Change is afoot!
 

Quoting the author of the story:

By Seth Borenstein
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON —

Change is afoot for the official measuring stick used to size up big places in America.

The reason? There are actually two different definitions of the 12-inch measurement known as a foot. Some land surveyors use what’s known as the U.S. survey foot. Others use the definition that’s more accepted by the broader world: the international foot. The difference between them is so tiny that you can’t see it with the naked eye on a 12-inch ruler. But over big distances, it matters. So, to reduce the chance for errors and confusion, the federal government has announced it’s finally giving the boot to the survey foot. The international foot is the smaller one — adding about an eighth of an inch of difference when measuring a mile. That means the United States is 28.3 feet wider when measured using the international foot instead of the survey foot. The change started in 1959, when the federal government mandated that everyone use the international foot but allowed surveyors to keep to the old U.S. survey foot for a while. That temporary reprieve has lasted 60 years, but it will finally end in 2022, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Institute of Standards and Technology announced in October.

Surveyors in 40 U.S. states and territories still use the larger U.S. foot. The rest use the smaller international one. “We have chaos,” says Michael Dennis, a project manager for NOAA’s National Geodetic Survey. Geodetics is surveying that takes into account the curve of the Earth. “This is a mess.” The small difference may not seem like much, but it caused trouble in planning for high speed rail in California, Dennis said. It also created a mess for bridge work between Oregon, which uses the international foot, and Washington, which uses the U.S. one, he said. Dennis also relayed a horror story one surveyor sent him: A contractor from a state that uses the U.S. foot planned a building in the glide path of a major airport in a state that uses the international foot. The confusion over the two different feet caused delays, extra cost and redesign of the building to be one floor shorter. (Dennis wouldn’t identify the airport.) “It’s embarrassing that we even had this going on for 60 years,” Dennis says. “This whole thing is ridiculous.” Dennis knows some will squawk. The U.S. foot “sounds very patriotic, very American,” he said in a webinar. “Then there’s the word ‘international foot,’ which sounds kind of new world order, U.N.-sanctioned, maybe with a whiff of socialism.” But it makes sense to be using the same measuring stick as the rest of the world to save time and eliminate embarrassing errors, he says. Those who fear this is a slippery slope leading to the metric system are worrying a century too late, NIST metric coordinator Elizabeth Benham says. Since 1893, the official definition of a foot is based on the meter.

For us it is no big deal, we will still provide the file in the coordinate system the client requests, and re-projecting the file is just a click of a button. We have clients that are working with old files that date back many decades. They want the new files to match and align with the old data of course. They request files in UTM NAD27 (that is a 1927 system) and some ask for meters some want feet. We are not prejudiced, we make it what ever the client wants.

For the most part, our default is NAD83 US Feet. (the 1983 standard, really modern) ;)

There are tons of weird global projections that try to show a flat product fitting the curved earth. And for the Texans, I hate working in Texas systems most of all. In the days when the land was first surveyed, and rancher would spit on the ground and say that is the beginning point of my survey, then the one of many dozens rail roads came through, and said, no we started our survey in St Louis, so this is the survey we use. Then another RR came along and said no we started in San Fransisco at the beach, and this is our survey. Then to make things even goofier, the roads and sections are at some off angle, and they don't use North as up. It makes no sense, but hey it is a bunch of Texans, so what do you expect!

Those Texans ought to know better than to mark their territory by spitting. Real men piss on their boundaries to mark them.
Can I get a survey done in furlongs?

Surveyors have been using the foot divided into Tenths since they gave up the chain. I don't believe they will change.

"The International Foot." That's pretty funny when the US is the only place to use a foot.

Is the 'International Foot' the same as World Series baseball and NASCAR World Cup which I believe are a big deal in the US but outside of the US not many people know about it :D

Just for the record I still use inches, feet and miles but also use mm, meters and kms and at times mix them together too but then I'm not right in the head :confused:

LOL

GF says "It's about two feet." I say "I don't know what you are talking about, we have been metric since the 1970's." just to wind her up. She used to live in Scotland is where she learnt that.

