You know, those lurching bumps that litter our roads like glitter at a hen do, slowing traffic down and, well, not really making you go any slower, but giving your bones a rattle and your car an early grave, while you curse your local council for jolting your organs around like a 1970s disco light this website.
Ever ask yourself what speed humps are doing to the environment? No? Then I’m about to take you on a whistle-stop tour of why we need to think long and hard about these bane of our roads.
Not only that, but speed bumps are made of asphalt. If that’s not something you’ve heard of, allow me to enlighten you: it is not green. Producers of asphalt engage in heavy industry. They create fumes and spew out pollution and gobble up crude oil like it’s going out of fashion. Every time we build another speed bump, we are making a large carbon footprint, just when we should all be trying to reduce our footprints.
But it’s not the materials that are the problem. Think about how these bumps affect your driving. You accelerate. You brake hard. You accelerate again. It hurts your neck, but it’s also a vicious cycle of consuming more fuel and releasing more emissions from your exhaust. Not exactly green!
But, please, don’t forget your car. Speed humps put a lot of stress on a vehicle, meaning that your car will have to be repaired or have parts replaced more often. This also means that more resources are needed, more waste is generated, and those defunct shock absorbers and broken springs will be filling up a landfill somewhere, leaching horrible chemicals into the Earth.
I’m not just whining though. There are much better ways of calming traffic that don’t create so much environmental havoc. There’s a whole armoury out there of smarter, greener ways of doing things that so many people are still ignoring.
Rumble strips are less intrusive, just as effective and don’t require drivers to do a stop-start routine that burns fuel as if there’s no such thing as a tomorrow. There’s also chicanes and road narrowing – techniques that slow down drivers without the sudden rudeness of a speed bump.
And for heaven’s sake, why aren’t more of us talking about smart speed tables? These are the Rolls Royce of traffic calming. They slow cars without the jarring impact. They can be made from recycled materials. The net environmental impact is minimal.
But listen: it’s 2024, we have cars that drive themselves, and we’re sending rockets to Mars. How come we’re still using millennia-old chunks of asphalt to manage our roads? It’s time for innovation in traffic calming. It’s time to make our streets safer, smarter and greener.
In short, next time you lurch over a speed bump, think about what you’re doing to your car, your spine and, indeed, the planet. At the very least, this might be a good reason to start pestering town halls and state legislatures to look into some alternatives. If we’re serious about tackling runaway emissions and making our cities greener, it’s probably time those miserable old exhaust-belching speed bumps were phased out. Let’s make our roads smarter, not just slower.
Read another of my green articles here: https://roadsahead.co.uk/greener-safer-uk-streets/