On 2008/08/09, at 8:14 PM, Pierre Abbat wrote:
On Saturday 09 August 2008 04:46:29 Pat Naughtin wrote:
Essentially, the techniques you need to go so slowly toward
metrication can be summarised as:
1 Encourage the idea and practice of metric conversion.
How would you handle a field where, were everyone to metricate right
now, data
in old units would be still in use for at least a hundred years? In
surveying, the document that first defines a lot is the controlling
document.
It may be dimensioned in meters, feet, chains, or maybe other units.
It may
refer to trees that don't exist any more. It may be illegible. It
may be
missing essential dimensions (many old maps have no bearings or
curve radii).
It may not close. It's still the controlling document and we have to
go by
it. And every time someone buys a lot, a surveyor has to go out
there and
make sense of that document.
Pierre
Dear Pierre,
I am not a surveyor so I am unable to comment personally. However, I
also know that this issue was quite difficult to achieve quickly in
Australia.
Here is a lengthy quote from Metrication in Australia by Kevin Wilks.
The two sections are headed, 'Land' and 'Real Estate'. I have made a
personal observation after quoting Kevin's work. By the way, I regard
Kevin Wilks as a personal friend and I have long admired his work on
metrication in Australia.
##
Land
The conversion for land included the surveying and mapping of land
areas, ownership and titles, real estate development and sales.
The committees which were responsible for these conversions were:
Land and Surveying Sector Committee
Real Estate Panel (New South Wales)
Real Estate Panel (Victoria)
Real Estate Panel (South Australia)
Real Estate Panel (Western Australia)
Real Estate Panel (Queensland)
Real Estate Panel (Tasmania)
Panel on Surveying Tapes
The land titles offices in each State, which were represented on these
committees, greatly assisted the change by requiring all new plans and
surveys to be in metric only from 1973 As a result, these operations
were converted without difficulty and were some of the first
conversions to be completed.
Despite the success of the conversion of new survey work, it was
sometimes found necessary to continue to work in imperial when using
old plans which could not easily be converted. This was particularly
the case with old mine workings in which the original surveys had been
done in feet and decimals of a foot.
Immediate conversion of existing plans and deeds was not considered
essential and, in accordance with the low priority given to this task,
small teams were created to work systematically through all plans and
update them to metric by typing in the margin the appropriate
conversion of every imperial reference contained on it. Because of the
large number of plans involved this work was expected to take many
years to complete.
Because of the inevitable delays in completing the conversion of
certificates of title, it was widely recommended that contracts for
the sale or purchase of land should be written in metric,
notwithstanding that the title deed to which it related might remain
in imperial for many years. As a general rule, certificates of title
were only converted when, as a result of new subdivision, a new
certificate of title had to be created or where further endorsement of
the existing certificate was no longer possible and a new certificate
had to be drawn.
Real Estate
Despite the successful conversion of surveying and mapping and the
registration of land titles, conversion of the sale of real estate was
considerably less successful and was a classical case of the need for
conversion to be supported by legislation and of responsibility for
action being useless without proper authority to carry out that action.
The first attempt to convert the real estate industry consisted of a
recommendation from the Land and Surveying Sector Committee, on which
the real estate industry was represented, that the several industry
associations should advise their members that from 1 July 1974 only
metric units should be used. At first many agents attempted to follow
these recommendations but as resistance and competition increased
there was a widespread return to imperial units.
As the public was believed to have had significant exposure to metric
already, it was wrongly assumed that people would have little
difficulty in making the change from feet, square feet, squares and
acres to metres, square metres and hectares, and few problems were
anticipated in the attempt at real estate conversion.
With the failure of this attempt, it soon became obvious that the
difficulties of the change for the industry and the public had been
considerably underestimated and that much more detailed planning would
be required before a new attempt could be made. Separate real estate
industry panels were, therefore, set up in each State and a new
program was developed for conversion throughout Australia from 1
January 1976.
