Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by VBprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

VBprogrammer·

This appears to be a UK based site so why on earth are the distance units in Kilometres?

View on HN

Because we are metric in the Uk.

What's more odd is distances from London for things in London. Presumably from some bogus centre.

Not in all cases. Distances of such length are almost always measured in miles here.

Only because of road signage and a failure to complete the move to metric.

I tend to use both miles and KM. Miles in the car, KM on the bicycle.

I understand and can visualise what a KM is better than what a mile is though.

Distances and speeds on our road system are always measured in miles. As such most British people generally have a much stronger intuition of Miles than they do Kilometres (except strangely runners who quite often use Kilometres).

Maybe it depends if you have a car. Runners, cyclists, people who go by train, people who travel to Europe, technical people all use km. I wouldn't have ever thought of using miles on a website...

(Unfortunately) that's not true. All road distances are Miles here in the UK. By this I mean road signs, maps, vehicle speedometers and trips, etc.

I wish we did use Km - I just spent a couple of months riding my motorcycle around Europe, and metric everything just felt so much more intuitive.

I get this a lot - I guess it was one of my americanisms coming through when writing the front end (I lived in the states for a few years), as well as a preference for working in KM.

Essentially, it's on the TODO list to be updated.

We don't use KMs in the US either.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com