Yup, it is stupid and I wish we would just go to Metric and be done with it.

I typically do not work on anything large enough for this change to affect me. Here is a conversion to put it in perspective:

3.28083333333 US survey feet per meter

3.28083989501 International feet per meter

0.000006' difference.

In 5,280' (1 mile) it will change 0.0317 feet. It is a rare day I am working with distances like that.

I have been getting notices about this change for a few months now. As I mentioned in the post above, it will hardly affect me. It is a rare day when I am dealing with a distance longer than 1300 feet.

I used to measure three to five miles at a shot with the EDM and we did have to figure in curvature of the earth.

And that's why all sensible and scientific people use the Metric system.

Y'alls can't even figure out what a foot unless you get one up yer ass !
https://media1.tenor.com/images/78fa...9fdc/tenor.gif

Green font, Stijn, green font... :D:D:D

naaah, not on the topic of imperial vs metric system

The Mericans wanted nothing to do with the British Empire, fought over it
then stick to Imperial measurements.. like , make up yer mind :P

Svandamme, a bit of mischaracterzation.
A lot of Americans fought to have their own kingdom based on the British system.
The fight didn't start with what transpired later in mind.

The fight was over the perception that they weren't being treated British enough.

You are preaching to the choir, I wish we, as land surveyors, would just switch over and be done with it.

Try explaining to a layman how to convert decimal feet to feet and inches.

I work a large pool construction company I tried over and over to explain how to convert the decimal feet on my surveys into inches to their deck supervisor. He just could not grasp it.

I finally gave up and gave him a tape measure with decimal feet and inches on it.

I call it our re tarded metric system, because it is.

The inertia inherent in the imperial system is huge. We always work with a Registered Land Surveyors and engineering companies if any sort of map accuracy is needed. Usually they are our client, and they sell it to the end user with their stamp on it. If they just want "a pretty picture" of campus, or farm or whatever image of the ground they want, to hang on their wall, we don't get any ground control except what the airborne GPS & IMU give us. It is just a picture, not a map.

If they want to have a map, and meet the National Map Accuracy standards we require them to put down ground targets.

https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1999/0171/report.pdf

The targets are large white X shape targets that make it simple for us to see that point, and tell our computer this is X,Y & Z and accurate to a very high accuracy (sub MM) since they used a Trimbale GPS or some other brand that gave them super accurate measurement. We ask for a grid of them, in a pattern, and we will be well within the map accuracy standards.

In talking to many clients the centimeters, 1/10th of a foot and miles get all mashed together in the clients specs. Most high res jobs want a 3 inch pixel or a 0.25 of a foot, or a 7.62001524003048 CM (we usually round that to 7 CM for conversation purposes). We will make them in whatever the clients specifies. We will use Indian Yards (0.0833336339006011) or links (0.378788636365151) or Sear's Feet (0.250000933449327) or any of the other myriad of measurement systems.

In the end, we are NOT surveyors, and never claim to be. We sell the geo-referenced image to the surveyor and they are the ones presenting it as a map and accurate. I just finished a project that the deliverable is a 32.4 GB (34,886,586,530 bytes) tif file. It is a large area, at very high resolution.

It has been a couple of decades since I used photogramety. In addition to the targets we have to proof your data.

We would run a series of cross sections randomly around the project and have to achieve a passable level of accuracy.

I had looked into Drone surveying. The software to process the data was cost prohibitive. Instead I chose to invest in 2 roving GPS units which were still cheaper.

The GPS has been an eye opener concerning accuracy. When Inhave time I will post about that.

Sent from my SM-G960U using Tapatalk

I personally use the metric system in my work, and am the only person in the company that does so.

I have a fondness for the mile and mile per hour because these are connected to driving in the U.S..

