The interesting thing about this article is that the guy talks about British bike paths and how inferior they are to German ones, uses the word yards when speaking of the British paths (one time) and metric units when speaking of German paths and windmills (rest of the time).
Now read the last three paragraphs and see if you can apply that to those British who want to cling to imperial.
http://www.newsandstar.co.uk/unknown/viewarticle.aspx?id=291149
23:00 - 13 October 2005
We can learn from Germany
Published on 13/10/2005
I have just returned from my first visit to Germany and my mother’s relatives and I have noticed many similarities and differences between them and us.
The Germans do not have any concept of tokenism. For example, for a century, cyclists have campaigned for safer treatment on our congested roads.
The best this country can come up with is a thin, white line one yard off the road verge – a cyclist’s zone.
Not so in Germany. There is, by law, a metre wide strip of verge, then a metre-wide cycle path on every road in north Germany. Because Ostfrieseland is the Fenland of Germany it is flat, so everyone has bikes – and they use them.
It is comparable to Norfolk, or Lincolnshire, but God help any cyclist brave enough to duel with the articulated lorries and Land Rovers on the roads of our fens – I know, I’ve walked them.
Another Fenland phenomenon the Germans have are windmills, thousands of them, from the picturesque four-sail post mills everyone loves, to the most modern 150-metre high generators so hated by the British rural middle classes.
Not everyone likes windmills, but being the practical people they are, they accept them.
Because it is flat land Ostfrieseland has water problems, that is, getting rid of the excess, but keeping the remainder clean.
All their canals work as commercial waterways as well as for leisure, and are clean enough to fish in.
The city of Pappenburg is 100 km from the coast but produces two ocean liners each year which are carefully floated down the shallow river with great pride and ceremony.
We have the idea that Germans are at one extreme fanatical and at the other slavishly obedient to authority.
My observations are that they are pragmatic and tacitly accept what is good for them, and then get on with it, for good or ill.
We British would become better wholehearted Europeans when we lose our tokenist attitudes; our problems are not with Europe, but with ourselves.
n Arthur Walby is a reader from Gaitsgill
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