Private sector support is also much stronger this time around. My slipform paving machines will not know the difference, nor will my crusher know whether it's crushing centimeters or inches. A 1.5-inch screen is close to 4 centimeters and so forth. Within tolerances, a 10-yard mixer holds 7.5 cubic meters. A lot of conversion has already taken place.
Electronic equipment can do metric at the push of a button or with very minor programming.
Many nuts and bolts and other machinery parts are already metric. We buy bottled soft drinks and liquor by the liter, and nobody complains. When people think of a meter as simply a unit of measure that is broken into handy decimal divisions instead of as 39.37 inches, the mystery goes away. Time and practice will do the rest. Eventually, kilometers per hour, square meters, kilometers per liter, and the rest will become as natural and automatic as miles per hour, square feet, and miles per gallon are today.