No no no, why would you solve a problem with mere geometry, when a solution is available that uses ultra-high-tech materials? Cost? Tell me, do you want to be the town with the cheapest speed bumps? Or the best?
Oh God I thought I was joking. “The First Intelligent Speed Bump?” Really? Intelligent now means squishy?
Yeah, they could be graffitied simply by pressing newspaper comics against them.
You didn’t play with it when you were little? I am sad for your missing childhood.
I did, I just wasn’t cutting open speed bumps to get my fix
OK, then emergency vehicles would have radio transmitters that would change the molecular structure of the goo so that it wouldn’t be thixotropic for a few seconds, before returning to its “I dare you to drive over me fast” state.
I disagree. I fucking hate speed bumps. Whats more, they cause me physical pain to go over usually, even very slowly. They cause wear and tear on the car, albeit minor, but it adds up if you use it a lot. Assuming this does actually cause a notably better experience if you are traveling slow, I say it’s an improvement.
Maybe this wouldn’t survive everywhere, but I am sure a lot of neighborhoods could install this and it would work better than a standard bump and not get vandalized. I have taken my kid to play days where neighborhoods have several of these installed.
Sounds like entitlement (“how dare you suggest that I should have to drive over a speedbump and be forced to slow down my sovereign vehicle to conform to someone else’s rules?!?”) to me. Using emergency vehicles as an excuse for this sort of thing is a bit of a strawman. Having to slow down for a few seconds before a speedbump is not going to cost anyone their life or property. It’s not as if there are 80 of them in a row. Calm the F down already.
Back when (luck) dragons ruled the BBS, we had a list of people who had expressed their disappointment in boingboing, usually regarding how the author of the post had “gone too far” as a “long-time reader of the site”. For your reading pleasure
It ended up being something of an in-joke to express your disappointment.
EDIT:
“I thought BoingBoing was supposed to be a directory of wonderful things” was another one that landed many on the list. That’s why it’s now “a directory of (mostly) wonderful things”
Faster, harder. Indeed.
The fully punitive “speed bump” is actually an old invention ascribed to a small-town policeman in Mexico. The town was reputedly astride a highway where traffic ignored all attempts to get it to slow down for the homes it blew past.
So the clever individual rigged up a speed control with spare parts: shock absorbers, auto springs, and piano wire. The wire is anchored at one end a few inches off the road, at the other held tight by a spring and shock absorber. With a little tinkering, the spring allows the wire to go flat to the road when a vehicle goes over it but the shock prevents it from doing so quickly. As a result, the tires get shredded.
Problem solved. As an added bonus, the town now has a prosperous tire shop and lots of material for huaraches.
Me too! Funny thing is that around my parts they are made of asphalt and every time the roads are resurfaced the bumps get shorter as the incline is reduced. A few more years of resurfacing they will be gone. Yay!
Have you ever ridden an ambulance on a genuine emergency run? They don’t go extra fast for too many reasons to count, but “that’s kind of rough for someone this banged up” is one of them. My ride with a broken leg was right up there with kidney stones. If they really need to go fast, they use aircraft.
Cops in a hurry are generally in a hurry because someone else is speeding away. Enforced speed limits will generally take care of that, and a kid killed by a speeding cop is no better off than a kid killed by a speeding drunk.
Or more precisely, a dilatant. AKA shear thickening non-Newtonian fluid.
Oobleck is an example.
You want an electrorheological fluid. Magnetorheological could work too.
Maybe set this up with radar so that anyone below the speed limit gets a squishy bump. Above, and you get “solid” bump.
I find it very irritating when marketers throw around the words “intelligent” or “innovative” when they really mean something more like “reactive” or “improved”.
That was me!! I was one of 'em! I’m so proud of myself. The change happened less than two weeks after I said it AND they had deleted my comment.
Weird. They are also called “sleeping policemen” in Haitian Creole (“polis kouche”).
Many speed bumps do more harm than good, though this technology appears to solve many of the problems.
And yes, emergency vehicle response is severely impacted by speed bumps. This has been studied many times. Speed bumps used too frequently also make traffic worse because the studies putting them in are only for a very small segment of the traffic pattern - the cars simply go a different direction.
IKR?
Can’t tell you how many I’ve passed…
You seem to have mistaken my expression of disappointment (thanks, Tekk) with a stupid and callous idea for an argument against speed bumps. I said nothing of the sort. What I said was - sometimes there are legitimate reasons for going over the speed limit. I stand by that. I didn’t think it was necessary to say explicitly that usually, there aren’t. Hopefully my position is now clearer to you.
And you might want to check your use of strawmen - I never said slowing down for a speed bump will cost anyone their life or property. I said that designing traps that could destroy someone’s most valuable possession was an appalling idea. In retrospect, I see that such a “fun” idea is worse than I thought - it could well turn that possession into an uncontrolled missile that could certainly cost people other than the speeder their property and their health, and perhaps their life.
