- Joined
- Jun 2, 2019
Apply this to the multibillion dollar American Construction industry and you’ll understand why the US will never wholesale switch to Metric as long as there are humans on the job site.
Everything about our infrastructure, from suppliers to foreman to structural engineers is built around Imperial. The lion’s share of structural steel for American projects is made domestically and nearly all of it in Imperially dimensioned standard shapes that have been standard for almost a hundred years. All that tooling required to mill and roll it? Imperial. Dies for reinforcing bar? Sized to the 1/8th inch. Dimensioned lumber, hardware, concrete batching sizes; it’s all inches, feet and cubic yards and every construction manager in the country is running their jobs based on convenient standard batching.
More importantly, every skilled and unskilled contractor has learned imperial exclusively since they first stumbled onto a construction site. Start throwing them materials sized in metric (which don’t actually exist locally) and plans dimensioned in metric (which they barely read as it is) and you’re looking at delays, safety concerns, and mistakes up to your eyeballs for decades of transition time. Conversion may be largely trivial (if time consuming) for an engineer, but half or more of a structural engineer’s job is making sure that the design can be safely and efficiently transferred to a finished building by people with a trade education.
Asking the US to convert to metric would be a serious strain in the economy. It’s asking real estate developers, architecture/engineering firms, and construction managers to shoulder an enormous additional cost and liability for no gain to them. It’s all domestic anyway; high end firms that do foreign work, like the US based engineers that did the Burj Khalifa, Taipei 101 and any number of China’s big flagship skyscrapers are already working in metric because they have a reason to. The developers doing your local strip mall are going to prefer someone local, in their own price range, who can pick up the phone and come over when the sub they got to do the roof joists is setting them at 36 inches in center instead of 24.
Considering that real estate is at the heart of literally every other fucking industry in the country, then it doesn’t take a genius to see why metric is a bad idea. Tech company wants a new server farm? It’s gonna cost them if everyone involved has to spend a 20% premium in time lost to conversions (that shit will absolutely add up), mistakes and delays. That’s not even touching on the fact that you’re drastically increasing the chance of a serious safety concern when those mistakes make their way through the cracks because people don’t have the institutional knowledge yet to catch them.
We’re talking billions of dollars of economic strain (and actual fucking human lives lost) all to satisfy the smug fucks on the internet who think that metric “just makes more sense”. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter, except for what’s more efficient. And until there are robots spacing and tying rebar, Imperial is going to be more efficient.
There are still arguments to be made about the utility of Imperial vs Metric in practical use, but other people have touched on them in this thread. The question is, for existing industries, is it more efficient or economical to switch to metric than it is to stick to Imperial. The industries that can answer “yes” have already started working in Metric, because, ya know, they want to make more money. The ones that haven’t switched have no incentive to, and a lot to lose if forced to.
I’m largely speaking to my own experience, which is how everyone who says “it’d be easier if the US just switched to metric” is a fucking moron who has no idea what they’re talking about.
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