You must log in or # to comment.
The “socialist speed bumps” is deliciously ridiculous of course, and it’s easy to imagine these complaints coming from rich people who want to race their super low Ferraris through the street, but from the article, the complaint sounds a lot more reasonable; these bumps apparently exceed the council’s own allowed height. And some have indeed been fixed already.
That said, I’m not a huge fan of speed bumps (though I don’t mind them much either), because I think they might encourage these people to buy luxury SUVs instead. I’d rather see extra curves added tot the street. They may do less for the sports cars, but more for the SUVs. A mix is probably best.
But I suspect it’s cheaper to just add a speed bump; requires less thought , less redesign.
I think they might encourage these people to buy luxury SUVS instead.
Yes, they absolutely encourage motorists to get inherently less safe vehicles. They also impede emergency vehicle access, are a hazard to road users and increase wear on vehicles. Taking action against people with sports cars is an insane starting point in a reality where SUVs and trucks exist.
Speed humps are objectively a bad solution, you can achieve the same desired outcome (slow traffic down) by reducing lane width. Adding bike lanes or planter boxes are both cheaper solutions without the same downsides.
im pretty sure speedbumps with non newtonian fluids exist that do nothing if you’re following the speed limit but do the speedbump thing if you’re not, idk why those aren’t widely adopted.
Socialist speed bumps?
Are we just randomly labelling things based on whatever political view we don’t like.
Maybe he should Conservative shut the fuck up.
Where have you been? People been doing that for decades at least
Speed bumps are socialist because everyone is affected by them. Capitalist speed bumps would only hurt the poors.
Conservatives never shut the fuck up. I wish they knew how to
Can’t wait for them to complain about the gay roundabouts.
This engine is woke.
Not to mention the transmission.
It’s the Torygraph. It was always trash.
Ironically, shouldn’t be an issue for anti-socialists since they obviously would never use the public roads built and paid for by a society.
So that speed bump is sentient? How would it differentiate between an expensive car and a beater with shitty suspension.
The bump is inside the wheel base, so the shocks won’t carry it. And luxury cars tend to be lower to the ground.
Although you tell from the photo that the asphalt there has heaved up, so I doubt it was a purposeful change to the road.
that isn’t definitely just asphalt heaving up. they put in speed bumps around here with similar geometry just by layering asphalt, and it isn’t visible in the photo where the seam would be if that were the case
I’m also of the opinion that you can’t tell if the photograph was taken from a similar elevation, or lower. if you think it was taken from a lower elevation than the top of the speed bump in the lane that the camera is, then yeah it’s got to be heaving. but I don’t think that with this perspective it can be ruled out that the photo was taken from on top of the adjacent speed hump
When suspension on a car is fucked the car doesn’t get shorter. Springs set the ride height and are just coiled metal, but shocks are full of fluid which can leak leading to a sloppy ride and the inability to properly absorb bumps.
In this case, it’s the height of the front bumpers off the ground. As someone who has a BRZ which was even lowered for awhile these drivers need to get over themselves and stop bitching that they can’t have the entire world built to serve them and their fully voluntary choices. What’s next, complaining that nature is woke because it makes driving my low, RWD car slightly more difficuly?
because it makes driving my low, RWD car slightly more difficuly?
You have a weird way of saying ‘more fun’. Biking in the snow is much more exciting than biking during summer. Yes, I’m Danish and have a death wish, why do you ask?
It’s hard to believe that the Telegraph used to be a serious newspaper.
Socialism : social ownership of means of production
What are speed bumps producing? Street safety by speed reduction. Who owns the speed bumps? The council, i.e. the state, which is answerable to the people (in a democracy).
So, technically, with a lot of word pushing, there are socialist speed bumps.
So, technically, with a lot of word pushing, there are socialist speed bumps
And so is the road
The Telegraph are now basically a US republican newspaper that somehow found itself in the UK, calling everything that inconveniences the rich/their preferred people “socialist”.
To be fair, anything that actually properly taxes the rich, is indeed socialist — and that is good! They should not leech off.
Speed bumps are not a new invention
If you buy an impractical car for the situations it’s expected to be used it (i.e. British roads, long featuring speed bumps), you’re just a moron.
