Speed bumps suck. They're put there to intentionally increase wear and tear to cars and have minimal impact on traffic speeds. It's only accelerated the arms race to buy bigger and taller vehicles so that you can plow over speed bumps ever faster.

There was a neighborhood where I grew up that had speed bumps in a neighborhood that were smoothest if you hit them at about 40mph. That did nothing but INCREASE traffic speeds (myself included).

We've got speed bumps in our neighborhood. They suck, and people just speed over them anyway.

Ditto using stop signs as traffic calming measures. YAY, let's increase air pollution (fuel burnt), increase noise pollution (accelerating and braking vehicles), increase water pollution (brake dust and other byproducts) and waste everyone's goddamned time by making every single car come to a stop (regardless of cross traffic or pedestrians) just so that some NIMBY can think SOMETHING WAS DONE.

I once heard from a traffic engineer that certain speed bumps are made to be gone over at 20+ Mph faster than suggested so that ambulances and emergency personnel can travel over them with little to no trouble.

I've noticed this myself in certain areas, the speed bumps taken at higher speeds cause less issues, but it still of course increases wear and tear on motor vehicles, in most cases unnecessarily so.

A speed bump was put in on a hillside residential street near where I grew up, coincidentally right near the house of a councillor.

It was taken out a few months later because of noise complaints. Turns out the locals preferred the people going a bit too fast to the people downshifting, breaking, clanging over the speed bump and then accelerating away.

Speed bumps usually kill more people by slowing down ambulances than they save by reducing vehicle speeds.

The best way to keep a street quiet is to remove the cues that tell drivers that they can drive quickly. Narrow the street, remove the sidewalks, add trees and other visual noise to the margins, and remove lane markings. Replacing asphalt with gravel can also help (and is cheaper to maintain).

You don't need to fine people to get them to slow down if the road is terrifying to drive on at more than 20 MPH.

> Speed bumps usually kill more people by slowing down ambulances than they save by reducing vehicle speeds.

I don't think you're going to find research to support that. At least, I couldn't. http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6419/do-speed-bu... has some interesting discussion of it.

I'm a big fan of the other advice, though, about changing the road design to discourage speeding.

Thanks for the link - apparently I need to flag "things I vaguely remember being as facts I read at some point" as "possibly an urban legend".