"Portable"plastic speedbumps were brought to my neighborhood recently. They are bolted into the street…as if they knew community dissatisfaction would cause their removal soon. They didn’t want to have to rip up the street!
Good thing old 4x4s are “stiffly-sprung”. I feel the same bump whether it’s a small curb or a fat log.
More often than not it’s a fact, not an assumption. I live on a 3/4 mile long residential street (25 mph limit) in a 45 year old neighborhood. The street is used by many as a cut through to get to the high school and elementary school. As a neighborhood, we decided to look into having speed humps installed. The state D.O.T. set up a traffic counter and speed recorder to see if speed humps were necessary. On January 22 of this year 892 cars used on our street. 95% of those vehicles were traveling in excess of 45 MPH. There are about 20 homes on my street, so the 46 cars under 45 MPH would account for our comings and goings. Everbody else speeds, and most by double the posted limits. Would you, as a driver, rather see a cop posted on the street 24/7 or a series of speed humps? I don’t want to close the cut through, I just want people to slow down.
Speed bumps exist because the average driver is an asshat who will go careening through residential neighborhoods at speeds more suitable for the expressway, and, should they run over some hapless child or elderly person who can’t get out of the way fast enough, leave that child or elderly person to become human roadkill.
Here, in the People’s Republic of Berkeley, we were polled as to whether or not we wanted to keep our speed bumps. Of course both sides of the question were addressed, emergency vehicle stuff and all. We still have speed bumps, and I am glad. Regardless of what some all-wise posters claim here, they DO slow down the traffic. They’re the big,wide ones that don’t scrape low slung cars if you slow down. They are signed.
You don’t like driving slow? Go around.
Peace,
mangeorge
I have no problem with speed bumps and think they and other traffic calming devices should be used. Generally people have proven to be unwilling to drive carefully and watch out for others. As for those who complain because they have to slow down all I can say is boo freakin whoo.
Except it’s a street, not a courtroom.
There seem to be a lot more speed bumps in TX than in MI (probably due to plowing), but I still have both sides of the spectrum:
Completely useless:
On this street leading to where a friend of mine lived, there were these speed “ripples” on a deserted stretch of the road. It was actually FUN to take these things at 30mph. There were about 5 in a row, so it was like bumpbumpbumpbumpbump. Almost like a really lame ride.
Excessive:
IIRC, in front of a the Home Depot on I-35 in Round Rock, they have three HUGE speedbumps in front of the store. I don’t know how big they were, but I had to almost stop just to not scrape the undercarriage of my car. Which I did anyway. Although, sometimes I wouldn’t go fast enough, and end up rolling back off it.
What was amusing, tho, is that one was far enough fro the store that you could easily go past it, the 2nd one was really strange - split in half and in different places for each lane, so they were really easy to dige, and the third one was on the other side of the drive-thru loading thing, so people just drove through the loading area if no one was there.
By god, I hate Speed Bumps. Seems like there are 10 in every parking lot in Austin. And not neccessarily in useful places. I can understand useful ones, but some of them just seemed like they were there to piss me off.
Sigh. Too many typos in that last post. Sorry. It’s time to go to bed.
My apartment complex has a truely excessive number of speed bumps. If I drive from one end to the other, there are five. FIVE! Over about a 1/2 mile distance.
More interesting is that they initially built them too high. They had to go back and use a tractor or something to scrape them down a few inches. Which is good because you don’t have to slow down as much. But bad, because they also scraped off the yellow paint and now they’re utterly invisible if you’re not paying attention.
I hate the speed bumps in front of my high school.
I have to take them so slowly that I’m in danger of not making it over the tops of the damned things. And there’s an enormous pothole on the opposite side of one of them, so I have to wait for a break in traffic and go over in the middle to avoid hearing a godawful crunching, scraping sound.
What’s worse, these things serve no purpose whatsoever. No one ever walks along the entrance road that they’re on: everyone leaves by car or by bus. There are none of them in the actual parking lot, where they’d accomplish something.
No, the ones that go down and slow traffic are prevalent in the NYC area. We’ve had them for decades.
They’re called potholes. 
In France they call that “Gendarmes couchés” (lying policemen).
In Belgium scienfic teams have taken over. By law :
L = length of the speed = 4.8 m.
H = height : 120 mm
Profile conform to the following formula : y = 0,06 (1 - cos (2 x / L)).
No kidding!!!
I cut through a high school on my way to and from work every day (so, yeah, I suppose I could just fight the traffic and take the real streets) and the speedbumps along the campus are horrendous! The have been plowed so many times that there is no more paint and so they are stealthy little buggers. Also, half of them are missing halves, making it fun to guess which wheel will actually cross that little pile of asphalt and in which direction your coffee will fly. It also doesn’t stop anyone from speeding, especially the SUV’s who easily clear the smaller of the bumps. It’s a personal favorite of mine to go about 16 (1MPH fatser than the posted limit) when there’s someone in a real hurry behind me. Yeah, come to think of it, I’m gonna get shot one of these days.