Complaining to the council about your stupid decision is just weaponised incompetence
vOlUmE uP kiss my shitter you corpo scumdogs
I think one of the reasons that SUV’s and ‘crossover’ type cars have become so much more popular is that they make speed bumps less of a nuisance and allow the driver to cross them without slowing down as much
it’s a mix of factors as for why heavier vehicles go over bumps better
1 - bigger/taller vehicles generally have more suspension travel which is also softer
2 - heavier vehicles have more inertia (which results in less body movement when going over bumps)
3 - bigger wheels mean a larger radius which means bumps feel softer when hitting them - think pushing a shopping cart versus riding a bike over a crack
4 - the bigger and heavier wheels actually act against the smoothness of the ride here, but the suspension is designed for that and the overall inertia of the sprung mass seems to mostly cancel it out
I will say that I generally hate speed bumps as a concept. I think that they are ineffective and annoying to everybody.
cons of speed bumps:
-
annoying to the driver
-
annoying to everybody else who has to hear cars and trailers squeak and smash over them
-
annoying to drivers behind drivers who crawl over them at a snail’s pace
-
annoying to cyclists (if they don’t have cutouts for bikes)
-
they interfere with snow plowing operations
-
they distract drivers from paying attention to their surroundings, and have them focused on speeding up and slowing down for each bump because they must get there faster faster faster always
-
drivers accelerate and brake between each bump, causing engine tire and brake noise for everybody nearby
-
the constant accelerating and decelerating of 4,000 lb vehicles is incredibly wasteful *not just because of fuel but because of tire and brake wear and pollution from that
-
some people just drive over them at ‘full speed’ which makes bouncy car and tire slap noises (this is usually what I do when I come across gentle speed humps in a 40 km an hour zone, I’m not slowing down and speeding up the whole time so I’ll just hit it at 35, tap the gas to get back up to 40, and coast until the next one. obviously my speed is appropriate to the surroundings at the time and I don’t always do 35 in these situations, I’m just talking about when it’s clearly wide open and obviously nobody hiding behind parked cars)
it annoys me so much because like you can get the same result by just narrowing the lanes and designing your streets better instead of having a literal highway-speed-designed road with two lanes each direction and raised median and 6 ft painted paved shoulder until a curb with no sidewalk immediately adjacent to the pavement with a 50 km an hour speed limit slapped on it
Nitpicks:
2 - Inertia doesn’t help. It cancels out because the suspension must be equally stiffer to carry the added weight. There’s a correlation, which is more because bigger cars are more expensive, which have better suspensions and stiffer bodies.
4 - Unsprung mass helps and hurts comfort. It filters out high frequency vibration, forcing the tyre to flex more, but the mass bounces higher up from bigger bumps, hitting the suspension harder.
- accelerating and braking between each bump causes engine and tyre noise, and tyre and brake dust, which are toxic.
could you elaborate on the cancelling out more? I’m not a suspension guy, but I am mech eng, and I am interested in knowing more about where specifically to look into that topic.
I didn’t think that simply having stiffer suspension would result in that being cancelled out. mitigated, sure, but not cancelled
Thought experiment: weld two cars together side by side - double weight, double suspension stiffness carrying the weight. Why would there be any difference in vibration when they drive together over a double-wide speed bump?
It’s the same as with dropping objects of different weights (in vacuum) - the feather falls as fast the hammer, because weight and inertia cancel each other out.
hmm, I guess if you assume each side of the axle is acting together as one paired unit, that works.
I’m just trying to reconcile this with my experience of “heavier vehicle feels better over bumps” regardless of age of vehicle, or even across multiple conditions for the same vehicle. for example, old van vs newer sedan. or if I’m loaded up with a bunch of bags of soil over my rear axle (stuff that stays in place and doesn’t bounce around), as long as I’m not bottoming out the travel, it just feels smoother going over the bump, like the reaction of the wheels going up is dampened by the additional sprung mass.
I will admit that suspension design, like electrical stuff, is basically sorcery to me. not my kind of thing at all. also I could absolutely be misremembering scenarios.
Loading up weight does make the ride smoother because suspension stiffness stays the same, unlike when a heavier car is designed.
The newer sedan was likely designed to tolerate spirited driving. When designing a car, they’re aiming for an appropriate resonant frequency for body up-down bounce, under 1 Hz for good comfort, more for sportier ride. Featherweight Citroën 2CV gives a very soft ride.
-
I’ve had suv drivers brag to me about that as a feature they like
that’s not even a tall or sharp bump. that’s very gentle in slope and not tall
Here’s an article about it from Yahoo News:
Labour council installs ‘socialist speed bumps’
Sat, January 10, 2026 at 10:00 AM GMT
Credit: The Telegraph
A Labour council has been accused of building “socialist speed bumps” that scrape high-performance and luxury family cars.
