Speed Humps:

Introduction:

The city recently installed speed humps to slow traffic on streets in several Nashville neighborhoods. In one such neighborhood—Green Hills—the speed humps were ripped out after drivers started cutting through peoples’ yards to avoid them. As well, Public Works officials said the humps had been constructed poorly.

The issue, it appears, is more than just about slowing cars. It is about public interest vs. self interest, the tradeoff between community safety and the right to drive unimpeded on public thoroughfares, and a host of other things. We recently asked Scene writers what they thought of speed humps. They are not, you will find out, mere bumps in the road.

Matt Pulle, staff writer

I like the concept. In fact, I think it’s great. But in practice, the

speed humps seem to punish all drivers whether they are traveling

the speed limit or not.

Adam Ross, special projects editor

They tend to slow me down.

Walter Jowers, columnist

Well, generally I’m in favor of the government leaving us the hell alone, right down to the street level. But the problem is, people use neighborhood streets for shortcuts. And they haul ass. That makes for a quiet-enjoyment/personal safety problem. So the question becomes: What’s more intrusive? The dang government, coming along and making the roads bumpier, or assholes driving 50 mph through a neighborhood? In this case, the assholes are the bigger problem.

So, I say go ahead and bump up the streets. If drivers start behaving themselves, we can always tear the bumps out later.

I’ve threatened for years to put together a little rig in the road in front

of my house, where I watch for assaholic speeders, and when they get close,

I pull a string and launch a cardboard pop-up of a little boy pulling a

little girl and a puppy in a wagon. If anybody hit it, I’d then shoot their

tires out.

Probably better to have the bumps. Fewer repercussions.

Donna Bowman, film writer

Speed bumps, in my opinion, are the perfect test of self-interest/public-interest positioning. People love them because they force other people to slow down (public interest), and hate them because they force them to slow down (self-interest). Because, of course, when I speed through a neighborhood or parking lot, I know what I’m doing, but when other people do it, they’re maniacs who must be stopped.

Knowing that how I judge my own self-interest is fatally flawed by

inherent bias, I love speed humps. I should be forced to act in the

public interest when it’s been shown I generally relegate the public

interest to second tier whenever I like.

Phil Ashford, political writer, and member of the special Metro commission that studied the whole issue in 1997

The argument for them is that they encourage drivers to go slowly in areas where fast driving is inappropriate. It is not clear that they really work for this.

The big problem—especially the Valley Brook issue in Green Hills—is that Nashville is a big city with considerable congestion in certain activity centers like Green Hills and the West End corridor. Big traffic arteries are frequently at the limits of their capacity. The only way to stop them from clogging hopelessly is if there’s some overflow capacity at peak times—i.e. through the residential neighborhoods.

Neighbors don’t like that, obviously. That’s why they want bumps or traffic harassment stop signs. But nobody has a permanent right for their street to be a quiet country lane. It’s a question of all of us needing to give up a bit in order to get along in an urban environment. That said, it’s not unreasonable to try and slow the traffic down a bit, in the same name of getting along and encouraging driving that’s appropriate to the surroundings. (Also, it wasn’t exactly civil for drivers to go around the humps by driving across lawns.)

Angela Wibking, arts writer

Speed bumps are an unfair burden to those of us who observe the posted speed limits along residential streets and only provoke those who don’t to drive even more recklessly. Rather than spend money on speed bumps, Metro would do better to post police officers or install video cameras around Green Hills, along Belmont Avenue (where most drivers go 53 mph rather than the posted 35 mph) and other problem spots. There’s some real money to be made in fines for running stop signs (the new 4-way stop on Glen Echo ought to generate a few thousand daily), speeding and illegally using the middle turn lane as a passing lane. Now, about those barking dogs...

Kay West, food writer

As the resident of Sweetbriar, which is used all day and night as a cut-through for drivers racing from the 440 off-ramp on Hillsboro Road to Twelfth Avenue South (Sweetbriar), I have never felt safe allowing my children to ride their bicycles or rollerskate on their own street. If drivers adhered to the speed limit it would be one thing; I am fully cognizant of the compromises of living in an urban neighborhood as opposed to a Brentwood cul-de-sac. But the speed limit is 25 or 30, yet drivers routinely hurtle through anywhere from 40-60 mph. If I go out into the street and gesture for them to slow down, they beep their horns at me or give me the

finger, which seems to be the accepted method of civil disobedience today.

