Hi all,
Now i know there are loads of threads whining about speed bumps already on this site, but i thought i\'d offer an opinion of my own on yet another public safety REDUCING effect these things have.
The other day i was on my way home from work along a 20mph limit road full of speed bumps, doing on or around the limit, as you do. So you can imagine my surprise when an ambulance pulled out of a side road in the distance ahead of me with its lights and sirens going, then proceeded to virtually stop at every bump, with the result being that i ended up forming the front of a queue behind the patient-laden emergency services vehicle.
Surely this should be an issue for the government road planners to look at, as surely these bumps are effecting response times, let alone the added danger to the patient from all the bouncing around!
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Not really on topic, but related - it disturbed me yesterday, when driving down a completely snarled up high street, to see an ambulance with lights and siren going trying to get through. The congestion was such that traffic simply couldn't pull over to let it pass, due to parked cars, narrowness of road etc. I'd say this must have put an extra 10 minutes or so onto the ambulance's response time, and the implications were truly frightening.
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and back injuries have shot up as a result of bumps
mainly passengers, mainly bus and taxi passengers that dont see it and fail to tense up
the bus drivers in newbury were so convinced all the humps were doing their own backs in by repeatedly going over them that they got on the BBC news and lots of the humps on the bus routes were taken away
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In the US they actually investigate these things instead or working to a strict political aganda and denouncing anyone who disagrees as wrong, see below:
'The results of the analysis show that residents are in far greater risk from even minor delays to emergency response caused by delay inducing calming devices than from vehicles, speeding or not. The analysis has been verified by a professional mathematician and can be viewed online at members.aol.com/raybowman/risk97/eval1.html. The Assistant Fire Chief of Austin Texas, Les Bunte, applied the Bowman analysis to Austin with similar results, which can be viewed online at home.cfl.rr.com/gidusko/texts/tfc_calm.pdf./
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Surely the delays to ambulances are just the fault of car drivers who speed and use the roads excessively, because without them the humps wouldn't be necessary and there'd be less traffic jams to increase response times?
Okay, I don't believe that, but you can easily blame car drivers for the presence of speed humps, regardless of the actual cost/benefit analysis.
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Local parish councillor was wittering on about why handn't traffic slowed down with their new expensive humps. Why should it someone asked - speed limit hasn't changed has it??
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re "why handn't traffic slowed down with their new expensive humps"
when im in a company/hire/pool car i make a point of going over humps at the speed limit instead of slowing down, and lots of people i know make a point of speeding up
just another aspect of the company car culture in our country that distorts the car buying trends/garage viability and all sorts of other stuff
in countrys such as belgium where company cars are much more rare, much higher percentage of people are affected by having to slow down and damage to cars, therefore there is more political pressure to use them rarely
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We lose every way with humps.
Emissions? A car moving along at steady speed vs one on the brakes up to the hump and then accelerating away to the next one.
Suspension? Can't be doing springs or dampers any good
Brakes? Can't reasonably just drive up to them at constant speed so excess wear
Exhausts? All the body movements will stress the hangers and you might catch a silencer box on a hump
Tyres? How many "eggs" do you see in sidewalls? Quite a few actually caused by delamination on excess sidewall deformation by bumps and obstacles.
Spoilers and body kits? All right, most are naff and deserve trashing, but it's some spotty oik's pride and joy n'est-ce pas?
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