Forensic Home Page Insurance Links Legal Links Other Relevant Links Revised Speed Conversion Table

Below is a link to our Speed Conversion Tables. The document is in PDF format so you will need the Adobe Acrobat Reader to view and print the tables. mph - km/h - m/s - ft/sec Conversion Table .pdf (426 kB) We hope you'll find these tables useful. We've created them to help you with evidence from witnesses. For example you may be more comfortable with miles per hour (mph) and may be dealing with someone who prefers kilometers per hour (km/h). The Metric page of the table will let you convert the speed they give in km/h into the mph you prefer. The Imperial page will convert from the mph a witness may give to km/h. The other two columns on each table convert speeds to either meters per second (m/s) or feet per second (ft/sec). For example, a witness may say "I saw the pedestrian at the next corner as I entered the block." The witness may have said he was travelling about 40 mph. You can use the Imperial table to convert 40 mph to 17.9 m/s. If it was determined that the block was 300 m then by dividing 300 m by 17.9 m/s we find the witness would take almost 17 seconds to reach the corner where he saw the pedestrian. This example brings up another point. The witness said "about 40 mph". This is not a precise speed so we rounded our final answer to an even second. Just because the arithmetic yields several decimal places doesn't mean we can use that level of precision. The result of any calculation is only as precise as the inputs. At the bottom of each page are conversion factors you can use to convert from values not shown in the table above. For example, 23 mph * 1.609 = 37 km/h. You could also do this by adding two conversions from the table above: 20 mph + 3 mph = 32.2 km/h + 4.83 km/h = 37.03 km/h. Of course we round this to 37 or perhaps refer to it as between 35 and 40 km/h. Finally, if you are going to use such a range you could use the Metric table to find that 23 in the mph column would be between 35 and 40 km/h. Expert Engineering Investigations for the Legal and Insurance Industries 1439 Legion Road Burlington, ON L7S 1T6 Map to Office Tel: (905)632-3040 Toll Free: 1-800-263-6351 Fax: (905)632-2131 E-Mail: forensic@forensiceng.ca The Services We Offer Our Areas of Expertise Vehicle Collision Reconstruction Other Transportation Losses Lighting and Visibility Fires and Explosions Electrical Failures Materials Failures Personal Injury Structural Losses Please send us E-Mail and let us know what you think of our site. What would you like to see here? Do you have any questions about what we do? Would you like to be notified when we add something to our site?