Although a great deal of time was devoted to industry training it was
recognised that the greatest difficulty would be in effectively
communicating in metric with the public. While it was reasonable to
assume that most people would, by 1976, know that the metre was the
unit of length and that it was slightly more than 3 ft, very few would
have an appreciation of typical house and land sizes in metric
numbers. In fact, throughout metrication it became obvious that it is
not the learning of the names and sizes of the ten common units, but
the learning and remembering of typical numerical values of a variety
of things in metric units, which was difficult. To the extent that
this factor was not recognised early enough, a great deal of time was
wasted teaching two-way conversion factors when direct thinking in
metric by comparison with average metric sizes was what was actually
required. In addition, unlike experience gained rapidly in the daily
purchase of foodstuffs in metric, the infrequency of real estate
transactions precluded any possibility of the public being able to
learn real estate metric values by experience in the time programmed
for conversion.
Several companies which had strongly supported the industry's
conversion program found that the number of responses to sole metric
advertising was so low as to render them economically unable to
continue to support sole metric advertising. Some even reverted to
sole imperial. Most agents agreed that while the difficulties of
advertising in sole metric related to a lack of size appreciation in
metric numbers, this difficulty disappeared as soon as the client saw
the land, house or office advertised. The real difficulty was to
convey sufficient information in the advertisement or on the telephone
to bring the client into the office or to inspect the property.
Conscious of the difficulties of gaining public acceptance of metric
units, the industry repeatedly urged the Board to assist, through a
program of national advertising, to bring public appreciation of
metric sizes to a level at which the loss of sales would not be
intolerable,
The Board considered that it did not have sufficient funds to engage
in expensive advertising programs such as this might require and, were
it to do so, it would be obliged to assist other industries similarly.
With a policy of no compensation for costs incurred for conversion,
the Board considered also that consumer or market education should be
a matter for the industry itself.
However, in accordance with its policy of providing aids and
literature for use in the conversion the Board produced and published
a poster, "Metric Real Estate", and a pamphlet, "Buying Real Estate
the Metric Way", which were distributed very widely to agents and the
public.
In the absence of mandatory legislation or a public education program
directed at buyers of real estate, and with the risk that reversion to
imperial units could give rise to unfair competition between agents,
the industry asked the Board to obtain the assistance of the media,
particularly the newspapers, in implementing a cut-off for the
acceptance of non-metric advertisements.
While all newspapers responded favorably to this request, they
considered it to be the responsibility of the industry associations,
not the media, to ensure that their members adhered to the metrication
program. The associations, on the other hand, clearly had no powers to
discipline members and could not ensure success of the conversion
program.
Despite efforts by the newspapers to urge the industry and private
users of its columns to use metric only, much copy and artwork, over
which the newspapers had no control, was submitted to them in imperial
units and many valued clients and private users were unwilling to
voluntarily limit their advertisements to metric. Competition between
newspapers also rendered the achievement of a uniform conversion by
this method largely unworkable.
Again, in an effort to introduce some form of legislative support for
a uniform conversion, the Board approached the Trade Practices
Commission for assistance in prohibiting unfair competition between
traders in process of conversion, which could result from reversion to
imperial units. Unfortunately, in the absence of legislation which
would specifically prohibit the use of imperial units by an industry
in process of conversion, the Trade Practices Commission could find no
basis on which it could legally insist on metric measurements only.
The only assistance that this Organisation could give was the
publication of guidelines, under the title "Consumer Protection,
Advertising and Metric Conversion", which urged agents to take account
of progress in conversion and to use metric units only.
While initially high levels of metric usage were achieved in each
State, the effects of competition and public unfamiliarity with
dimensions given in metric units forced a significant return to
imperial units, particularly in the advertising of rural land.
It was evident that without mandatory legislation to regulate the
change, such as the State weights and measures Regulations for retail
trading, uniform packaging regulations for packaged goods, building
regulations for building design and materials, and highway speed signs
and traffic regulations, conversion of the real estate industry on a
wholly voluntary basis would be almost impossible to achieve.