I work with the metric system because I am designing optical components, millimeters as my standard unit just works better for this.

One thing about the English system is the different measurements are often sized around practical use for that measurement.

Why must we use the international foot, when the international community largely doesn't use the foot at all?

In the end, every unit of measure is completely arbitrary to the average Joe. Look at the history of the definition of a meter. You think that in 1793, they had any real clue what the distance represented by one ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator along the meridian through Paris was?

Lots of equally useless definitions along the way to the current one, which is the length of the path traveled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 of a second.

Yeah, I can relate. Let me get my dad's old stopwatch. It's here somewhere.

Drone companies are often our best clients. They can usually pop out a product easily for one building, or even a few dozen acres. Then some big client calls them for a 4 square mile area and they realize there is no way they can handle it. That is a piece of cake for us. We have done some much larger areas than that.

We can usually provide a surveyor the image at way less cost than they can do it on the ground. Even more so in rugged areas. We did one job on a oh my gosh, hurry hurry basis that was the bend in a river right after a mega rain fall and flooding. They needed to see the area, and it was still swampy mud, full of mosquitoes, ticks, chiggers and poison ivy. The surveyor said he was dreading and one employee threatened to quit before he went in there. We did it in short order and the final client thought he was hero to do it so fast. Of course it took 3 months to get paid. They all want the product NOW, but the payment is always slow.

We have a bunch of crazy expensive software. The Cessna 182 was not cheap. We can still do a 1/4 section or square mile section of land in short order, and for less than the surveyor would spend on the many road trips to the remote area to do the survey on the ground. Even more so if the area is really rugged with ravines and area no 4 wheeler can cross.

going metric.............
 

Ok, but if we go metric, let's go all the way and include time. One hundred seconds to a minute, 100 minutes to an hour, 10 hours to a day, 10 days to a month and 10 months to a year. That should keep everyone scratching their heads for a while! At least it would keep watchmakers and calendar companies busy for a few years. Also, get rid of mr. Fahrenheit and go with degrees celsius.

I'm fine with metric time , don't wear a watch anyway
Phone is my time piece, and it can can already do metric time

Although we have been metric since the 1970's some things are still in feet.

A guy is 6'1" a surfboard is 8 foot 2, a piece of land is four acres.

And virtually all cars manufactured have a SAE bolt and threads for the seatbelt anchor. Tires and wheels are sold in inches.

True, a 7/16-20... Always wondeed what the story was on that... Goes back years...

What I heard, the US safety standards had that size bolt specified. Since the USA is the biggest part of most car markets, and that is the majority of what parts are on the market for car builders to use, they all adopted it as standard. Even cars made in foreign countries for other foreign car markets find it cheaper to buy a bolt that KNOW is designed to do the job safely and correctly. Why spec a bolt of another size that cost more than the mass produced ones.

Yeah wheels are the strangest. Mm in one direction, inches in the other.

Accuracy:

I was sold this Topcon system I am using now on the basis it would provide me with the accuracy I wanted which was 0.02' to 0.03' horizontal, I was told I would get close to the same vertical, that would be a lie.

I also discovered something horrifying while using it. Just holding the pole in human hands can result in inaccuracies of up to 0.10' or greater. I needed better than that.

Here is my 16 y/o (when he was 15 earlier this year) running it locating utilities and fences. I taught him how to run it in about 15 minutes. Which makes me sad as any idiot can be a land surveyor now.

https://photos.smugmug.com/photos/i-...-2LCBntz-L.jpg

Once I realized we humans cannot hold the thing steady enough to obtain real accuracy, I purchased some carbon fiber bipods to mount on them. Now we can lock the unit in place and keep it there. We use the bipod mount for any location requiring high tolerance. Then we programmed to the GPS to take thirty separate one second observations then average them out.

https://photos.smugmug.com/photos/i-...-PfL4GXs-L.jpg

We will sit on a property corner or nail in the road for 30 seconds using the bipod locking it into place. We are finally achieving 0.02 or better accuracy horizontal.

Vertical? Not so much I have to use a level to get good vertical, it is wanky at best, I see 0.1' to 0.3' variations all the time. Sometimes it is within 0.01' others it is out to lunch at 0.30'. I am a 1 man crew so I keep a laser level in my truck to use when I need high accuracy like an FFE staked on a house.

What made me realize we were NEVER very accurate was the fact that the pole can move so much, using a standard total station with a prism pole it would not be so noticeable. If we were going for a tight closure we would be using tripods and running a closed loop, turning multiple angles (typically reverse) and taking multiple distance readings.

When we were laying out houses and locating form boards, or even setting corners, I realized just holding a prism pole can result in 0.1' or worse accuracy. This was realized when using the GPS.

The addition of GPS has been a godsend, my next 2 purchases for my company will be a robotic total station then out of left field, a Prius V for my second crew to drive. I realized they are 99% on the pavement in residential settings. I am the one on the construction sites all the time. So the other crew is ditching the 20 MPG pickup truck for a 40+ MPG Prius.

The robot will compliment my GPS so I can truly be a 1 man crew. Right now I sometimes have to steal a guy to help me or take the prismless instrument and set up prism poles on bipods for backsights. Which I have to do next week to do a tree survey. The robot will eliminate that. Plus the robot runs off the same Win10 tablet I am using for my GPS utilizing the same software, I just have to pay to unlock the capability.

We have a surveyor client that normally works in NW Oklahoma, where he lives. He landed a project here in OKC. He brought his new Trimble GPS unit so he could map out the target locations on a job we were going to fly for him. We just chatting and volunteered to show us the operation of his system. My business partner lives close by so he went and got his DJI drone, and flew my house. We just used crack in the concrete, or corners on sidewalks and various point we could see on the ground. We flew my house twice, and I combined all the images from two flights to "map" my house just for fun. It was insane high resolution, and we could measure the heights of the bricks. One of our Photogrammetry geek customers wanted som sample data to play with. He built a vector 3D AutoCAD line drawing of my house at 1:1 so I have an exact model of my house, and property, and crazy high resolution image of it. It is useless to me for any real purpose, except it is cool.

The Trimble was fun to play with and we just hand held things since we were not really interested in real science and not selling it to anyone.

I work with feet, survey feet, meters, micrometers, kilometers, kilofeet, all in NAD27, WGS83, UTM N14W99, even ITRF2008 (find me THAT one!). When you are mapping 300-500 square miles, even the small difference between feet and survey feet crops up, and I need to use 5 or 6 decimals when converting between imperial and metric or things get sloppy.

If you have to work in Texas, I feel sorry for you. We hate Texas projects and trying to figure out which RR survey or rancher's survey was used for a square mile, and then most of the time things are at a weird angle and north is never up. We are happy to accept the Texas projects but it involves more profanity on our part. Of course cussing Texans is a sport around here. ;)

I'm working with geophysical data for Oil, so *generally* someone else made the decisions and I just have to follow them, but we do deal with projects in every possible projection from all around the world and sometimes we change projections as we go (legacy data from the 70's in NAD27, and they want the resulted updated to WGS84, etc).

I feel yer pain.

We had one manufacturing site that was using plant coordinates since the day the plant was plotted. They wanted to everything done to match the old plant coordinates and at the same time have the new images in WGS84 to work with the GPS and laptops. Then they asked us to update all the old paper maps. We "let" them do that themselves.

Of course then they bought the plant next door, and it had a all different plant coordinates and mess of paper plots. I felt sorry for their GIS guy.

Puerto Rico still uses the Querda, or a "Spanish Acre" which his 0.971 of an imperial acre, which is 0.39295 Hectare.

When I lived in West Stockbridge,MA, most of the land surveys were done using a bench-mark that was in the wrong place. My house used a granite marker in the backyard (1824 hours), so the survey was one of the few that was correct.