) except that it's standardised and well-defined. The litre hasn't existed in labs since the 1970's (we use the 'decimetre cubed' instead; thankfully 1.0234 litres is 1.0234 dm3). As the litre doesn't exist thus the 'ml' doesn't exist either and we use the centimetre cubed (cm3) instead (except the medical fraternity still use l and ml).
It doesn't stop there, as SI units increase or decrease in 1 000 units, and the SI unit for length is the metre, that means the 'next size down' is the millimetre - and thus the centimetre does not exist in SI! Obviously the next step up is 1 000 metres = 1km.

There also very strict rules as to how one writes these units. No capitals (unless the unit is named after someone - e.g. Newtons or Pascals) and no plurals ( e.g. kgs is wrong - as is Kg or Kgs; kg is the only correct format). I don't know about the US but over here - and especially in France -the 'Kgs' is very common and is known as the "Grocer's plural" ( and even worse Kg's ).

If all this seems horrible - it's not; all UK and I think all school kids in Europe are taught exactly the same - and therein lies it's strength - science reporting and the use of data MUST follow a common language. The SI system is consistent; we know where we are. All exam papers in the UK in the sciences (and I believe engineering etc) have used SI for some time, and we have no problem using mixed units. My electronic balance couldn't weigh my piece of beef 30 mins ago- so I used an old weigh pan and put lbs and oz weights on the opposing pan. Easy. I/we buy pints of beer, weigh ourselves at home in stones and lbs (kg at the doctors though), and if measuring wood will use whatever unit is to hand and gives a handy -whole number. (I've just needed to cut wood that was a smidgen over 2 feet (=24 inches), so I used 61cm (not cms) (-but of course I should have used 610mm (not 610mms))!
The SI units also use a lot of superscripts over the numbers - but I'm not sure that the software we all use in these forums is up to that.

Just as a standardised language in science is so important -so it surely should be in our everyday language - when needs must. I don't know about the US but in the UK now there appears a host of examples of poor grammar and sloppy speech (" I was stood" instead of 'standing') etc - but let's not go there or we'll increase my BP (no longer measures in inches of mercury), increase my energy output (measured in kiloJoules (kJ) not calories. I'm off for a pint!
BW
RTJ
 
neiltc13 said:
Northern Ireland isn't in Great Britain either.
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You really are hilarious. Of course, I meant United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but like most people nowadays I was using the short term to refer to it. Yes, the short term is actual GB for the above.

Nice try though :rolleyes:.
 
Scientifically, we use metric. In public, anything goes. products are weighed in grams/kilograms, but people talk about their weight in stones/pounds. Gasoline is measured in litres, but road signs in miles and feet. Spedometers have both miles and kilometres.

I don't understand the imperial system at all with the exception of miles and feet. Stone? Pound? Ounce? Huh?
 
OllyW said:
What do you class as "old people"?

I'm in my forties
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I'm just 31, and the only unit I don't like is Fahrenheit. Any and all maths, science, engineering etc MUST be done in metric imho, but in terms of casual conversation or weights-and-measures at shops, I don't care what they use.
 
rtjstevens said:
It doesn't stop there, as SI units increase or decrease in 1 000 units, and the SI unit for length is the metre, that means the 'next size down' is the millimetre - and thus the centimetre does not exist in SI! Obviously the next step up is 1 000 metres = 1km.
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But even mm and km aren't true SI units; proper notation for those would be 10^-3 m or 10^3 m (in true SI fashion), respectively.

I'm pretty sure that the SI units pertaining to electricity are used just about everywhere, even in the U.S. Volts, Watts, Amperes, Ohms, etc. are all standard here, and they're SI units.
 
Yeah - I always cringe when people refer to farenheit, lb's etc as 'English' units. I much prefer the word 'Imperial' units as it infers that they are from the past - which is where they belong.
 
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