An incident on 17 June, in which a foreign lorry struck a low bridge near Cannock, the third such incident since April, has prompted the police and Network Rail to call for metric signs to be shown on all bridges in the area.
LACORS (the Local Authority Co-ordinators of Regulatory Services) has confirmed its earlier advice that, where office floorspace is let per unit of floorspace, that unit must be metric. In doing so, it implicitly says that previous Government advice on this matter is wrong and/or misleading.
The Department for Transport (DfT) continues to ignore the clear advantages of the adoption of the international norms for road signage, namely the use of metric units, while potentially preventable accidents occur on our roads.
I recently had the pleasure of visiting the splendid (Chinese) First Emperor exhibition at the British Museum. Apart from the terracotta warriors, what impressed me the most was the way that Qin Shihuangdi imposed standardisation on his vast empire - including, of course, weights and measures.
But seriously folks. The article below was an April fool joke but the decimal tape measure is real. In Britain surveyors did use the decimalised foot before going metric. Clearly they recognised the advantages of a decimal system but realised that the metric system proper had much more to offer. The tape featured in the article is in fact American where they still use old fashioned units of measurement. They too clearly see the advantages of decimal in measurement, so the next step is …
The Trading Standards Institute (whose members are responsible for enforcing weights and measures law) has declined to support the UK Metric Association’s campaign for a single, rational system of measurement that everybody understands and uses for all purposes. In response, UKMA has accused the TSI of “an abdication of professional responsibility”.
The Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Mail have followed the far-right British National Party in drawing attention to the case of a market trader in Dalston, East London, who prefers to sell fruit and veg by the bowl (see previous posting in Metric Views). This may come as no surprise to some readers, but we wonder where it is leading.
The following news release was issued by UKMA at 02:00 on 18 January:
Today’s announcement by the European Commission that it is to propose that “supplementary indications” (such as lbs and oz) should be allowed indefinitely does NOT mean that traders can go back to weighing and pricing in imperial measures – so says the UK Metric Association (UKMA) In fact it will be business as usual. Just as they do now, traders will have to weigh or measure goods in metric units (kilograms, litres or metres) at the checkout and also display prices in metric units – with the option of a supplementary indication in non-metric units. [Press release issued on 11 September}
The UK Metric Association has accused the European Commission of “political cowardice” because it has caved in to American and European exporters - supported by the UK Government - and effectively abandoned the objective of a single, rational system of measurement throughout Europe.
The Commission has just published its response to the recent consultation on revising the Units of Measurement Directive. It is a badly written and illogical document, and UKMA has commented on it in the following press release: