UKC

Just wondering if anyone has any positive experiences of getting speed bumps installed in their local area? How did you go about it and how painful/slow was the process?

Thanks, 

Nick 

It's pretty easy to get pot holes installed, which are basically reverse speed bumps! They do a very similar job! I would let winter do it's thing and you will be fine! 😜

Oh, I thought local councils excavated pot holes to build speed bumps.

Hi Nick

I've been involved in getting other traffic control measures installed.  A good place to start is through a local residents' association if you have one because they will already have contacts with local councillors etc, and will have a stronger voice than one individual.  Either through them or directly, you then want to speak to your local councillors (easy to find online who they are) to see if they will put it forward.  These things aren't quick because there will then probably need to be traffic surveys and surveys of local views.  It will also depend on whether there's any budget to do the work given that central government has been reducing local authority funding for years.  It won't be quick but if it's worth doing and the case can be made, good luck.

HTH

Simon

Are you on a bus route? 

They put them in on our estate about 10 years ago, total waste of time. Apparently being on a bus route means we can only have those 2 lumps that just about every modern car can straddle so. Most people just ignore them.

They are a nightmare on a bus route - so uncomfortable. Remember some passengers will feel pain being knocked about like that.  OP should be asking how to get the bloody things off bus routes or how speed bumps could be used to cancel out potholes.   

Some of them are horrible on a bike too.

Or to be more precise slalom round, meaning they are more focused on the road than on potential hazards ahead (like pedestrians or oncoming vehicles).

Girlmonkey is right about potholes though, we noticed an increase in speeding cars (always a problem on our road anyway) after the council resurfaced it - fortunately they did a budget job, so the potholes soon reappeared.

See if you can get free parking instead 🙂 On my road there was a consultation to introduce residents parking permits. I was vocally very against, as the parked cars form an effective chicane, significantly slowing the traffic. 

Much as I'd like to reduce speeding, I really don't like speed bumps. They're a pain on a bicycle. They seem to encourage people to accelerate between them in a way that you don't get with well placed chicanes. And the knobheads in giant 4x4s see it as a challenge how fast they can go over them 

No, speed bumps on the bike = jumps! 😀 Play time!

You do realise that the idea is to slow down?

Buses are slow.   Try riding one after abdominal surgery if the route is affected,  Bus route? NO bumps! Ever.  Then there is the wear and tear on them - which gets lumped onto the fares.

You don't want to be the person who lives right by the speed bumps if you get traffic passing overnight.

That was my point, because it's a bus route they can't put in proper speed bumps, we have those meter square lumps that a buss can straddle so they don't jostle the passengers. 

Trouble is all but the smallest cars can straddle them too so they are totally pointless

Speed Bumps is a strange name because if anything they slow you down.

I got the 30 Mph zone extended and one added near us, took me 4 years to achieve.

Starting point was head of roads/director at council, sent a clear letter explaining and showing diagrammatically how it was extremely unsafe as it was and risked a school child being injured or killed. Standard response back no money / no one has been injured yet so why do we need to do anything.

Got our local councillor involved who is excellent, he found a bit of funding and we managed over a period of about 18 months to persuade them to do something, another parent also started emailing them. From agreeing to do something and actually implementing took another 18 months, they had to provide notice and give people chance to object etc. 

Had this failed was going to start a petition via school.

End result is some improvement, cars are a bit slower so risk of death is probably reduced but 4x4s continue to fly over them and quick accelerating electric cars are often back to over 30 Mph in the zone between humps

As others have hinted at, speed bumps are now rarely installed. To be small enough for ambulances and buses to straddle them, they are small enough to be straddled by the kind of lovely people who drive shiny 4x4s in urban areas and don't think that any road laws apply to them.

The modern way is 20mph zones, chicanes and signage to slow people down. These will only generally be installed where there is a recorded history of accidents and/or fatalities (it's difficult for a cash starved council to justify a traffic calming scheme where there have been no recorded incidents over a location where there have been problems). 

If you want them as a preventative measure, you have next to no chance, unless the location is outside a school (Sheffield has done a lot of work recently around improving road safety around schools). If there have been problems at your location, talk to your local council's traffic/transport team in the first instance. They collect road safety stats to help inform where traffic calming measures should be prioritised.

As I understand chicanes are being phased out also. At least this is what I was told by a London councillor when I was on site recently.

They cause traffic and accidents and people speed away from them in frustration.

I actually know someone in hospital at the moment. He rides old motorbikes, and the light on the bollard had failed, lights on old bikes are generally poor so he didn't see it until it was too late. 

Not a fan of speed bumps. The amount of wear and tear to cars suspension and tyres makes them a last resort in my view. The ones at Tesco car park near me, my god, you literally need to cross them at 3 mph, and they still bounce the car around.

