Don't get me started on those miserable round-abouts. Limey-speak for what you term rotaries. Had one of the local city councilors who absolutely fixated on having one installed at an intersection in her ward that she swore would benefit from the exercise. People, to this day, still don't know how to use the thing properly and the number of near misses from drivers trying to change lanes to get into position to leave the thing is pretty much chronic. For myself I will take an alternate route rather than try to deal with the thing.
As for the metric system, for that you can dump the blame squarely on the FROGS. Prior to their "revolution", measurements were done as they always were. Post guillotine, some "scientist" got the bright idea that since there was no more king there should be no more measurements based on regal standards. So this mis-begotten mutt came up with the base 10 standard because, "we have 10 fingers and 10 toes that we received through divine ordination so we should be making our measurements using that format.". (Don't expect that is the absolute backstory on this but as good as any)
Anyway, they did manage to keep it to themselves, at least until the 60's, when up here we got a visit from a miserable old goat named Charles Degaulle and one of the curses he inflicted on us was the Hole concept of free the french, and the virtues of metrics as a side bar.
Much as I hate to acknowledge the whole mess, metrics would have oozed its way under the tent flap anyway because the computer geeks had already been seriously messing with various systems of counting to get one that they could readily adapt to an electronic format. Fundamentally all computers are, after you strip off the covers and the hype, is an absurd number of incredibly small switches that can alter current flow according to a preset pattern at a rate of speed faster than the "b*tch sw*tch of urban legend.
