I have not sent it yet; I will change it a bit. But as long as the speed limit is 60 mph it is risky to advice people to drive 100 km/h; that is simply against the law. More than 2 km/h too fast often is enough. When the change comes, then 60 mph should become 100 km/h. The present speed limit of 40 mph has the same problem. 70 km/h is too fast and leads to prosecution if stopped by the police, or Gardai in Ireland. The new limit could indeed become 70 km/h. I will send it as follows (see below),
Han ----- Original Message ----- From: "kilopascal" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, 2002-11-02 21:04 Subject: [USMA:23062] Re: Letter to the Editor 2002-11-02 Han, I hope you did not send this yet! The recommended speed for 60 murphys is 100 km/h, nor 95 km/h. 100 is a nice, neat and rational number. No 65 km/h. Either 60 or 70. Choose numbers that end in zeros. No fives. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Han Maenen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, 2002-11-02 13:16 Subject: [USMA:23060] Letter to the Editor 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-up areas." 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. Until metrication makes its debut a sensible conversion is: 70 m.p.h. = 110 km/h; 60 m.p.h. = 95 km/h and 30 m.p.h. = 50 km/h; the future Irish limits should be rounded to tens of kilometres, just as they are now in tens of miles. These, for instance, are the Dutch speed limits in kilometres per hour: 30 in residential streets, 50 on through roads in built up areas, 80 on country roads, 100 to 120 km/h on motorways, the latter according to motorway conditions. "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 70 km/h (rounded up from 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 metric mainlaind Europe. 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 <snip>
