I recently took a trip to Quebec and one (extremely trivial) thing I noticed was that road signs on the highway often pointed out a potential hazard (e.g. a school bus stop) was coming up in 230 meters. Sometimes it would say 200 meters or 250 meters, but 230 meters came up frequently enough that it was noticeable.
Why 230 meters? Is it a function of the speed limit (usually 90 in the area I was in)?
(Obligatory useless answer: Why not 230 meters?)
Guess here (I know this is FQ) but 230 meters is just about 250 feet. Maybe that was common before Canada went metric in the 1970s and it has just been held over after replacing those signs.
That’s true, it is pretty close to 250 yards.
Right, I meant yards, not feet. Thanks for correctly translating my first post of the morning. 
Like I buy jam in 450-gram jars. They are just the old 1lb jars really.
In the UK, we have striped “countdown marker” signs which mark the distance to the next exit. Three stripes is 300 yards, two stripes is 200 yards and one stripe is 100 yards. All nice and straightforward.
When I learned to drive in the mid 90s, the Highway Code gave those same distances in metres, which meant they weren’t nicely intuitive, and you had to learn them.
Having just looked at the online Highway Code, it seems they’re back to quoting the distance in yards.
They might be using safety standards developed in the U.S.
[we know you meant yards]
My car’s GPS always tells me that I have a turn to make in 7/10 of a mile. I think it was programed in the UK, and knows we’re a kilometer away.
Around me they have started putting up signs with really accurate distances, in feet. I passed by one this morning that says “Merge in 575 Feet”. Why not just round up to 600?
Down here in South Florida, I pass a “No U-Turns Next 1190 Feet” sign all the time.
On the same street, going the other direction, there is one that lists 1857 feet, and one for 570 feet.
These are near a school zone, so I’m guessing the numbers are based on some codified math about entrance distances, mixing with traffic lights. Or something like that. But I don’t recall seeing such odd numbers in other nearby zones.
That does sound kind of odd. Back home we use mixed systems but road distances are pretty consistently in metric and warning signs are in increments of 25 meters.
Part of what you are seeing is that probably the federal laws and regulations defining safety distances were written in yards/feet and it is a much more cumbersome process to rewrite that than to just paint an approximate equivalency on the sign.
As we move to driverless cars and coordinated traffic systems will the impetus be to more accurate and specific signage, so that ‘Bus stop 230 metres’ will need to mean exactly 230, not 225 or 235 or over-thereish? We already have humans following Google Map instructions to the point of self-harm, so we might need to be far more specific in how we get cars to navigate on our behalf.
Are feet/yards/etc still used extensively in Canada?
I was just up there and noticed there was no smoking within 9m of an entrance. Why 9? Why not 10 meters? It is true that 9m is pretty close to 30 ft (and 230m is pretty close to 750 ft) but why should that matter?
Yards are almost never used in Canada, compared to meters.
Feet and inches are sometimes used, especially for a person’s height.
This is another “metrification artifact” I’ve noticed.
Somewhere, most likely in the USA, someone made a 30-foot smoking-zone rule. When “borrowing” it to the new location, rather than figuring out their own rule, whoever was in charge instead of transposing it as 10 meters went Strict Textualist and made it 9.
It’s like if we were metrifying speed limits and insisted in making the surface-road limit be 88kph instead of rounding it either way to 85 or 90kph.
I’ve actually seen something like this. There was a device that claimed it was heat rated up to 293 deg. Took me a while to figure out they literally just converted 145C to F
There was actually a Mad Magazine item about this sort of thing. Maybe 50 years ago.
Rather than do the extensive work to dig a new hole and put in a post, concrete etc. for the 10m sign, just use the old 30ft sign post and replace the sign for 9m. It is much less work and less costly.
Yards are used in some sports in Canada, such as football, golf, and even horse racing (which also uses furlongs and miles). But not on roads, no.
The signs are generally right by the doors.
Going back to the OP : when I was a kid in Québec in the early 1970s, we had signs announcing things (a stop sign, a road crossing, a railway crossing), 500 feet ahead. Typically, the labeling was just the symbol for the thing and “500” below it (no indication of unit - presumably to maintain language ambiguity). 500 feet was typical, but there were some cases with different distances where visibility or speed justified it.
Then we switched to meters, but many signs weren’t moved, they were just relabeled / rounded and this time the unit was mentioned: “500” became “150 m”, etc. So yes, it’s easy to imagine “750” becoming “230 m”.
So all this was to avoid planting new posts, right ? Probably. But I remember highway 10 (Autoroute des Cantons de l’est, from Montréal to Sherbrooke – about 150 km long) originally had mile markers, and in the second half of the 1970s they pulled them all out and put in numbered markers every 100m (150 X 10 X 2 directions = 3000 markers – I guess somebody at the ministry really enjoyed the Mille Bornes game). All the highway exits were renumbered as well, and of course all the speed limit signs were changed too.
I question the OP’s notion, however, of signs announcing school bus stops on the highway. 