Change is afoot!

[GH85Carrera]

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!

[wdfifteen]

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?

[BeyGon]

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

[Bill Douglas]

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

[Captain Ahab Jr]

Originally Posted by Bill Douglas

"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

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

[Bill Douglas]

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.

[Jims5543]

Originally Posted by BeyGon

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

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.

[Jims5543]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

Quoting the author of the story:
[FONT="Franklin Gothic Medium"]
By Seth Borenstein
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON —

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

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.

[BeyGon]

Originally Posted by Jims5543

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.

[svandamme]

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 !

[Geronimo '74]

Green font, Stijn, green font...

[svandamme]

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

[Tervuren]

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.

[Jims5543]

Originally Posted by svandamme

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 !

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.

[GH85Carrera]

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.

[Jims5543]

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

[Tervuren]

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.

[javadog]

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.

[GH85Carrera]

Originally Posted by Jims5543

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

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.

[fred cook]

Originally Posted by Jims5543

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

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.