Hi, I had also been thinking about m/s vs km/h some while ago. They convert quite easily, seeing as there are 3,600 seconds in an hour, and of course 1,000m in a km. m/s = (km/h)/3.6, or km/h = m/s*3.6. For scientific and industrial purposes, m/s seems a lot more useful. However, roads are expressed in km and people usually don't like to fiddle with seconds when driving. I think *ideally*, maybe m/s would be better, but overall it might make things more difficult. Driving is usually much more associated with minute accuracy than second accuracy, or even hour accuracy (most of the time). I think m/min seems reasonable (at first glance), but at that point moving to m/s sounds best to me.
I do think that the public needs to know more about m/s in general. For anything scientific or muzzle velocity, it seems to be a far superior unit. Except for really slow speed stuff, then dm/s or mm/s might be more appropriate. I'm not nearly an expert in the metric system so had to look up the prefixes, and was suprised to find that deca's prefix is "da". dam is an interesting way of writing 10m; I would have thought that D would be a better prefix. Cheers, Teran On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 00:47, Pat Naughtin<pat.naugh...@metricationmatters.com> wrote: > Dear All, > I have just been reading this blog > at http://globonsomeday.blogspot.com/2009/07/improving-metric-system.html where > they say: > Another metric unit commonly encountered in everyday usage is the unit of > speed, kilometres per hour. The official SI base unit for time is seconds, > and therefore a more appropriate measurement of speed is metres per second. > For example, 100 km/h is equivalent to 27.78 m/s. > > I wonder if we will ever be ready to embrace the idea of using the SI unit, > metres per second, for speed in everyday conversations. > Let's take the example given above with sensible rounding. The speed limit > on a highway might then become 25 metres per second. > Other limits might go like this (using Australian examples): > School zone 40 km/h 10 m/s > Suburban street 60 km/h 15 m/s > Main (4 lane) cross town road 70 km/h 20 m/s > Highway 100 km/h 25 m/s > Freeway 110 km/h 30 m/s > It might be interesting to see this idea applied to speed limits in Asia, > Europe, the UK and the USA. > Cheers, > > Pat Naughtin > Author of the forthcoming book, Metrication Leaders Guide. > PO Box 305 Belmont 3216, > Geelong, Australia > Phone: 61 3 5241 2008 > Metric system consultant, writer, and speaker, Pat Naughtin, has helped > thousands of people and hundreds of companies upgrade to the modern metric > system smoothly, quickly, and so economically that they now save thousands > each year when buying, processing, or selling for their businesses. Pat > provides services and resources for many different trades, crafts, and > professions for commercial, industrial and government metrication leaders in > Asia, Europe, and in the USA. Pat's clients include the Australian > Government, Google, NASA, NIST, and the metric associations of Canada, the > UK, and the USA. See http://www.metricationmatters.com for more metrication > information, contact Pat at pat.naugh...@metricationmatters.com or to get > the free 'Metrication matters' newsletter go > to: http://www.metricationmatters.com/newsletter to subscribe. >
