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Comment by Doctor_Fegg | Hacker News Reader

So I’m genuinely interested - what would you expect? I was born in Britain in the mid-70s and miles and metres, though an unconventional combination, is what I grew up with. But I realise not everywhere has the same weird combination of metric and imperial as we do. What would make sense to you from a North American viewpoint?

Edit: Thanks everyone for the feedback! Just pushed a quick fix:

- USA now defaults to miles & feet

- Canada and Mexico now default to km & metres

- Britain defaults to miles & metres (as before, yes we're weird)

- mainland Europe, Australia and NZ default to km & metres (as before)

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I'm from the US, and I would never expect "feet" in a road sign or on a bike. For distances below a mile I'd expect "½ mile" or "¼ mile"—this is how they are almost universally marked on road signs across the country. For extremely short road distances I've occasionally seen "⅛ mile". For road distances any shorter than that, which in my head I'm thinking of as "very short long distances", at that point I might expect—and I feel a little guilty even typing this out loud—yards. (Or blocks, where 1 block = ⅛ mile, but that's a peculiarly Chicago measurement, I think.)

Feet do show up on signs, but always in large round multiples of 100 feet. They tend to only show up on low-speed roads though -- signs like 'blind driveway 500ft'. On highways, distance signage is almost exclusively in miles and fractions thereof.

In Canada distances are almost always in meters/kilometers. For US I assume they would want feet/miles.

As an American, the mix of meters and miles really threw me off. When it said "40m" and "5mi" I thought it was switching between estimated travel time and distance. For me, it would be better if it was consistent with the measurement system (using miles and feet, OR meters and km).

I immediately recognized metres + miles (for a road distance) as British, I was also born there.

The USA should be feet and miles.

Canada should be metres and kilometres.

But you did say North America, it seems these might use miles per hour for road speeds, so they might not want metres and kilometres. I don't know if they want feet, yards or metres though.

Antigua, Bahamas, Barbuda, British Virgin Islands, Grenada, Puerto Rico, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, or the US Virgin Islands.

In canada we use feet and inches for building dimensions, but not for distance travelled. so we've still got the weird metric/english combo, but not quite as weird as miles and metres.

Well, miles andc metres is basicallyh identical to miles and yards, so it's not that weird...

U.S. Miles and Yards... Canada, Mexico KM and Meters.

Not the OP, but probably picking one unit at the start and sticking with it.

So "6 miles" and "0.04 miles"? I don't think that's the most understandable for anyone.

Probably feet for the latter. How is it sane or understandable for anyone to switch from metric to imperial mid-route?

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