Atlanta Buckhead, May 2005
(The Atlanta News Group)

First Person:  Are Speed Humps Really the Answer?

By Christine Eisner

The way I see it, life is moving way too fast nowadays.  Whatever happened to the cup of homemade coffee while reading the morning paper or, for that matter, the trip to the grocery store for a week’s worth of sit-down dinners?  These days every minute counts, and our cars are vital to keeping up the pace of our busy lives.  Take food, for example:  people queue up for drive-thru lattes or dash through Publix or McDonald’s to grab rapid-fire dinners after work.  The car is more than The American Way – cars rule.  

So let me confess that, as a driver, I am guilty of driving ‘briskly.’  In my travels I am confronted by an assortment of messages that urge me to SLOW DOWN — some more strongly than others.  The thing is, I just can’t seem to slow to a crawl of 25 m.p.h. when I’m needing to be two places at once, five minutes ago.  Guiltily, I find myself asking if I really want to show my two children in the back seat how to ‘sidestep’ the law on a daily basis.  This is surely not a teachable moment to be proud of.  Perhaps more important is whether this is the kind of lifestyle I really want.  I often find myself asking whether I really need to be driving around this much — or this fast.  

Over the past decade or so, Big Brother, in the form of speed limit and stop signs and traffic lights, has morphed into Big Bully who literally forces us to go slow by means of a state-of-the-art innovation – the ‘speed bump’ — or ‘hump,’ depending on the current trend in traffic lexicon.  If the goal behind this more blunt approach to the speeding problem is to slow cars down, all I can say is that it doesn’t’t seem to be doing the trick.  

On ‘humped’ routes, the result is often the screeching of brakes just before a car is launched airborne.  After the inevitable crash landing, the gas pedal goes to the floor … redefining the idea of ‘zero to 60 in five seconds’… because 5 seconds is all there is before the next one.  Of course, the warning signs, “Speed Humps – 6 sets,” do help to inform drivers just how many times the vicious cycle repeats itself.  

So why aren’t these speed humps succeeding in slowing cars down?  A well-intended idea has instead become a Band-Aid that forces drivers to navigate through an obstacle course instead of concentrating on getting somewhere safely. We know that speed humps provide great entertainment for young drivers (take Shepherd’s Lane off of Lindbergh, for example), but I can’t help but wonder how they might affect the progress of ambulances and other EMT vehicles.  PATH has done a great job of creating safe zones for pedestrians and cyclists.  The many new sidewalks and cycling paths are doing a great job of keeping innocent people out of harm’s way.   But why can’t we walk or cycle along our streets anymore without jeopardizing our safety?  Will this strategy ultimately result in an Atlanta that is 100% ‘humped’?  Something is very wrong with this picture.  

So while the traffic gurus figure out what the next ‘solution’ is to Atlanta’s speeding problem, here are some ideas to improve your mobile quality of life.

Tips for a More Balanced Lifestyle-on-Wheels

How people set up their surroundings can have a huge impact on quality of life.  This applies to cars as well.  Here’s how: