Love ’em or hate ’em, speed humps here to stay
Kirkwood Avenue is undergoing more traffic “calming.” Out where rubber leaves the road, the nervous breakdown edges closer.
First the mid-west street was four lanes, then it was two-ish, with some parking and some bulb-outs.
It once had no speed bumps, then it had some, then the “some” were adjusted, and now it has more. I know this because the first time I drove over this summer’s new speed bump — technically called a “hump”
— the car nearly had a second sunroof.
We watched several dozen vehicles go over the new hump at the corner of Iona Street one afternoon. It was illuminating. A handful of cars actually came to a stop, like Grandma was lying on the road; most slowed to about 20 km/ h; and a few sailed right through at normal speed, probably for the first and last time. OC Transpo buses did an ungraceful dance, dump trucks shook to their steely bones. The top of the hump already looks slightly battered.
“It’s horrible,” said Colleen Findlay of the new hump, located just south of a new crosswalk. “It’s just way too high.”
She has lived on adjacent Dawson Avenue for 45 years and was just stepping out to the community mailbox.
Ever since the first bumps were installed in the late 1990s, she can hear the clanging of metal, the strangled squeals of brakes, the clatter of banging cargo as trucks make their way north to Richmond Road or south to the Queensway.
Well, there is news. The city is reviewing what it calls “construction deficiencies” with the hump and is “addressing ” them, which could mean anything from ripping the damn thing up or making it even bigger. It’s how Kirkwood rolls.
Say this about speed humps: They’re addictive.
About 20 years ago, Ottawa had almost none. Now it has something like 350 on 60 or 70 streets in 16 of the city’s 23 wards. If the budgets were bigger, we’d have lots more. (Toronto, where it’s hard to imagine driving fast anywhere, at any time, has more than 2,400.)
And here’s why city hall loves them. “Speeding traffic is, by far and away, the biggest complaint that comes into councillors’ offices,” said Coun. Jeff Leiper, whose Kitchissippi ward takes in Kirkwood. “You’re forever trying to find ways to mitigate the speed at which people are travelling down our streets.”
Among his concerns with speed humps is that they divert traffic to neighbouring, freeflow streets, and they’re noisy. They’re also relatively expensive and usually the result of an “area traffic management” survey, for which there is city-wide backlog intherangeof80.
The consensus, however, is that speed humps work and are here to stay.
“In terms of our tool box of measures to reduce speed, they are probably our most effective tool,” said Heidi Cousineau, a program manager in the city’s traffic management section.
The city has found — in line with many studies — that speeds are typically reduced by 10 to 15 km/ h with a speed hump, putting the average crossing speed at about 25 to 30 km/ h.
There are, of course, complaints. “Some people love them. Some people hate them. They can be quite polarizing in some communities.”
There are different styles, too. A speed “bump” is usually a reference to the private parking lot style where the “vertical deflection” (my God, they have a fancy word for everything) is short and sharp.
A speed “hump” is more elongated and varies in height, and a speed “table top” is wider still, with a ramp on either side and a plateau or top in the middle. (There is, too, a speed “cushion,” but that’s probably enough learning for one day.)
The humps tend to be used on collector roads where volumes are heavy but there is plenty of shared access with pedestrians, cyclists and scooters, and the street connects schools, community centres or shopping areas.
This is why you will see them on Kirkwood but not on March Road, where the speed limit is 80 km/ h. Speaking of rubber fleeing the road, the residents of Lyon Street, from Somerset to the Queensway, deserve either a civic medal or danger pay for putting up with their personal Himalaya lo these many years.
Leiper pointed to an alternative that is cheaper and easier to access. Every councillor has a $40,000 fund that can be used for measures like road painting (“SLOW DOWN”), or speed boards that light up red/green, or planter boxes, or flex posts that are fixed to the middle of the road in non-winter months. It all helps to battle our incorrigible behaviour.
“We’re fighting this rearguard action against congestion in a rapidly intensifying neighbourhood. Every action you take might improve access for one set of road users but it detracts from another set,” laments Leiper.
A handful of cars actually came to a stop, like Grandma was lying on the road, most slowed to about 20 km/h, and a few sailed right through ...