Is there a name for those long skinny concrete slabs at the front of parking spaces, cunningly designed to rip your front bumper off? There’s got to be a name, but none of my coworkers can think of it. Help, Teeming Millions!
“Wheel stops” or “curb blocks.” Cite. I want you to know that it took me far too long to figure this out, and you are naughty for asking such a question when there is Science waiting to be done. 
A quick google search also revealed, ‘concrete bumpers’, ‘concrete wheel bumpers’ and ‘parking bumpers’. I always called them ‘berms’ but that seems to refer to a mound of earth.
As far as mundane questions go, this isn’t even top 100
When you microwave something small, where on the carousel should you place it?
What is this hairstyle called?
Do vegans swallow?
(I like this one)
And thats just on page one today.
Huh. While I certainly appreciate the answers, I feel like there’s a certain…elegance that’s lacking by the phrase “curb blocks”. I was hoping for a single word that, when spoken, would immediately bring to mind the object. Still, it’s nobody’s fault. Sometimes English just lets us down. Thanks, all!
But here’s my city’s standard design for parking lot bumper curbs.
Don’t ask, I just ran across it.
jersy barriers
jb
I prefer “parking curbs”. A friend of mine always calls them “Sure Stops”, but I believe that’s a brand name.
Those curbs don’t rip off my front bumper, but sometimes a part of the undercarriage of my car can get hooked on one of them and I hear a weird noise when I back out.
Ian’t the “Jersey barrier” the taller formed-in-place concrete barrier used on freeways to divide the different directions of traffic? Although there are portable prefab versions used around construction areas, now that I think of it.
I always just called those concrete parking-lot things “bumpers”.
BTW, the concrete base you often see on light poles in shopping mall parking lots are called “sonotubes.”
I have to know that – I’m rewriting a zoning code.
elmwood, I think your misapplying the term “sonotube.”
A sonotube is the thick (approx .25 inches) cardboard cylinder-shaped form (they look like the Jolly Green Giant’s toilet paper tube) that they use to cast concrete pilings, pillars and, yes, lampost bases.
BTW, I believe “sonotube” is a brand name.