I think that would need a lot of public buy-in, here in the UK we aimed to go fully metric in the '70s and it's still a mix to this day. Most things are officially metric but you still see a lot of informal use of imperial even among young people (height, weight etc) as well as quite a few official things like signs on roads and pints of draught beer in pubs.
Given how politically polarised the US is it'd end up as political football too I think, in the UK opposition to going fully metric sometimes manifested itself as Euroscepticism and that was back in the '00s when we didn't have nearly such aggressive culture wars.
The US is metric for everything except casual conversation. In the same way that i see and hear people in the UK say "he weighs 18 stone" or whatever, but everyone knows what a gram and kilogram and metre is.
There's some things where knowing the SI definition is irrelevant, like how many PSI a tire needs. Sure, knowing what that is in SI is useful if you're trying to figure out how much a car weighs, but if i'm at the gas station setting the pump to 35 doesn't really matter.
Industry and commerce is conducted on the global standard, though. And while the average american might not know how to convert between kilometers and miles (or hogsheads or chains or ...), but knows 500km is far, 500kg is heavy, and 500l is a lot.
Until the SI stuff is the largest part of labels, and people feel like paying a ton of extra taxes to replace every road sign in the entire country (there's millions!), it's never going to be a "metric" country. Just think of the logistics and cost of replacing every road sign, including "mile markers", exit number signs, distances on all US government roads (BLM, USDA, Forestry), overpass signs, speed limit signs and road paint - i don't see that happening any time soon. If the only benefit is "the rest of the world stops talking smack because we're backwater imperial measurement users", would you force everyone to pay for that?
>Just think of the logistics and cost of replacing every road sign, including "mile markers", exit number signs, distances on all US government roads (BLM, USDA, Forestry), overpass signs, speed limit signs and road paint - i don't see that happening any time soon.
This is pretty much why British roads still use miles and yards, the cost to the taxpayer of switching over would be horrendous. We do have dual measurements on heights and widths though, feet/inches and metres because many HGV drivers from the Continent aren't familiar with feet and there was concerns about them driving into bridges and so on.
> Given how politically polarised the US is it'd end up as political football too I think,
it was a political football here back in the 70s when there was talk of metric adoption.
i do hope that people like stewart brand (whole earth catalog, coevolution quarterly, how buildings learn etc) feel some level of shame for the role their proseltyzing against metric, in spite of the good things they also did.
Given how politically polarised the US is it'd end up as political football too I think, in the UK opposition to going fully metric sometimes manifested itself as Euroscepticism and that was back in the '00s when we didn't have nearly such aggressive culture wars.