American travelers in Canada, or anywhere else in the world for that matter, are often flummoxed by the metric system. The U.S. is, in fact, one of only three countries in the world where the metric system has not yet been officially adopted. Since the metric system has become the lingua franca of business and industrial measurements, the U.S. is finding it necessary to slowly begin the process of metrication. In the meantime, travelers need to learn some basic conversion factors in order to gauge how far it is until the next town or rest stop.
The metric system has a long history. The French metric system, developed in the late 1700s, was used by many countries around the world until 1960 when the International System of Units (SI) was created to standardize metric measurements.
The SI system is also known as the modern metric system, a simple, decimal-based system of measurement. Its simplicity comes from the fact that there is only one base unit for each type of thing being measured. For example, in the case of distance, the base unit is a meter. When you want to describe something much larger or smaller than a meter, you use multiples of 10 of the base unit. Each multiple has a name. For example, “kilo” indicates 1,000, so a kilometer is 1,000 meters. On the other hand, “milli” indicates 1/1000, so a millimeter is 1/1000th of a meter. Easy, isn’t it?
What isn’t so easy is the process of converting between the metric or SI system and the Imperial system still in use in the U.S. It is not nearly as simple as multiplying or dividing by ten. The table below tells you how to convert linear measurements from the Imperial system to the SI system (and vice versa). Multiply the unit by the factor to do the conversion. For example, 3 miles X 1.6093 = 4.8 kilometers.
centimeters to feet .0328
centimeters to inches.3937
feet to centimeters30.4801
inches to centimeters2.54
kilometers to feet3,280.833
kilometers to miles.6214
meters to feet3.2808
meters to inches 39.37
meters to yards1.0936
miles to kilometers1.6093
yards to centimeters91.44
yards to meters.9144
Want to track your fuel consumption? Use the calculations below:
- miles per gallon to kilometers per liter.4251
- kilometers per liter to miles per gallon2.3521
