New York was one of the last to revert, we are still building metric projects but they are becoming fewer and fewer. The mistake we made was to try to convert part of an industry. When the auto industry converted everything did at the same time, all US manufactures, and all suppliers. We converted the State highway agencies and some city and local agencies followed, even some major cities followed but not all. Worse yet, the private construction market did not convert so we had suppliers providing shop drawings for State agencies in metric and for private work in English. Contractors were building in both. Federal building contracts were metric but the billions of private construction were still English. Also some states said they were converting but dragged it out so much they never really were. The Construction industry is so domestic that its probably the last place you want to convert.
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John M. Steele Sent: Wednesday, September 07, 2011 6:49 AM To: U.S. Metric Association Subject: [USMA:51093] Re: Question about metric highway requirements Congress passed a law back in 1995/1996 saying the Feds could not FORCE metric on the State highway departments. The States all reverted to Customary and the Feds finally gave up, both on highway construction (which I doubt visitors would notice) and signage. The 2009 MUTCD has moved all metric dimensions on highway signs to an appendix and removed all sample metric messages. I don't think they are "illegal" but they are no longer explicitly given by examples (Standard Highway Signs, SHS, has not yet been updated to follow suit.) In the period when the MUTCD was showing metriuc sign messages, several States passed laws clarifying that they did not use the metric. --- On Wed, 9/7/11, Parker Willey Jr. <[email protected]> wrote: From: Parker Willey Jr. <[email protected]> Subject: [USMA:51091] Question about metric highway requirements To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]> Date: Wednesday, September 7, 2011, 2:44 AM I have a question about metric highway requirements. In this memorandum: http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/programadmin/contracts/1108metr.cfm Apparently, all state highway agencies have changed their internal requirements to use only colonial units and not use metric at all. There seems to be a clarification probably to state highway departments. It seems to say there is no requirement to use or to not use metric units. Then, I assume that a state highway department can use metric in it's designs if it wants to and still qualify for federal funding. Is that what I am seeing? I believe that when foreigners come to the US and see our peculiar colonial highway measures, they then will not buy our products as they will probably be not dimensioned in metric units. How can we push the highway departments to get on the metric system? Any ideas? ...Parker