I think zebra crossings with fake speed cameras next to them is a good solution. It's cheap, it helps pedestrians, both the crossing and the camera have the impact of slowing down cars. Every now and again, the camera box should be fitted with a battery powered speed camera that uses 4g. This way you never know if it's working or not. And we don't have to pay for a silly amount of cameras. They just move them around.

Do you not think that, by slowing cars to 3mph, they might actually be achieving their objective of keeping movement around car parks down to walking speed? Would that be so unreasonable an objective?

On a separate note, I'm quite impressed by the cameras that cause traffic lights to turn red ahead. Not sure they have any of those in the UK yet but they should. Drivers seem very much more keen to respect red lights than speed limits so they seem to work. I suspect enforcement of red light violations is easier too. Although I do think it would be better to advertise the fact that they're around, otherwise much of their usefulness as a deterrent is lost.

On reflection I think it is a reasonable objective, at least between the parking spaces. I would opt to replace them with softer bumps on the approach roads however. I was about to say that they only have them on the approach road which is an odd design choice. But I checked google maps and they have them everywhere. I guess I just didn't notice them between the parking spaces as I'm going slow there anyway.

hadn't heard of these but it sounds hilarious. A bit niche however, as you can't put traffic lights up everywhere so I guess it can only be used where there is already lights in place.

I believe the UK does use 'green speed' lights, where they are timed (no cameras) so that if you drive at a sensible speed, once you clear one green light you will sail through all the rest on green - excess speed and you'll hit every one on red.

Sadly though the A61 near us appears to have been set at 40mph, so if you drive at the legal 30mph you hit pretty much every one on red.

I don't know anything about how to get them installed but I will just say that I agree with others that speed bumps don't really force you to slow down, but a family member recently moved house and the estate around them has a lot of roundabouts and loads of bits where half the road is bollarded off with a little island and there is a give-way / priority sign; and I found that this was a very effective set of traffic calming measures which really does force you to slow down and look ahead and think about what you're doing, more so than the speed bump slalom others have referenced!

I think that estate may have been built that way from the beginning so might not be plausible to do it everywhere, but thought it was pretty clever. Also the traffic islands were a nice place for plants and trees etc. which you can't put on speed bumps!

One way to achieve traffic calming is via a Community Highways Scheme application. You will need to be organised, have a good evidence base for a scheme, public support etc. There is usually a scheme cap at c£250-£300k, so make it realistic. 

We had road narrowing, raised table junctions, additional crossing points with islands, white dashed lines removed, 40mph down to 30mph, buff coloured surfacing. All sub £275k I think. A group of 4 of us did the legwork and probably 2 years (ish) from idea to implementation. ( 1year of baseline work, public consultation events, accessing road data loops etc, then the application, wait, get it, council highways contractors do it).

Also, for ideas/ reference, look at Hamilton Baillie's work. I spoke to Ben before he sadly died in 2019 about our scheme, and he was supportive and gave us a few pointers. 

I hope it works out well for you.

I think they’ve been in use in the UK for a decade or more, but I don’t know how widespread or whether you can tell that’s what they are doing (seems it would make sense if you could). They do seem like a good idea and one that’s worth publicising more - I think I only heard about them on a speed awareness course. 

I think there are limitations on where it is deemed safe to install them though - I.e. there needs to be a sufficiently long approach to not cause dangerously hard braking (which presumably happens anyway in those locations but I guess if the lights aren’t triggered by speed there’s no question of the local authority being in some way liable for actively contributing to an accident. Not sure if that’s actually part of the decision making.)

I came across a set of these on the approach to a village, can't remember where, West Sussex perhaps.

If you came into the village too quickly and above the speed limit which I think was 20, then the lights ahead of you just turned to red to make you come to a complete stop for a few seconds.

Worked really well.

Quite common in France,  there's a set in the village next to ours close to a school at the end of a long straight. Works very well, if you approach at 30kph or less they stay green, any faster & they change to red.

I wonder if it's possible to get to them before they change to red by going really, really fast? 🏎

I can't recall where but diagonal speed bumps take the biscuit. Like being at sea in a force 8, especially when you encounter a whole run of bumps. Goodness know what damage to my car!

A (late) friend of mine was involved, as a local councillor, for his village.  I don't know how much talking versus 'doing' time there was but it rumbled on for a few years.

On a personal note, mainly from a cyclist perspective, they are an utter pain.  The strops of road outside the bumps take all the tyre wear and rapidly deteriorate into potholes which are unavoidable due to the bumps.

Yeah I've come across a couple in Scotland. I think they're brilliant, though would be improved with a camera on the traffic lights to prevent people ignoring the red light.