How Speed Bumps Could Help Your Business Save Lives

In fact, a Department for Transport study undertaken in 2000 demonstrates simple traffic management like reducing road speed to 30mph in built-up areas can decrease the number of individuals seriously injured or killed in traffic accidents on village roads by 50%. That same speed table reduction (to 30mph) results in a decline of collisions involving children by 40% and in accidents involving an automobile and a kid cyclist by 51%. Due to this study and others want it, villages and the owners of private roads and residential developments have installed traffic management methods including posted signs to speed humps. Still, significantly less than one in five local authorities have implemented or plan to implement ways of speed reduction. Why would local authorities ignore this kind of potent life-saving tool?

There are several reasons for this, but the largest of them is the strong feeling most people have against the usage of speed humps.When there is one issue that's created a united front throughout the political spectrum, it's speed humps. Throughout the last few years, everyone from novelist Beryl Bainbridge to Labour MP John Mann have spoken out - and very vocally - against the so-called'sleeping policemen '. Yet speed bumps are just one of several different traffic management measures that can be taken to reduce speeds to a fair 30mph or less..

Traffic management includes traffic calming (the use of roadway constructions to organically slow traffic), markings and signals, and physical patrolling. Signs, markings and signals all have varying effects on the speed of traffic. Of the, traffic signals are the very best, while they manage traffic directly. Signage and street markings involve some impact on traffic speed, though much of the result is lost over time. When traffic calming methods like speed bumps, closures and traffic roundabouts are introduced, though, automobile speeds are reduced permanently. Traffic calming methods include vertical deflections, horizontal shifts, roadway narrowing and closures.Each affects traffic in different ways, and each has advantages and disadvantages.

Vertical deflections are those least liked by the public. They include any road construction that raises the top of the road - speed humps, raised intersections, rumble strips and speed tables are examples. There are numerous innovations on speed humps, including an'intelligent'hump that senses the speed of the oncoming vehicle and deflates itself if the speed is low enough to pass over it without jolting.