Can anything be done about speed bumps?

ubersonic

ubersonic

ubersonic

Soldato
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26 May 2009
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Let me paint the picture, my local council loves speed bumps, even when the is no need for them on a road, and where the is and most councils would use mini roundabouts or other traffic calming measure this council just whacks in a bunch of speed bumps, they love them.

Well the road my business is on has a mother load of them that were installed a few years back (despite the never having been an accident on that road in the last decade or more). Then earlier this year they replaced one of those "walk halfway across the road onto an island" crossing things in front of a school with traffic lights (again, no accident has ever occurred there and the old method worked perfectly)

Which can be seen here:

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=rhyl&ie=UTF8&hl=en&hq=&hnear=Rhyl,+United+Kingdom&ll=53.310451,-3.479044&spn=0.000939,0.002411&t=h&z=19&layer=c&cbll=53.310451,-3.479044&panoid=y5qWsjL59DHQtgo4X0Go1A&cbp=12,141.52,,0,7.15

Then last week they closed the road for 5 days and we all had to take a 2km detour. No reason given. Now this week we find that they have gone and installed the godfather of all speed bumps, they have completely raised the entire public crossing at the lights so it is the same height as the pavement :O this monster spans the width of the road and is roughly 2 meters long, the ramps at each end are very short and it is forcing drivers to slow down to below 10mph to drive onto it (and most of them floor it after coming off).

Is the any way to complain about this farse? surely the must be some standard they are supposed to comply with? (we do work for this county, they do not care one bit about regulations/HSE/etc unless a newspaper is likely to hear of it)
 
You need to hire a JCB and at the stroke of 2am in a balaclava go Schwarzenegger on them.

That will show your distaste for the situation.
 
If you are concerned measure the height and see if it is legal. Wouldn't be the first time a council has installed an illegal speed bump. If you have evidence that it is illegal, then IIRC the council could be held responsible to car damage as a result (ie they will do something about it).
 
Just looks into it, it appears its 150% of regulation height and is of a design known to cause damage to loaded fire engines, but how do I go about reporting this?
 
It should not be any higher than 100mm and that is normally frowned upon with 75mm high being the favoured dimension (in my area anyway). I cant remember the requiremed gradient for the approch ramp off the top of my head and I'm not at work at the moment but a general rule of thumb it would be at least 1m in length

If you have a real problem with the raised table crossing then I suggest reading the number of documents available freely on the internet such as the Road Hump Regs 1999:

http://www.statutelaw.gov.uk/conten...rentActiveTextDocId=0&activetextdocid=2718995

And the DFT document LT1/07 on Traffic Calming:

http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roads/tpm/ltnotes/pdfltn0107trafficcalm.pdf

that should give you a basic idea of the processes involved in the making the decision to install and designing road humps. There are plenty of other free documents available out there! Google is your friend ;) You can then contact your local highway authority and express your opinion.

Speed humps and general traffic calming measures are not generally installed on a whim it is usually following pressure from local residents, schools and councillors and are thankfully installed as a preventative as opposed to a reactive measure.

I dislike speed humps as much as everyone else (as my car tends to grind over them) but in a residential area or outside of a school etc if it stops people hooning past places where children and other peds frequently cross then its doing its job.

Hope the above helps.

Bit of additional info: the standard height of a half battered kerb is 125mm so if they have just installed the crossing without locally lowering the kerbs then its a good indicator that it is indeed too high. However iirc you can apply to the secretary of state to install a road hump >100mm.
 
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Speed bumps are a waste of time, damaging to vehicles and a lot of cops share that sentiment.

It's a shame that common sense doesn't filter down to the local authorities who scatter them around like confetti.
 
Von Smallhausen said:
Speed bumps are a waste of time, damaging to vehicles and a lot of cops share that sentiment.

It's a shame that common sense doesn't filter down to the local authorities who scatter them around like confetti.
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Its a shame that when the police are consulted, as they are required to be by law, they never reply with their views! ;) Not a dig just saying it how it is where I work.

So the work goes ahead as requested by the public (when I say public I refer to the local busy bodies who represent probably 10% of the local pop). But thats local govmt for you :D Happy days!
 
Then speed humps where I live are car killers literally, there is an excessive amount of speed humps everywhere, and they often very high ones that put a lot of stress on cars, changing exhausts and suspension parts will be regular activity....
 
I measured 3 around here that where illegal told the council they fixed them and made them totally useless and flat :D . Did take them 2 months to bother to do it mind.
 
ShakenNstirred said:
as said i don't see a problem if you drive over them at the speed your meant too
unless you have a car with lowered shocks
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My car is perfectly standard and if I attempted to drive over it at the correct speed then I would suffer serious tracking/suspension/and possibly even gearbox damage on impact not to mention exhaust/and potentially fuel tank damage on landing
 
NathanE said:
Just drive over them at walking pace. Won't damage your suspension then.
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Suspension damage would be the least of my worries on a 150mm hump. Sumps and exhausts being left behind would be be a much greater possibility; even at walking pace the force exerted on these parts trying to stop dead ~1200kg of car would large enough to cause damage.
 
Tell me about it, one near my home annoys me most:
http://maps.google.nl/?ie=UTF8&ll=5...=NWYD7-7zxGOPwQhqiehs9Q&cbp=12,175.02,,0,5.35

It is a 30kph zone ( 20 mph?) and if you take that speed in any car you are damaging your suspension. In the Volvo, Corolla and even the hydraulic C5 it feels like you are hitting something. In the Galant, you hear a a scraping noise, loud bang, another scraping noise and another loud bang, I punctured my exhaust on it and scraped the bumper quite hard the first time I went over it in it. Any other speedbumps are no issue but this one and another one further down the road need to be taken at crawling pace not to scrape my bumper on it :(. 30 kph my arse, 3 kph is a more suitable speed for those mountains in the road.


All those bored civil servant/council morons responsible for them bumps should be fired and get a real job rather than destroying perfectly good roads.
 
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