They are breaking the law by speeding down this street. I would prefer a

stop sign mid-block to speed humps, but I think that as Nashville traffic

increases (seemingly in ascending proportion to Nashville drivers’

patience), cut-through streets should be identified, and a solution reached.

I would love nothing more than to find the people who honked horns or drove up into people’s yards and sit in their front yard about 3 in the morning with my car alarm going off. So there.

Willy Stern, investigative reporter

I have no sympathy for people who live on those roads whining about people speeding through their neighborhoods. That’s the risk of buying on those roads. That’s the deal. Caveat emptor. Only a fool buys a house near a raceway and then complains about the noise.

Wayne Wood, funny guy

I think the concept of “public” includes the notion that the public is allowed to use what they have paid for, whether the immediate locals find

that palatable or not. Every street has kids and people who drive too fast;

it shouldn’t be well-connected neighborhoods who can strong arm Public

Works into slowing traffic down. But what do I know. I live on Gale Lane,

a.k.a. the highway to Kroger.

Marc Stengel, automotive writer

No surprises here: As regards speed bumps/humps/mounds, I hate 'em. But this isn’t the car guy talking. I also hate the recklessness that

motivates folks to the desperate measures that speed-calming devices

represent.

For me, speed bumps illuminate, at best, a poverty of thinking about

transportation, at worst, a denial of the reality that smooth-flowing

transportation is the circulatory system of a healthy community. It’s a big

and complicated issue, of course. And it’s made worse by the legacy of

neglected planning and misplanning (particularly in Green Hills) that

“wise” city fathers have abandoned to our fate.

There are, for example, clever tools in the toolbox that no one seems to know how to use: traffic circles (a.k.a. British-style roundabouts) naturally slow traffic from intersection to intersection without imposing the

unnatural/annoying/unsafe rhythms that disruptive bumps engender. Sidewalks (without manifold curb cuts) channel both pedestrians and vehicles in both residential and commercial districts. (Imagine taking a “shortcut” through a private yard if it means hopping a five-inch sidewalk. Imagine the improved arterial flow along Hillsboro Pike if curb-cut chaos didn’t reign—and if centralized parking linked to merchants via sidewalks did reign. This latter fantasy alone would quell most appetites for seeking “work-arounds” like the Cross Creek-Valley Brook cut-through.)

Maybe it takes a philosophical approach. If so, I’d start with David Hume: “The overriding force in all our actions is... the desire for

self-gratification. In order to survive, society has to channel our passions

in constructive directions.” The operative phrase, of course, is “channel

our passions.” That’s “channel,” by the way; not “impede,” “dam up” or

otherwise “obstruct” by use of regressive speed bumps.

Over and out.

Diann Blakely, writer and poet

At a Christmas gathering a few years back, I heard a small group of women friends raising their voices louder and louder and louder, and with

increasingly outraged tones, in our host’s living room. I sidled close to the

hors d’oeuvres to hear what was inflaming their tempers. Were they venting, so to speak, about global warming? (It was December and we had the AC cranked up.) The increasing commercialization of the holiday season? Clinton’s fucking or not fucking Monica Lewinsky?

No. They were talking about the speed bumps on a nearby street and how they did not sufficiently slow traffic. The street in question, residential but fronted by a major thoroughfare and numerous businesses, is unquestionably dangerous Though I’m not a parent, my protect-the-offspring sense is strong enough to make me hyperventilate at the thought of my nieces or nephew playing there; the idea of one of them being hit by a speeding driver makes me think not of the judicial system but of gaining access to a chainsaw. Surely such drives have an evolutionary purpose: many of us wouldn’t survive to adulthood were it not for hard-wired female vigilance, which sleeps with one eye open for speeding cars and worse.

And yet, having taught in a nearly all-female environment for over a decade, I’ve seen this keep-the-world-safe-for-our-children instinct pushed to frightening conclusions. I’m no longer sure it’s just Big Brother we need to be looking out for. It’s Big Mama too.

