Bet you think I’m going to talk about Europe from that headline. Far from it, I’m actually irate about speed humps. The Ken Clarke reference is due to the fact that he admitted he was responsible for introducing them into Britain. Anyway, this all stems from a very unpleasant bill I had to pay to get my old banger through its MOT last week. It was due to the fact that the hooter wasn’t working because the wiring had been crushed by a collision with a speed hump. Thinking back, I remember the hump in question. It appeared without warning on a road which didn’t have it the previous week, I took it at 25mph in the dark and the result was thus.
 
This has bought home to me just how much I hate these things. They appear without warning in areas where you would struggle to work up a decent speed, and proceed to knacker up your suspension due to how oversized they are. I also had a very unpleasant experience when I was rushed to hospital in an ambulance 3 years ago and the vehicle that had been ravaged by speed humps and I felt every single slight bump in the journey. Not what you want when you’ve got peritonitis.
 
Apart from my personal gripe with them, there are other reasons they need to go. I’ve already mentioned emergency vehicle damage and hold ups. These things could well be costing lives. There is the extra carbon emitted by the stop start nature of these things. There’s the noise pollution they produce especially with lorries going over them.

A sensible approach would be to dig these up and install either hazard signs showing your speed and urging you to slow down or installing chicanes. This would slow traffic down without damaging cars and emergency vehicles. As we haven’t come out with a transport policy or statement for months, then the halting of the installation of speed humps in favour of other solutions must surely be a popular and worthwhile policy direction.