Residents on an affluent street in Lewisham, south-east London, say the local authority has installed sleeping policemen that are prone to damaging the undercarriages of expensive private vehicles.
Motorists in Blackheath have even produced their own engineering report, which claims that 12 out of a sample of 15 new speed bumps breach Lewisham council’s recommended height limit. The council, however, insists they all meet national guidelines.
The local authority installed the speed bumps a few months ago in an attempt to stop drivers exceeding 20mph speed limits imposed on Lee Terrace and Belmont Hill.
The council has received numerous complaints that they are too high and the undercarriages of a variety of cars are being grazed.
The residents’ report claims the council’s “own standards” dictate that a speed bumpshould not be any higher than 80mm. But five of the 12 cushions they measured appeared to be between 100mm and 105mm high.
Andrew Thorp, a 59-year-old architect who lives on the terrace, carried out the survey after his Mercedes C-Class estate repeatedly scraped the bumps, despite being driven very slowly.
Credit: The Telegraph
“We are paying for the bumps with our council tax, and then paying for the damage to our cars,” he said, insisting he and other residents supported moves to prevent speeding, but felt these bumps were too high.
“Lewisham has spent a lot of time on diversity and inclusion policies, but such policies do not apply to travel – roads are for everyone.
“Trains sometimes have the wrong leaves. But we, according to Lewisham highways department, have the wrong cars. The council is quite literally making mountains out of molehills.”
The council has been sent video clips of vehicles scraping the bumps, while other motorists are being forced to swerve around them.
One Labour councillor responded to complaints about the designs by insisting her old VW Golf experienced no problems when driving over the concrete mounds.
“It’s as if they are socialist speed bumps,” Mr Thorp added, explaining how certain vehicles like Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Tesla, Toyota Aygo and Volkswagen Mini were most likely to grind on the cushions.
“We are in favour of the 20mph speed limit and we are not against speed bumps. But, we think the council has not installed these speed bumps to their own standards,” he said.
Steve Emmott, 67, who also lives on Lee Terrace and struggles to drive his Ferrari over the humps, said: “I have to almost stop entirely before I reach them, coming down to 3-5mph. If I try to straddle them, I will take the underside of my car out.
“We are all pedestrians, cyclists and motorists – so we support the use of speed bumps. But, it’s the size of the things that is the problem.”
Residents claim they are being used as “crash test dummies” by council engineers and contractors building the infrastructure.
Andrew Holmes, an 82-year-old retired civil engineer living on Lee Terrace, said lorries and trucks carrying skips can “shake the house” when they hit the bumps.
“It doesn’t seem to matter how slow the vehicles go. There’s a shudder which can shake the house. Skip lorries are the worst. Trucks also make a huge noise when they drive over them,” he said.
Lewisham Cyclists, part of the London Cycling Campaign, has also expressed opposition to them, claiming “oncoming vehicles swerving round cushions directly towards cyclists or vehicles from behind cutting in front of cyclists to straddle the cushion” can “jeopardise” the safety of those on bikes.
Andrew Thorp carried out the survey after his Mercedes C-Class estate repeatedly scraped the bumps - David Rose
A Lewisham Council spokesman said: “We introduced speed cushions to help drivers stick to the borough’s 20mph limit and make roads safer for everyone, as previous surveys showed average speeds were still significantly over the limit, despite clear signage.
“The cushions we’ve installed follow national guidelines, which allow heights of up to 100mm, and meet Department for Transport standards.
“Earlier this year, we identified three around Belmont Hill and Lee Terrace that needed adjustments and these have now been fixed at the contractor’s expense. All cushions are now within permitted sizes and can be crossed safely by all vehicles at 15–20mph, however driving faster may cause scraping.
“The design allows buses to straddle the cushions, so services are unaffected. With a school near Belmont Hill and a hospital on Lee Terrace, speed control in this area is essential.
“We are monitoring these roads to determine whether there’s an issue with noise caused by the bumps and will take action if the impact is significant. We’ll continue to listen to residents but our priority remains safer roads for all road users.”
Comrade speedbump keeping up the good fight against the bourgeoisie.
Kids these days are all into nazi guns and commie bikes
Those are some reactionary words, which means they have no value
This news is glorious. Let’s please have more of this.
Joy, and no apologies, that these forms of protection for humanity are harmful to douchebag-owned vehicles.