Her ascendancy seems the result of an errant pendulum at work: having loosened—thank goodness—the restrictive gender roles that made women responsible for nurturing children and men responsible for pushing them out of the nest while cawing about self-sufficiency, white middle- and

upper-middle-class America, especially its female half, has become rigidly,

disproportionately, and more nervously reactive about what’s outside.

Our fearfulness’s most obvious metaphor, thus far, hasn’t been the speed bump, but the SUV. These were already selling—primarily to white families with children, primarily to women drivers—at exponentially high rates when 9/11 was but a maniacal gleam in bin Laden’s eye. Even in the tragedy’s aftermath, driving the civilian equivalent of tanks seems unnecessary but freighted, one might say, with meaning. As does the continuously swelling ranks of those who flee to gated communities, which promise protection—including speed bumps, inevitably part of the layout—while preventing more and more of us from having any real sense of neighborhood, which offers a human, rather than mechanical, means of looking after each other.

Which isn’t to suggest that the current demands of ungated Nashvillians intersect neatly or often: the demand for speed bumps in my part of town seems more than a little perverse when compared to Edgehill and East Nashville demands for greater control of drug, not vehicular, traffic.

My own stereotypically female associative logic leads me to wonder further if the issue of speed bumps has anything to do with another cultural hotwire, one we’re only now beginning to approach, if still in a largely hands-off way: The vast majority of the people who died in the WTC bombings were white men who functioned as their families’ primary wage-earners. Most of them weren’t firemen or EMTs—they were office workers. Does this mean that white women agitate to have speed bumps built for their children while men—at least those living and/or working in New York—are willing, when necessary, to lie down in the road and be speed bumps to protect grown-ups who aren’t even related to them? This code of chivalrous behavior, grotesquely enough, is what allowed bin Laden’s suicide bombers to carry out successfully their plans in the air—they knew that the pilots would leave the cockpit if they believed that their female flight attendants were physically imperiled.

Am I suggesting that men are morally superior, or more meaningfully protective and safety-conscious, than women? Hell no. Reread the preceding sentence and try to remember how many female bomb-happy Taliban minions you’ve heard about. Check car insurance and fatal accident tables. Consider the fact that the very male population that supplied most of the civilian heroes of 9/11 similarly supplies Congress, which regularly defeats measures designed to save lives via what most developed nations consider a basic human right—a decent national health care system.

No sane person opposes speed bumps, if only for karmic reasons. And for some folks, any swerve from the issue of child safety connotes an impaired heart and/or an implicit breach of the social contract. But when the level of civic—and living room—agitation rises to a point that doesn’t seem quite consistent with larger forces at work in our universe and the chance of actual danger, it may well be time to check out the rear- and side-view mirrors. And maybe even drive across our domestic and local divides, across our country, across a few continents, and check out the same mirrors from there.

Liz Garrigan, news editor

They’re humps, with an 'h’. Believe it or not, there’s a difference. Meanwhile, I’m stunned anybody gives a damn one way or another about these things.

James Hanback, technology writer

One problem is that they don’t slow motorists who really don’t care about hurting their cars. (They just jump 'em.) The other thing is that they

do slow emergency vehicles. Here’s a better argument than I can make:

http://www.motorists.com/info/speed_bumps.html.

Martin Brady, theater critic

I’ve been up in arms since they put them in on Valley Brook and Cross Creek over in Green Hills. That’s my “secret” way to get in to the Green Hills shopping area so I can avoid Hillsboro Road. Clever me, right?

Well, if anything will help to deter people from using this route—and rechannel traffic to Hillsboro!—it’s those confounded speed bumps. Question: Are they actually inspired by safety concerns, or are they

really just a shameless way for that neighborhood to assert its elitism? The homes there are all set back far from the road. I have never observed pedestrian traffic of any consequence.

OK, the speed bumps are no big deal, right? I grin and bear it, right? And besides, what could possibly be bad about going slower in a residential area?

However, the speed bumps in question are, in my opinion, too densely laid out based on any logical standard. (A fact that clinches it: The locals just did it to make people stay out of the neighborhood.) Also, when going northbound, there are inadequate warnings about what’s ahead. One gets up a head of steam, and Boom!—you hit the speed bumps, which, in

this case, appear to be much higher than the kind one sees in typical places, such as college campuses. It’ll rattle your front-end alignment for sure, wreak havoc with your axle maybe, possibly make hubcaps pop off, and God knows what all. (Maybe even shake the fillings from your teeth.)

