In 1896, a man named Walter Arnold of the UK was the first person to ever get in trouble for speeding. His penalty: fine of one schilling. These days, the amount of money people spend on gas can really break the bank and a little known fact about speeding is that it actually wastes a lot of your gas; every five miles per hour a person goes over sixty miles per, they pay an extra twenty four cents for each gallon. 13,000 lives are lost each year due to speeding related accidents, which compares to 33% of all fatal accidents are due to speeding. So how do we solve a national problem?
Speed bumps are bumps on the ground that can harm your car if you speed over them. On average, a person needs to go anywhere from 10-20 mph to safely maneuver across a speed bump. There are many pro’s and con’s to these bumps that make some residents question if they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing, or better yet, if they’re even safe. Speed “humps” vs. speed bumps have popped up around cities and a lot of residents have concerns that they don’t cause anybody to slow down due to how small they are. Others believe that even if the bump, or “hump”, is small, it gives the street a view that a person needs to slow down and, believe it or not, actually stops people from speeding.
Sometimes speed bumps are put in place strictly to reduce the amount of complaints that circle in from residents, but the noise level that speed bumps cause due to cars going over them only carries in even more complaints. There isn’t a lot of controversy over this subject which seems to be a pro, but the actual cost of construction and continued maintenance makes people wonder if they’re actually worth it.
Another con to speed bumps are the problems emergency vehicle face when trying to get to houses in residential area’s quickly. Unfortunately, if a person is going to speed, a person is going to speed, but when it comes to the life or death situations that emergency vehicles cater to, the few seconds they can get from going a tad bit faster in these neighborhoods could save a person lives. Weirdly enough, there are even complaints from people that have gotten into accidents because they were trying to avoid the speed bump, as some cars are low to the ground and cannot travel over the bumps safely unless they’re going close to 5 mph.
Unfortunately when it comes to speeding, people who are in a rush won’t pay attention the road anyway. It costs society $76,000 for every minute a person spends speeding, so maybe if people paid attention to the statistics and problems speeding causes, they’ll slow down. If the sad truth that, on average, speeding related crashes costs society around $40 billion annually doesn’t scare a person into following the law, a bump in the road probably won’t either.
