I am going to send this message to the Irish Times. Madam,
I saw in Saturday's Irish Times the following recapitulation of speed limits in Ireland: "And just for the record, the speed limit is 70 m.p.h. or 112 k.p.h. on motorways and dual carriage ways; 60 m.p.h. or 96 k.p.h. on urban stretches and outside built-up areas and 30 m.p.h. or 48 k.p.h. in built-upareas." No visitor's car with a metric speedometer can hold such funny speeds. Sometimes metric values like that are used to ridicule the metric system. A sensible conversion would have been: 70 m.p.h. = 110 km/h; 60 m.p.h. = 95 km/h and 30 m.p.h. = 50 km/h, and these may well be among the future Irish limits. "Soft" metrication, like 30 m.p.h. becomes 48 km/h, is disastrous. It is to be hoped that metrication will not be used to lower the limits, just to make them sensible. In fact, 50 km/h in residential streets is too high; it should be 30 km/h, so that many of the old '30' signs can be re-used. And on splendid through-roads 50 or even 65 km/h (the old 40 m.p.h.) is too low. Make it 80 or 90 km/h and up to 120 km/h on the emerging Irish motorway network. Another article on this metrication issue in Friday's IT, used the word 'confusion'. I would not think so. Metric road distance signs have been present in Ireland for many years and many Irish motorists drive in mainlaind Europe which is metric. Almost all Irish cars have a double speedometer, and when metric comes in all new cars will have metric-only speedometers. In the contrary, it will end the confusion that now reigns on Irish roads, as in a sense, it will be a return to one system of measurements, only it will be metric and not Imperial. And last, but not least, I have to mention that the international and correct symbol for kilometre per hour is km/h; k.p.h is deprecated. Yours faithfully, Han Maenen Nijmegen, The Netherlands One thing do Irish and Dutch residential streets have in common. A speed sign saying '30' at the entrance. Only, with us is it means 30 km/h, in Ireland it means 30 miles per hour, which is too high in my opinion. That would be a joke, a member of the BWMA, F2M, Inch Perfect or the UKIP driving in the Netherlands at 30 mph in such streets. That would mean a new kind of 'metric martyrs', if stopped and prosecuted. It would cost them dearly, a high fine and a time without a licence. Han Historian of Dutch Metrication, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
