SPEED HUMPS HAVE TO MATCH SPEED LIMIT OF AREA

Sir,

I would like to make a few observations on speed humps: 1) Installing speed humps is treating the symptom not the cause. 2) The few reckless drivers are getting everyone punished.  3) Everyone seems to want a speed hump outside their own gate but never consider the commuter who is not stopping there. 4) What about emergency services?

An ambulance trying to get to hospital quickly but now bumping over every speed hump jarring the injured patient! Police trying to get to a crime scene? 5) The humps must match the speed limit of the area. They must be so designed that they do not choke traffic.

The Manzini - Nhlangano road is a classic example of every hump being a different profile and thus traffic comes to a halt at every hump, causing congestion and frustrations and subsequent bad driving after the humps. 6) Outside Carson Motors, Moneni the humps are so big the traffic crawls.

Why are there no traffic lights at this intersection instead of humps? 7) Personally, my fuel consumption goes up by 12 per cent when compared with driving in South Africa, I attribute this to humps and the subsequent stop start driving. 8) I challenge the road traffic engineers to study what impact speed humps have on the maintenance of vehicles, especially trucks.

Brakes, suspension, transmission and pollution as, instead of maintaining a regular speed, there is constant acceleration and deceleration which is inefficient and fuel does not burn properly, increasing pollution. We import all our spares and fuel so this increases costs to our country. These extra transport costs are passed on to the consumer.

I challenge the police to patrol and monitor traffic and pull over dangerous drivers. The officer could then go through the whole vehicle ticketing for; triangles, hand brake, tyres, lights etc. wasting around 20 minutes of the offender’s time and thereby slowing him/her down, and allowing the safe drivers to be on their way, while pointing out that the only reason he is being delayed is due to his driving attitude.

I travelled 2 000km on Malawi’s roads a few years back, which are very narrow (no tar shoulders) and the population density is much greater than here and yet there was not a single hump on the roads.  People just drove cautiously and slowed down where necessary.
By the way, travelling at 30km/hr in 80 or 120 zones is not fuel efficient and can lead to more accidents. The safest roads are where all the traffic moves at a similar speed.

For pedestrians can we not build a pedestrian tar track away from the main road that carries non-motorized traffic? When building new roads I would love to see this being applied. The tracks do not need huge expenses as the traffic is light.

William Stein

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