Sorry, folks, but nothing’s gonna get me to use Hillsboro Road. But if anything’s designed to induce me to alter my route through the blessed Green Hills residential area, this would appear to be it.

Thanks for sending up this flare. I feel better now.

P.S. My ex-father-in-law used to say that dead Jesuits were buried in the speed bumps on the campus of Chicago’s Loyola University. The width IS perfect for corpses. Wonder if Tony Soprano’s boys are up on this....

Rob Simbeck, freelance writer

There is no constitutional right to drive on municipal streets. It

is a privilege, one the state is fully justified in licensing and

regulating as its elected representatives see fit. In the interest of

safety, it is within its jurisdiction to post speed limits, erect stop

lights and signs and, yes, put up speed bumps. The latter is an

inconvenience necessitated by the fact that some drivers are too selfish or

stupid to slow down in residential neighborhoods. Drivers who don't like

them should work to change the law or replace the elected officials.

Provided they are designed and installed properly—and there are plenty of

states to look to for guidance—they are perfectly in order where the

alternative is clearly endangering people.

Bruce Barry, freelance writer

Speed humps are a reasonable form of traffic calming in the right circumstances, and traffic calming is a critical element involved in

tilting the pedestrian/auto balance back toward the ambulatory. But

whether one likes them or not on their own merits, the actions by Metro

related to the installation and recent removal of humps in a Green Hills

neighborhood are nothing short of outrageous.

In Green Hills, according to news reports, Metro dismantled and removed speed humps because (a) they were constructed in a faulty manner, and (b) dissenting motorists were engaging in uncivil disobedience by making noise (horn honking) and by driving around the humps, which means in people’s yards to avoid them. The Tennessean quoted a Metro Public Works spokeswoman as saying the humps were removed mainly because they were poorly constructed, but also because of the honking and avoidance of them by motorists who didn’t like them. Said the spokeswoman, “From a public safety standpoint, we did not want people driving around into private property.”

This reaction by Metro is astonishing and alarming because it seems as though the city is allowing law-breakers to determine policy through

illegal acts. I assume gratuitous horn honking in a residential neighborhood violates some sort of law (disturbing the peace or a noise ordinance or whatever), and certainly driving in someone’s yard is illegal. Why didn’t Metro simply put a cop out there for a couple of days to nab offenders and uphold the rule of law, rather than take down the humps?

The “poor construction” excuse seems like a complete red herring. If

that were the real reason for removing the humps, the Metro spokesperson

could have simply said, “we’re removing them because they were improperly constructed, and we will be replacing them with properly

constructed ones as soon as possible.” Instead Metro is admitting that

law-breaking motorists induced them to change policy—one presumably

created in the first place at the behest of residents who worked through

the system rather than disruptively around it. The message being sent

here is that illegal acts will help you get what you want, as long as

your actions are sufficiently obnoxious and disruptive.

Christine Kreyling, architecture and urban planning writer

Cheekwood installed speed humps—wider than bumps—as part of its new site design and they work well to keep cars from speeding through the grounds. But they slow you down considerably, and if you forget they’re there you feel as if your car is coming apart. These are the only ones I’ve directly experienced. Whether they are the same as the ones installed/removed in Green Hills I don’t know.

There are other traffic-calming devices that street planners recommend in conjunction with the humps—sidewalks with planting strips next to the curb, general reduction of street width, on-street parking, roundabouts at intersections, etc. All of these are the opposite of the typical suburban street design, which is usually predicated on 12-foot lanes, which are too wide and encourage speed. My street is too wide, and even though there are plenty of cars parked on the street and we have sidewalks, drivers still go way too fast—I’ve had two cats and a dog hit by speeders—and many times I’ve longed for a big fat hump in front of my house.

Drivers will always go as fast as they perceive they can without endangering themselves—not anyone or thing else. Humps work because they are dangerous to go too fast over, but they piss drivers off because they slow you down so much. There’s probably a moderate hump design that pulls you down to 20 mph or so that they should use on 'hood streets. I guess I’d be in favor of such. And I certainly think that the assholes who drove through people’s yards should have been shot on sight.