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this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2024
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Speed humps. On my daily 5km drive, there are about a dozen of them each way.
I have a 900kg car with sports suspension, and I need to slow almost to a stop for many of them.
Meanwhile people in 2500kg road-blimps are blasting through without slowing.
Most are bumps in the road that taper on the sides. Vehicles with a wide enough wheelbase miss them amlost entirely, whereas my 1.6m wide car gets launched into the air.
The greater the kill capacity of your vehicle, the less you are affected by these "safety" devices.
I'm 50/50 on them. I wish they were more like traditional bumps, covering the whole road so there wasn't really an "avoiding" them. How they're implemented now encourages drivers to aim for the space between, leading to swerving.
The roads I've seen them on, they've done their job - traffic is significantly reduced down then. They're supposed to be unpleasant, but they should be equally unpleasant for all vehicles hahah.
Another small gripe I have with them is unclear signage. Particularly if they're not safe to take at/near the speed limit, each one NEEDS to be marked. They can be hard to see from a distance and slowing down takes time. A lot on certain roads here are missing signage, making the whole thing even more unsafe than if they just didn't install the bumps.
Speed bumps suck. Especially for cyclists. While lifted bro-dozer trucks can just cruise over them.
To slow down drivers, create horizontal barriers (choke points), not vertical ones.
Fair and valid point I had not considered. I guess I'd prefer to have a separated bike lane with proper dividers anyway, but either way, you raise a point I had not considered.
They also slow down emergency vehicles as much as everyone else. There's some arguments that they cause more deaths than they save. Not sure on the actual numbers for that, though.
not even bro-dozer trucks, I have a un-modified (unless you count dents and rust) ~10y old pickup and a fairly new 'sporty' sedan (i.e. low-profile tires, stiff suspension, somewhat lower to the ground). Sedan has to come almost to a stop or I will scrape something. In the pickup slowing down is optional (though I do because regardless of speed bumps I don't want to hit someone)
The ones near me are heavily signed. There's usually 4 sign posts on each one. They're big, bright, and an utter blight on the landscape.
I actually drive between them because my car is narrow. I drive down my entire street in the middle of the road and weave oncoming traffic. Again, I'm not sure what sped humps do for safety.
One thing that makes them "equally unpleasant" for everyone is a straight-through muffler. At 2AM, my neighbors are just an inconvenienced as I am when I drop back to first gear 6 times. My council refers to speed humps as "traffic calming devices". In reality, it just aggravates it.
Straight thru mufflers are generally a good way to inconvenience others.
I understand your plight. I drive a Miata and it can be scary sometimes.
I do appreciate "road blimps" as a saying. I have historically said "road whales" but road blimps is more fun to say.
You realize that having sports suspension leads one to wonder if you aren't one of those drivers that make people want to put in speed bumps. Don't get me wrong, I realize that may not be the case, and you might be a very reasonable, safe, and careful driver, but just pointing it out.
Speed bumps are often not so much for speed control. People slow down for them and then speed right back up. They don't work for that.
It's often to encourage people not to cut through neighborhoods that happen to connect to other neighborhoods. They want you to take the main road, not the shortcut.
The speed humps are actually worse on a softer setting. The car takes far longer to settle after a bump.
On standard suspension, the car would bounce off the bump stops at half the speed of everyone else.