Miles better

SIR – Chris Grayling, the Transport Secretary, has reminded councils of official guidance, last issued in 2016, that all road signs should put distances in feet, yards and miles (report, April 22).

Why do British television programmes continually refer to kilometres for distances in Britain?

A BBC webpage even quoted the distance to a recently photographed black-hole in kilometres, which seems madness, as it was in the thousands of trillions. It should have been in light-years. Robin Hargreaves

Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

SIR – Miles are an easily understood way to describe longer distances that people don’t physically measure themselves.

But the continued use of Imperial measures for shorter distances and heights is ridiculous so many years after this country changed to the metric system.

I started school 50 years ago and my entire education was metric. All measurements we ever made at school were in centimetres and metres.

Yet when I go to drive into a car park I am confronted with a sign saying the entrance is 6’ 8” high. What does that mean? Will my car, which I know is 1.95m high, fit?

Why can we not just move properly on to the metric system rather than having signs that less than half the population understand? Adrian S Marshall

Maresfield, East Sussex

SIR – I agree that signposts should give distances in Imperial measure. We could then open up many other avenues where we are presented with continental measurements.

In travel films, documentary narrators seem to have adopted the metric forms both above ground and below water. Whatever happened to the fathom? Michael Burton

Wells, Somerset