If it sometimes seems more comfortable to accelerate gently into a speed bump than to grind over it at 1MPH, you wouldn’t be alone. Jae-yun Kim & Jong-Su Lee invented a collapsible speed bump that flattens automatically for slow drivers, taking the rough out of responsible driving.
“Encouraging drivers to retain a constant slow speed will reduce the amount of stops and starts made…” they told Chris Burns of Yanko Design. “It is hoped that this retractable speed hump would therefore have positive effects on energy consumption and pollution.”
I have had an idea like this for years, only in reverse, and sudden, as in like you speed and suddenly you find yourself launched into the air…
Yeah, this is the responsible way to do it.
I am totally psyched that it has LED on it! the things they can do with technology these days, Huh?
The more we has blinky lights, the more we gots FUTURE!!!
One could place electric generators in it and create energy from safety. Of course still not as much as the car was using but might as well harvest as much as possible from the slow down.
I think this idea is much better personally… cheaper and tastier too…
http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Custard-Filled_20Speed_20Bumps#985712400
The problem with the device in the article is that it doesn’t contain instructions for use. How does the driver know that it’s been engineered to be more pleasant if approached at a low speed? All it says on the bump is “speed bump”. Not much of a clue. Perhaps it comes with a sign that describes its operation that you can only read if you’re doing 1MPH?
I find that real asphalt speed bumps are a lot less bumpy if I aim one wheel at the smooth road to the right side of the speed bump. Only rarely are speed bumps in my town stretched to the edges of the street. The car’s suspension allows the single-wheel bump to be taken at about twice the MPH of a both-wheel bump.
Maybe we should just not put the stupid bumps on the street in the first place, and trust people to drive the appropriate speed?
But if we must have them, this is a good idea to stop all the junk from flying out the back of your truck.
Where does it say this would be plastic? I would assume it would be steel – just like the joints in bridges that last for ages. As to “how often replaced on a busy road” – there should not be any speed bumps on a busy road!
The durability of such device is of great importance. I wonder how many times one of these need to be replaced each day, in a fairly busy road.
Rectifier, I think these would mostly be in parking lots, and believe me, you can’t trust people to go a reasonable speed in parking lots. Most do, yes, but a few will go 30-50mph without hesitation. There’s a parking lot near me that’s used as a cut-through to avoid the light at a busy intersection, and people have totaled cars in the lot and caused injury accidents. You can’t total a car going a reasonable parking lot speed.
El Mariachi, they’re saying positive compared to a regular speed bump which requires you to brake, speed up, then brake as soon as you get to the next one. Rinse and repeat. This one would allow you to hold a steady 5-10mph crawl through a parking lot without much discomfort.
You know what’s bad for the environment? Stopping and starting your car.
You know what’s WORSE for the environment? Paving a segment of trees to put up a factory. Building a smoke-belching, waste-producing, energy-using factory that spits out petroleum-based plastic speedbumps that last a year or so, then need to be replaced. And when they get replaced, the old ones go to a different building where people rip them apart and take out the recyclable bits and put the rest in a landfill.
Maybe instead of complicated plastic pollutionbabies, we should just use the same asphalt the street is made of.
This would be better than normal speed bumps if it lets emergency vehicles over faster. That’s one of the chief complaints about speedbumps-that they slow down firetrucks and police cars.
Braking turns inertia into friction into waste heat, and therefore doesn’t have “positive effects on energy consumption” unless by “positive effects on” you mean “an increase in.” Speed bumps just make it harder to tell when you’ve actually run over someone.