Multistate Disagreement over the Length of the Foot to End
27th June 2020
Most engineering projects in the U.S. have used the international foot since 1959, but land surveys—which map boundaries and infrastructure locations—use whichever foot an organization or state wants. (The international foot is exactly 0.3048 of a meter, whereas the U.S. survey foot, 1200/3937 of a meter, has an unending decimal.) This means that anyone working in multiple U.S. locations or with different agencies must keep careful track of which foot is in use. A recent poll of 530 attendees of a National Geodetic Survey Webinar, who were mostly surveyors, found that 62 percent blamed confusion between the two feet for problems in their work.
I’ll bet you didn’t know that.