THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I work in the Traffic Engineering field and a couple of us had a good laugh at this yesterday. It will only take a couple of times driving through it for speeders to keep speeding.

Tango, you driving it shouldn’t impact your opinion on it as I’m guessing you aren’t the type of person to speed through a neighborhood or not look out for children in the road. The real concern is the younger drivers, who will become desentized to it, and the older drivers who will just become confused. Also, putting this on one road will send a message that roads that don’t have this “speed bump” it is ok to speed and not watch for children.

Scott, what is the issue in putting speed bumps on far more roads?  Is it a local ordinance issue?  Is it an insurance/car damage issue?  Is it a “look” issue?

Because in my old apartment complex, our road was being used as thruway to go around traffic by cars from a neighboring town.  I would loves to have seen more stop signs and/or more speed bumps, to ensure that drivers never went above 25mph.

Finally, what is the recommendation to incentivize drivers to drive 25?

Tango, you driving it shouldn’t impact your opinion

Right, I meant that I need to drive through it, so I can make a guess as to how other people might respond to it.

A friend of mine in my town, but a different neighborhood, told me it took 10 years from request to construction to get speed bumps in his neighborhood.  At that rate, I suppose a lot of people don’t bother, figuring their kids will be grown and gone before it gets built…

Agreed that the potential to desensitize someone to an actual kid in the middle of the road is not worth whatever benefits there might be.

Regarding why not more bumps: part of the resistance to humps/bumps is just cost.  In my old neighborhood in Phoenix, we (our HOA) tried for several years to get speed bumps installed.  The city did put up traffic speed measuring things a few times at our request, but they had some kind of threshold above which the average speed needed to be in order for them to pay for the speed bump installation.  The problem is that it wasn’t an issue with average speed, it was the outliers that were the real problem.  We never hit that threshold.  They offered to “let” our HOA pay for them, but they were absurdly expensive to install.  It was frustrating.

To the traffic engineer in post #1.  Is there consideration of emergency responders when planning for speed bumps in both commercial and especially residential areas.  It is one thing to have a car slow down to 25 MPH due to a speed bump and maybe another for an ambulance, fire truck or police car.

Wouldn’t someone slamming on their brakes and/or swerving to avoid the child when they see the fake image be a significant potential hazard?

I wonder how well the image of the child would hold up in a location exposed to the elements.

first glance at the headline made me think of using real children as physical speed bumps.  probably unethical but i guarantee you get people to slow down. 

that are eighty bazillon speed bumps in my current neighborhood in suburban MD, and because I had a very young niece and nephew in the area, I appreciated them, but I’ve also heard that they can be a real detriment to emergency vehicles, particularly to ambulances rushing heart attack victims to hospitals where every second counts.

you can google for various articles and studies on both sides of the debate.  to me the key thing was to just be particular about where the go and only put them where they are needed.

#2 - Cost is a big factor as not only is there the initial installation but maintenance costs. #9 is right about the emergency vehicles who don’t like them. Also it’s up for debate how beneficial they are as I’ve read that people tend to drive faster in between speed bumps than if there weren’t any there at all. We’ve only installed on roads that are shown to be cut through trips when there is a main arterial they could be using. Also, according to national standards, stop signs should not be used for speed control as studies have shown them to not be effective. We won’t install stop signs to control for speed but other jurisdictions might. I would guess it’s a political decision that overruled the engineer.

#3 - That makes sense.

#6 - Well it is definitely considered as we wouldn’t put up any speed bumps on a main arterial. The type we put up in residential areas are the longer speed humps you might have seen. You can go about 20 mph over them and not be too inconvenienced. At least it’s better than the typical speed bumps you see in parking lots. As for commerical areas we wouldn’t put any up. However parking lots are typically private. I assume there are limitations to how many speed bumps they can install, but that is probably between the property owner and the fire department.

#6 - your post got me thinking why we cant just create adjustable speed bumps. as they say, “we have the technology”...it wouldnt be that hard to make a 2/3 position speed bump. put up the bump for when you would expect a lot of kids (ie school just let out) and give ambulances or cops an override to put them down.

The picture reminds me of the little girls playing in the hallway from The Shining.  That would make me slow down because it’s extraordinarily creepy.

This is such a strange idea. Seems like it really opens up a can of worms how it reminds people of certain dangers disproportionately to their probability of occurring (and the amount of control the driver might have over the event). Seems instead of the result being safer drivers In the long run, it might lead to additional “noise” in our already busy minds which distracts from other real dangers.

Most people speeding through residential areas aren’t likely to change for anything except penalties or near-misses- they already know it’s too fast, and already justify their own speeding even if it might be dangerous- don’t expect these people to change.
Car/car collisions are a way more important part of driving where we could improve safety using technology- we’ve come a long ways but driving is still way way more dangerous than people take into account. Would be pretty easy to detect speeding using sensors and automate penalties, although a bit creepy for sure- what if govt offered to give people car/fuel subsidies if they will install these tracking chips? Gps devices can generally tell you the speed limits on each road- this tech seems certainly possible to implement right now if desired.

Problem of course is how 90% of drivers think they’re above average...if we collected some data and made it a game (safety is cool, ha) then the truth might reveal itself to a few of the deluded masses making our roads more dangerous than they should be given the technology available in 2010

Here’s the same image in an outdoor location at multiple distances.

http://i.imgur.com/lKpox.jpg