Edit: And as I said in the my other comment, if you want people to go slow you need road features that will make them want to go slow on their own. Speed bumps are far more of an insulting road feature than bushes or something to make the road feel narrow because they basically say "this road is capable of X but we're going to make you go Y and you can't do anything about it" which is why people are complaining. If you want people to go slow toss in a raised median and raised curbs to make the road feel narrow.
When I was very young and very dumb, I did ~45 over a railroad track with a raised crossing. I landed OK, but it was a pretty scary experience.
Edit: some people seem to think that I'm against speed bumps to protect pedestrians because of my experience. I'm not really, I was just explaining my experience from when I was an idiot in how these bumps take speed. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
If the driver dies, I put it to you that it was only a matter of time, whether there was a raised crossing in this place or not. This sort of careless driving is vanishingly rarely a one-off, and almost always an example of a pattern of behaviour. Let us hope that they didn't take anybody else with them.
Let me stop you right there. What's generally accepted in the US--not sure about other countries--is to keep your speed less than 10 over the speed limit. This is commonly cited by new and old drivers, driving teachers, and traffic enforcement police. If cars are bottoming out when going over the bump at the speed limit, the road is built wrong.
In Australia you can be fined, heavily, for exceeding the limit by any margin. e.g. Limit was 100kph you were clocked at 102.
If you're driving so much over the limit that you're damaging your car on a properly built speed bump you're going too fast. In the UK you'd run the risk of getting hit with "Driving without due care and attention".
Still, system being what it is, this speed bump makes no sense in the US.
What alternative would you suggest?
As a parent of kids who cross the street to get to school, in my fantasy world, speed limits in school zones are enforced by impounding the offenders' cars.
Roads that are not straight, wide and well marked cause drivers to slow down naturally. Bushes trees and other landscaping can be used to make the road seem narrow which also makes people slow down. Having a good S-curve before the slow area works well too and many rural towns do this.
For a school zone you should probably stick a traffic light at the school entrance since that will allow you to create a traffic clusterfuck in order to slow traffic for the hours when you want it slow and not reduce the capacity of the road the rest of the time. Turning it into a 4-way stop would probably work well since people approach those slowly since they have to stop anyway.
If the aim is to lower to speed to 35mph, speed cameras?
In my fantasy world school drop off points would be 10 minutes walk from the school. But impounding sounds good too :)
Yeah. I'd wager that they will not be pleased when they catch some teenager catching air in his shitbox at 34.9mph.
... yes, that’s the point.
What if they put speed bumps on the motorway/freeway, to slow everyone down for roadworks?
FTA "and was built to slow cars to 35 miles per hour"
Yes use speed bumps to slow people to 20mph, not 35mph.
Obviously hitting a speed bump at 35mph would be a very bad experience, but that's a different device than what's represented in the article.
Also why does a text based website require a loading animation???