Ireland drives towards metric conformity Tue 14 September, 2004 16:14 DUBLIN (Reuters) - A driver is travelling from Dublin to Limerick at 60 miles per hour. Limerick is 198 kilometres from Dublin. How long will it take to get there?*
>From January 20 next year, drivers in Ireland will no longer have to watch the road >and perform these sums as they go because all speed limit signs will finally go >metric -- matching distance signs, which it started to convert in the 1990s. Ireland and the United Kingdom are among the last bastions of Imperial measurements like miles, feet and inches although countries like the United States also still like to do their baking in pounds and ounces. A special board will oversee the change and is planning a media campaign to help people make the mental switch between miles and kilometres, but the country's transport minister is hopeful things will go without too many hitches. "I am confident that we can make the changeover from miles to kilometres safely and smoothly," Seamus Brennan said in a statement announcing the date. Other countries have certainly faced tougher road-related challenges. Sweden switched sides of the road altogether in 1967 to drive the same way as neighbours Norway, Finland and Denmark. Ireland is unlikely to go that far any time soon but its January changeover will leave the UK as the last country in the European Union with non-metric road signs, which could prove tricky around the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=583283§ion=news or http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/Swissinfo.html?siteSect=143&sid=5213149
