Those who argue for the Imperial system of measurement often state that one of it's many great features is it's flexibility and the fact it fits in with everyday things... but I spotted something this week which once again proves that this supposed flexibility is often used as nothing more than a smokescreen with which to confuse the unsuspecting consumer!

It all started earlier this week when I saw a public notice in my local newspaper giving details of fares for Hackney Carriages in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, and judging by the wording the notice is something that's legally required. What really took my interest though was the table of charges.

At first sight I thought that perhaps the distances given were metric converted to imperial without the original measurement. So, out comes my calculator... but no! 541.54 yards is 495.1842 m and 125.7 yards is 114.94 m so that can't be right. So perhaps they put yards instead of metres meaning to put a supplementary conversion? Wrong again, 541.54 m would be 592.24 yards! So I decide to put the metric option to one side, only this makes no sense either since the two distances respectively are 49495.44 inches and 4525.2 inches so they don't even correspond to any rational distance in inches, let alone any other system of measure!

So I start to look at it from another angle. Are these fractions of a mile? Well yes. It seems that 541.54 yards just happens to be 4/13 of a mile and 125.7 yards is 1/14 of a mile.

I'm sorry, but this has to be said: Just how stupid is this?

After seeing this I decided to do some googling and found that this is a little unusual... councils do seem to use yards although it's usually something sensible. South Northamptonshire use "1/8th of a mile (220 yards)" on their website (click here) with no metric conversion. London seem to use 0.5 miles and Bath and North Somerset use "440 yards (approximately 402 metres)" as their base distance (click here) but then they use "217 yards (approximately 198 metres) and "175 yards (approximately 160 metres)" for additional charges. The smaller distances for Bath and Somerset still seem not to match anything "rational" but could be seen as a move towards metrication. On the whole though the distances used seem to make no sense whatsoever!

This raises a number of questions in my mind.

First, are meters on taxi cabs even accurate enough to measure these distances? Given that so many things can effect accuracy such as tyre pressures/wear and road conditions I seriously doubt it!

Second, is it legal to obfuscate distances in this manner? I suspect it probably is although it seems to me that using things such as "4/13 of a mile" is little different than selling apples by the bowl.

Finally, is it legal to produce these charges without giving metric distances? Current law allows the use of imperial on roads yet also says that items sold "by the unit" should be priced in metric... excluding the special excemptions given to the pint of course. I suspect that this is something that is enough of a grey area that it slips between the cracks!

Legal or not, to me it seems another great example of how the Imperial system of measures can be used to confuse the consumer... and even local authorities are involved in this scam! I think a bit more research is in order to see how this is done in other countries.

On that note... I'll be in Italy this time next week so will apologise in advance it my blog is late or even absent!