THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT 
              Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Wednesday, July 20, 1994               TAG: 9407200382
SECTION: FRONT                    PAGE: A3   EDITION: FINAL 
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS 
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                         LENGTH: Medium:   52 lines

GOVERNMENT DROPS PLAN TO SWITCH HIGHWAY SIGNS TO METRIC THE FEDERAL HIGHWAY ADMINISTRATION SAYS THE CHANGE FROM MILES WOULD BE TOO COSTLY.

Put away those plastic cards converting miles to kilometers. Stop trying to figure out how fast 100 kph really is. The nation's highway signs aren't going metric any time soon.

Not many Americans were trying to adjust in the first place - part of a national metric resistance that now has led the Clinton administration to quietly back off plans to convert the signs by 1996.

It's another setback for the 200-year-old effort to make the decimal measurement system standard in the United States.

For those suffering metric setback by phrases like 100 kph, it's 62 miles per hour.

As part of a 1988 law to move government away from the English system of gallons, pounds and feet, the Federal Highway Administration had told the states it might withhold their share of $18 billion in road money if the signs weren't changed to metric by Sept. 30, 1996.

But more than 2,200 people wrote the highway administration opposing the plan. Several members of Congress introduced bills to abolish the sign change. Most cited the cost, estimated at about $200 million nationally.

``A majority of the negative responses stated the funds to convert the signs could be better used for repair of roads and bridges or for charitable purposes,'' Administrator Rodney Slater said in announcing the decision in the Federal Register late last month.

There is now no timetable for converting the highway signs, although Slater said the decision should be considered only a postponement.

Congress earlier this year prohibited use of federal money to help in converting highway signs to metric. Beyond the cost, Slater said, it was clear most Americans are unwilling to stop using the familiar English measurements, even as more and more products appear on store shelves in liters and grams.

The United States remains the only industrialized nation that still officially uses the English system of miles, gallons and pounds. Resistance to the metric system dates to the nation's infancy, when Thomas Jefferson was unable in 1790 to persuade Congress to adopt the French decimal system.

Advocates of the metric system say the United States risks harming trade with other nations if it continues to produce goods, such as spare parts, that don't fit in overseas. Opponents say massive change would be a nightmare for taxpayers. by CNB