Re: How did statute miles come to be an absurd length of 5280 feet?

The statute mile of 5,280 feet originated from the Roman mille passus, or "thousand paces," which measured 5,000 Roman feet, a Roman pace being five Roman feet, measured from the point at which the heel of one foot is raised to the point at which it is set down again after an intervening step by the other foot. Around 1500 AD, the mile was divided into eight furlongs, a furlong measuring 625 feet. Later, under Queen Elizabeth I, the Statute of 1593 AD confirmed the use of a shorter foot that made the length of the furlong 660 feet, adding another 280 feet to the mile.

A nautical mile is the length on the Earth's surface of one minute of arc, or 1/ 5,400 of a quadrant of a great circle of the Earth, compared to the kilometer which was originally defined as 1/ 10,000 of a quadrant of a great circle of the Earth, measured around the poles of the longitudinal meridian passing through Paris. The problem with the old nautical mile was that the Earth is not a sphere, so an old nautical mile is longer traveling along the equator than traveling due North. For this reason, the international definition of the nautical mile was changed to 1.852 km (1.1508 statute miles), not exactly a round number.

Only three countries, the United States, Liberia, and Myanmar, have not officially switched to the Metric System, although almost all US scientists use the Metric System for their measurements. Rather than look to the nautical mile as a replacement for the statute mile, it makes more sense to discard both and use kilometers, especially since over 90% of the world population already use this system.