Evil humps cause damage to your car’s roof

IT WAS too good to be true. It’s dead now, damn. I talk of Johannesburg’s formerly Golden Mile, or more literally golden 2.4km of St George’s Road, from Observatory to Cyrildene.

We can recognise major minor roads, right? Minor minor roads and major major roads are safe from speed humps. It’s major minor roads that have suffered from Joburg’s three decades of transformation from flat-road city to hump-road city.

And what varied humps! We all know routes where the humps get it right – we sail along at an only-marginally-irritating 60, taking the undulations in our stride. We even respect them for requiring us to go no slower while deterring us from going any faster.

But then there are the other humps, the humps sent from hell. Small walls, like a row of bricks implanted to savage our tyres and rattle our teeth.

These evil humps are enemy action. We need a commission of enquiry to find out who on the city council has received funds from the Federation of Shock-Absorber Replacers.

Evil humps are bad enough when you see them coming, and it’s hard to believe they perform their purpose of traffic-calming. You must slow to 10 to challenge them, which is thoroughly anti-calming.

One can get so irritated by undue delay that you recklessly resort to Formula 1 acceleration for 40m until you must slam the brake for the next wall of bricks.

Hmm, petrol sales and brake shoes are also big winners in this process, we see. Conspiracy theory, anyone?

As for the humps where the white diagonal stripes have worn out and the chevrons have been overgrown by weeds, well! Hit an evil one of those, even at the modest 60 that they’re supposed to keep you to, and you’d better have your safety belt on or you’ll burst a head-shaped hole in your car’s roof.

You can crack your exhaust on the downswing. Not a few of those hidden evils boast battle scars.

One, that I meet on a walk, displays growing numbers of both the thin, straight, exhaust gouging and the wide, blunt (and rarer) gouging where the back humper has excavated a lip of tarmac.

But through a couple of hundred moons of the Invasion of Insidious Humps, St George has valiantly held out. From where I live to the airport, St George’s Road is almost as-the-crowflies. In mileage terms it’s an extreme shortcut, and this is a minority shortcut that works in time terms too. After adventuring through Yeoville, where the street is mainly a pedestrian mall, comes – came – St George’s moment of glory, from Innes Street to Aida Avenue, what must have been the longest uninter- rupted piece of suburban driving.

No robots, no circles, no humps. Plus a bonus at the east end, a magnificent and exceptionally un-clichéd view across south-east Joburg. Glorious it has been.

But eras end. The Insidious Humps have attacked.

I suppose that’s because some dumb charlies were hurtling through at 120. Some day we’ll be sensible enough to not need the humps.

Meantime, you’d think a city council could standardise on the humps that slow us without maddening us.

You now know for sure that I am a wicked immoral person. I didn’t alert you to the Golden Mile until its heyday was over.

Yep, right you are. But now I redeem myself, and reward your membership of the Stoep Club, by mentioning that it’s so far only spoiled by three humps at one end, none of them evil.