The Soviet Union use to use metres per second for aircraft speed and for
reporting wind speed. I don't know if this is still the case.
Stan Doore
----- Original Message -----
From: Pat Naughtin
To: U.S. Metric Association
Sent: Tuesday, July 14, 2009 8:47 PM
Subject: [USMA:45365] Speed in metres per second
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
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