I received a draft Engineering Instruction the other day. The New York State Department of Transportation is ending its transition back to US Customary units and we have a metric phase out date (although I can't state it until it's finalized). We still have a few metric legacy projects, there are a few metric projects in construction around the State. Of course we have many projects that were built in metric and will have to be maintained for the foreseeable future but I doubt that will have any major impact. It's not quite like building a car in SI then trying to maintain it using US Customary parts. After that date we will no longer support metric manuals and design standards. I tried to convince our main office staff to at least maintain dual units in our Design Manual but I am not sure if they are going to do so. At least we will have copies of old manuals around for some time as they take awhile to update. We will however no longer update and maintain metric standard sheets and metric specifications. Fortunately we will have quite a library of metric standards, details, specifications etc. that can be used if we ever revert or if other agencies want resources. Our designers will also have access to metric measuring devices, scales and other tools that we already own.
Sadly, I will likely retire (within the next 5-7 years) without seeing us go back to SI. At this point with reversion completed I fear it will have to be a full generation before anyone would attempt it again. Next time our industry will be the followers not the leaders converting only after everyone else has. Lesson to learn - you cannot convert part of an industry. It's all or nothing, in our case Sate Highway Agencies, the Federal Government and some local agencies, converted or tried to, but the private construction industry had no initiative to do so. There is too much overlap between private and public construction amongst suppliers and contractors. That is what eventually did us in. Howard R. Ressel Project Design Engineer New York State Department of Transportation 1530 Jefferson Road, Rochester, NY 14623 (585) 272-3372 | howard.res...@dot.ny.gov www.dot.ny.gov [Dept of Transportation Logo-with gov and commish names-memo] Metric Means Jobs and Money!
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