Originally Posted By: ZeeOSix
The USA was planning to go to the SI system many decades ago, but I think it was too "locked in to" the system it has always used. Still is IMO.
Nothing's locked in. In Canada, we were just as tied to the Imperial system of units, and not only had to worry about the rest of the world being metric, but the U.S. using U.S. gallons versus Imperial gallons, and so forth. Despite the fact that we've changed, we haven't gotten rid of two-by-fours, or fasteners based upon the old system (any more than the U.S. lacks metric fasteners).
As for signs and gas pumps, both are easy. Sign life isn't all the long, when you think about it. Replace as needed. They don't need to be done overnight. As for gas pumps, they're all electronic these days, and converting units for them is trivial. Water meters, gas meters, and so forth just get replaced as time passes, with new construction or when smart meters are installed or updated. My house had an Imperial natural gas meter and water meter for many, many, many years after official metric conversion.
02SE: With respect to road networks and size, Saskatchewan has the most roads in any jurisdiction in North America, with a population of 1 million people. As long as no one expects signs to be replaced overnight, or recent "old" signs be replaced before reasonable, there's no problem. I was learning metric in elementary school and undergoing the switch over, and none of it was anything close to instant. There were no mountains of discarded signs, or trainloads full of natural gas meters heading to the junk yard.
Overkill is quite right. Things took many years to change, and the old system hasn't exactly just disappeared. Fresh meat labels, for instance, have price per pound and per kilogram. That's trivial for computerised labels. Signs were replaced as needed, not just magically by some due date.
With the mention of replacing signs piecemeal, that works well. The new signs, here at least, got marked explicitly with kilometres, and eventually, the kilometre notation was phased out, too, since by years and years later, the units were redundant. Heck, in this province, when we used to have Imperial units, speed limits on some highways were different at night than in the day.
Agreed.
