THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 9, 1997 TAG: 9702090063
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY MASON PETERS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 66 lines
When the state Board of Transportation met Friday in Raleigh, a funny thing happened as they traveled from page four to page five in their monthly contract-letting agenda.
In the few centimeters between those two pages, it was clear that DOT highway engineers had double-clutched into a mighty downshift that carried them from the metric system on page four into English measurements on page five.
On page four, the highway design engineers asked the Transportation Board to approve a contract bid to build a .310-kilometer-long culvert to channel Bright's Creek in Polk County.
The engineers estimated the culvert work should cost $371,771.56. And three of the four contractors who bid said they could handle the Bright's Creek project for less.
But when the DOT moved on to page five of the same agenda, the transportation board members learned that Watauga County wants an estimated $470,566.40 to lay down 0.093 miles of pavement at a new Crab Orchard Creek bridge. Three of six bidders came in under that estimate, too.
``We're making haste slowly to convert to the metric system,'' said William Jones, a spokesman for the transportation department.
``We're not yet ready to put up highway signs that use kilometers instead of miles for distance. But our engineering division for some time has been drawing some plans that use metric measurement,'' Jones said Thursday.
``Whenever a project is started that uses metric instead of English measurement, we'll stick with metric as a matter of convenience,'' Jones added.
Metric measurements are based on a decimal system involving the powers of 10.
European countries and scientists all over the world use the metric system of measurement. But not even kilotons of persuasive effort from all sides have so far moved England or the United States to switch from inches, feet, yards and miles, or to scrap ounces, pounds, tons, and the 2.47 acres of land that equal a metric hectare.
While 39.37 inches is the U.S.-English length of a meter, a more accurate description would be to say that a meter is the distance light would travel in 1/299,792,458 of a second, with the speed of light being a constant at roughly 186,000 miles a second or about 300,000 meters a second.
A kilometer is about 5/8th of a mile, making .625 a rough-and-ready multiplier to convert kilometers to miles.
Former President Bush, an ex-Navy pilot who was pleased by the symmetry of the metric system, pressured Congress to get moving from miles per hour to kilometers per hour - and automobile speedometers soon began to double-talk: 100 miles an hour equals 161 kilometers per hour.
That change made the speeds more interesting. But cops have kept right on writing citations stating that 64 kph is too fast in town or in school zones.
``It will be some time before we start putting up signs that say, `89 kph speed limit,' '' said Jones. ``That's the present day 55-mile speed limit.''
Meanwhile, the British seem to have a last polite millilaugh.
Jones is a husky, pleasant man who would weigh about 13 stone in London. A stone is a British unit of weight that equals 14 pounds or 6.36 kilograms. English stones have never conveyed rational meaning or acceptance to overseas Americans trying to drive on the wrong side of the road.
Still, a good safe-driving rule in England is: ``Never argue with a lorry driver who weighs 20 stone.''
KEYWORDS: METRIC SYSTEM NORTH CAROLINA STATE BOARD OF
TRANSPORTATION