At one stage, consideration was given to amending the (Federal)
Weights and Measures (National Standards) Regulations to withdraw the
acre and the perch as Commonwealth legal units. These units had no
applications outside their use in real estate description and could
therefore have been removed as obsolescent without hardship to the
public. The effect of withdrawing units from the lists of Commonwealth
legal units was to make contracts using them, after the date of the
withdrawal, void and unenforceable. No penal clause existed in these
regulations and while no judicial action had ever been taken to void a
contract because of its failure to use Commonwealth legal units,
deletion of the acre and the perch could have provided a sufficient
deterrent to the continued use of these units to have allowed real
estate conversion to proceed.
It was subsequently shown that removal of the acre and the perch was
capable of being used by unscrupulous people to deliberately
invalidate a properly drawn-up contract which, by oversight or design,
might have included withdrawn imperial units, thus allowing the agent
to-resell the property at a higher price to another bidder. Under
these circumstances, the Board did not consider it wise to explore
further the possibility of this kind of amendment at this stage of
conversion.
A less hazardous method of securing mandatory conversion of real
estate was seen to be the creation of a regulation under the Metric
Conversion Act to permit the selective withdrawal of non-metric units
from use by particular industries where imperial units were
approaching obsolescence. However, by the time this action was
proposed, public reaction to enforced metrication had worsened
considerably, largely as a result of the unpopularity of the
prohibitions on the importation of non-metric measuring devices, and
the government indicated that it would be unwilling to consider
additional metrication legislation at this stage.
With the passage of time and the effects of trouble-free conversions
in the retail sale of foodstuffs and other consumer goods sold by
weight or measure in New South Wales since 1979, and with the imminent
demise of the Board in June 198 1, another attempt was made to secure
a more effective cut off for non-metric real estate advertisements
through newspapers in New South Wales.
Again, reluctantly, the newspapers accepted that, while they may have
the power to do so, they still considered it the responsibility of the
real estate industry to obtain the total compliance of its members.
The new newspaper cut off date was set at 1 April 1981 but as with
previous attempts at control by this method the agreement broke down
and many agents reverted to dual or sole imperial usage.
Finally, an attempt was made to secure the legislative support of the
only State, New South Wales, which had an Act which might have been
amended to require the use of metric units in real estate
advertisements in that State. Understandably, this State was unwilling
to take action unilaterally without an indication that similar action
would be taken in the other States.
In review, it seems almost axiomatic that any far-reaching national
change, not only metrication, which is initiated by government can
only be achieved by voluntary acceptance if it is made a democratic
obligation on all by legislation.
In the absence of supportive legislation, a public education program
to popularise and simplify the change would have done much to secure a
successful conversion.
Most of all, insistence on sole metric advertising of real estate was
a mistake because, while many agents were unhappy about advertisements
which they knew would produce a diminished response in sole metric,
most would have agreed to a requirement that allowed them to use both
metric and imperial in their advertisement. In due course agents would
decide for themselves that their clients could understand metric
sufficiently for them to forgo the tedium and expense of having to
work in two systems.
As things remained in 1982, it was difficult to see elimination of the
acre, the perch and the square from real estate advertisements until
generations of children still at school became a significant
proportion of the real estate market.
##
In 2008, what Kevin Wilks wrote in 1982 has worked out to be true. The
acre is used colloquially but it is little understood; people now know
that when they are actually buying or selling land then hectares are
the better way to go. Land for housing is advertised, bought, and sold
in square metres, I haven't heard of a perch (or a rod or a rood) in
more than 20 years, and the square (of 100 square feet) is still
occasionally used by some unscrupulous real estate agents selling new
houses. As a side issue, it is interesting how the application of
decimals to old pre-metric measures (squares of 100 square feet in
this instance and mining distances given in feet and decimals of a
foot in the mining industry) delays the introduction of the complete
coherent measurement system incorporated in the metric system. See http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/USADecimalisationAndMetrication.pdf
for how this might be a particular retarding factor that has to be
considered for metrication in the USA.
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin
PO Box 305 Belmont 3216,
Geelong, Australia
Phone: 61 3 5241 2008
Metric system consultant, writer, and speaker, Pat Naughtin, has
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