As a European, I’ve never been interested in working with the imperial units. But today I want to talk about a good point I discovered in it.
When I was living in Europe, I was driving every day, but here in Chicago I got used to moving around the city using public transportation or platforms like Uber or Lyft, even though I have my driver license ready to use.
I traveling by plane to visit and discover places in US but, sometimes I rent a car on weekends to visit places near the city. In this case, the trip is not so long and I don’t pay attention on how much time left to arrive to destination.
Of course, I’m using the map app on my phone, and I could use this app to know the travel time but the screen is not so big and the time to destination uses a small font. Because that, I prefer to calculate this time than distracting myself trying to read a small text on a small screen.
Last summer, my family came to visit me and we decided to go to the Niagara Falls by car. It was a really long trip and I had the opportunity to drive in a highway for a few hours, where I was paying attention to the distance signs.
In the beginning, I was converting miles to kilometers and then applied my previous experience in Europe to know how much time left to arrive. It was something like, first, multiply the miles by three and divide the result by two to obtain the kilometers (it is not precise, but easy to calculate) and then, assume that every 100-110 kilometers is about one hour.
Because driving is so boring, I ended up thinking about an easier way to calculate the time left until arrival. On a highway, the average speed (in my case) was around 60 mph and this means that every hour I drive for 60 miles. Such a coincidence! this means that every minute I drive for one mile. In this case, and only for highways, “Cleveland 75” means that I need to drive for an hour (60 minutes) and a quarter to arrive to Cleveland. So easy in miles and so complicated in kilometers.
Good point to the imperial units!