OT - grasp of simple concepts like road names

On 01-Aug-17 8:16 PM, Huge wrote: ...

Useful if you might want to add junctions later. Less useful for a road with junctions less than a mile apart :-)

In which case you resort the "A" suffix used here!

Yes it is - or at least, can be (I will be less etymologically dogmatic than ... others)

eg.

' "Gate" derives from the Norse word "gata" meaning street.'

J^n

A furlongs suffix would be more in keeping with the concept.

There's a long street called Walmgate. At the end is a fortification, which is Walmgate Bar. You might think it's the city gate, and it might be considered that - but anywhere with Norse names a Gate is a street.

Or if you don't believe me

See meaning 2.

Andy

Why not just add a decimal to work to 10th of a mile?

SteveW

Because this is the USA - one of the very few imperial holdouts.

Owain

Unnecessarily fine-grained! :)

That's no excuse - odometers (or at least the tripmeter part on more modern cars) read 1/10 miles!

SteveW

What a sellout! I expect Trump will issue a tweet^H^H^H^H^H edict about that.

I met someone in the USA when I was staying near Boston who resented the fact that the trip milometer on his car gave distances to 1/10 mile. He said "this is America - why can't our cars quote the fractional part in feet?". Mainly because you'd need four extra digits.

For some reason, American road signs seem to give fraction-of-a-mile distances in feet rather than yards. "Roadworks in 2000 feet" is not as easy to interpret as "in 300 yards" or "in 1/3 mile" (with the advance warning sign moved appropriately to give a round number of yards or fraction of a mile).

I tend to to use the largest unit (to give the smallest number) that will express the quantity to the precision I need. I certainly can't visualise how far "10,000 feet" is (it's a little under two miles or 3300 yards) - I once saw a temporary roadworks sign with that distance marked on it.

There was a progam on the TV this week about the Orkney isles, there was a

there's a perfectly good service by air.

Yes. I remember flying to Kirkwall, via Aberdeen, to attend a funeral (Jo Grimond's).

That's a lot of babies.

Andy

Ha! In Leicester. The one that we used to foil the fire service mobilising system's suppliers' 'clever algorithm' for ensuring street names were correct c1983, which is sort of where we came in. the code was altered before it went live.

For a bit of fun, have a look at this Google Maps fragment in Virginia: