John MacDonald: All aboard the speed hump bandwagon

Canterbury Mornings with John MacDonald

You can tell council elections are coming up, because that’s the only reason the Christchurch City Council is going to start using high friction road surfaces at pedestrian crossings, instead of speed humps.

Even though it knows that speed humps are safer. Even though it knows that it won’t slow down traffic. But you’ve got to keep people sweet when there’s an election coming up.

They’re starting with a pedesttian crossing Halswell, with the local councillor saying they’re doing it so that people don’t get brassed off.

Andrei Moore says: "We are putting safe infrastructure in without pissing everyone off.”

And there’s your evidence that this isn’t being done for safety. It’s being done to try and calm down all the whingers ahead of October's election.

Talk about shallow.

I know when these speed humps things started appearing, twe all thought “what the hell are these things all about?” And, since then, it's become incredible fashionable to slag them off.

But this is the problem when you get a bunch of people sitting around a council table all thinking they’re road safety experts when the only thing they're expert in is pandering to voters.

Apparently, the plus side of these high friction surfaces is that vehicles are less likely to skid, but they do nothing to slow traffic down. When some muppet is screaming up to a pedestrian crossing and has to slam on the brakes, they’ll be at less risk of skidding.

At least with the speed humps, even the muppets are forced to slow down – that’s not going to happen with your high friction surface, is it?

Cost is another thing in favour of the high friction surfaces, as opposed to the sped humps. A report I’ve seen says installing a speed hump —including the aspahalt, the road marking, and the signage— costs somewhere between $30,000 and $55,000.

Whereas, the anti-skid, high friction road surface costs between $25,000 and $35,000. The fly in the ointment there though is that this special surface costs more to maintain than your speed hump.

But are these speed humps really that much of a problem? What’s so bad about something that forces drivers to slow down – especially when they’re approaching a pedestrian crossing?

There’s nothing wrong with that.

And, if you are totally honest with yourself, do speed humps really have that much of a negative impact on your life?

Or do you think you might have fallen into the trap and followed the crowd in your opposition to speed humps? Because I reckon that, in the grand scheme of things, they aren’t a problem at all.

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