"Mrs Redboots" wrote in message
...
Niklas Karlsson wrote to uk.transport.london on Sun, 9 Jan 2005:

There used to be a silly joke going round to the effect that the
Republic of Ireland (with whom we do, of course, have a land border) was
going to change to left-hand drive, but to make it easier, they would do
it in stages: lorries and buses one month, cars and cycles the next.....
Mind you, given that they measure distances in kilometres and speed in
miles per hour (or is it the other way round?), one does wonder....

When I went over to Ireland on business and had to drive down from Dublin to
Wexford, I was warned about the distance signs being in kilometres and the
speed signs in miles/hour - a bugger if you're trying to estimate how long
your journey will take!. It's even more of a bugger that most cars have
speedometers and mileometers calibrated primarily in km/hr or km - you have
to remember to read the faint red markings (mph) rather than the obvious
white km/hr markings!

I was told by the guy I was working for that the Irish authorities are
reluctant to change the speed limit signs in case people try to claim that
the signs still indicate mph and therefore that they are allowed to drive at
80 in a zone that had previously carried a 50 mph = 80 km/hr speed limit ;-)

I have "fond" memories of driving back from Wexford following my Irish
colleague who was to lead me through Dublin to the airport. He set off at a
hello of a rate (even by my standards!) and kept overtaking in impossible
situations. Should I go at a sensible speed (and risk losing him) or should
I follow as best I could? Somehow I managed to achieve the dual goals of
staying alive and not losing him! But then we hit heavy traffic in Dublin.
He signalled me into a hotel carpark where I did a rapid changeover of all
my luggage from my car to his, in a scene that must have looked suspiciously
like a Crimewatch reconstruction, because he decided we'd make better
progress in his car if he didn't have to keep checking whether I was keeping
up with him. We still missed my flight, but after a pint or two of Guinness
in the airport bar, the prospect of waiting a couple of hours to the next
available flight didn't seem so bad ;-)