The absurdity of the use of kph

 

First and foremost I apologise (yet again) for such a long gap in between blog posts. The return of freedom over the past year has kept me away from screens.

They say it takes 66 days to develop a new habit. Running is a habit I developed over lockdown, but the return to the office (and I intend to never work from home again) and frequenting the pub has reduced frequency of this. 

It is, however, not completely bleak for my physical well-being. Cramming a number of social events in after work has led to me doing a lot more walking around central London. I don’t have an Apple Watch, (other brands of smart watch exist), but my iPhone records my steps and a lot of really interesting data on my walking and running.

As would be no surprise, I’ve configured everything in metric units. Thankfully, gone are the days where Apple would dictate to you, based on your location, the units of measurement you use. You have a chose whether to specify distances in miles or kilometres.

You also have the choice of which units you want to use for speed. Not just miles per hour and km/h, you also get to choose between feet per second and m/s. Very useful if you want to be even more precise or are an SI purist, but too lazy to divide by 3.6.

What is unfortunate is that iPhone mistakenly refers to kilometres per hour as kph rather than km/h. This is, as I have said for years, a common mistake in the anglophone world (and beyond). Treating kph as an abbreviation analogous to mph. But this is nonsensical and plain wrong.

 

The first issue is the lack of clarity that the use of kph introduces. Strictly speaking, this abbreviation means kilo per hour. It could mean kilogram per hour, kilometre per hour kilowatt per hour… kiloanything per hour.

The second issue is that the metric system uses symbols, not abbreviations. Using kph is effectively introducing a problem where there was already a solution. There is already an international recognised symbol for kilometres per hour - km/h.

It is astonishing that one of the world’s biggest companies has managed to make such a trivial error.