Amr El Beleidy

How stupid are speed bumps?

I heard they scored 3 on an IQ test, but the real question is how stupid are the people who lay down these speed bumps? So in the UK they tend to be used for areas requireing super high safety, like by schools, because you never know when this kid will jum out of no where. And then when there are loads of kids you have a lolipop (wo)man there as well. Fine! But then they went on and started throwing them everywhere in residential areas, what’s the bloody point? But wait a second, why am I complaining about the UK, here is the Egyptian speedbump strategy.

Speedbumps in Egypt might have the same name but they are definitely a different creature. Their method of construction is quite interesting. First you blindfold the workers, give them buckets of concrete and say GO! The result is usually a non-uniform bump in the road, that is a spike in the road, so you have to be really slow if you care about the underbelly of your car. Now where they apply them is also very interesting. They method is similar to the construction method, you give the council worker a blindfold, a map and some darts, and then you say GO! Wherever the darts land is where the bumps are put.

So I was driving on the circular, the M25′s Egyptian counterpart, it was night and the moon was shining, but apparently that was not enough light for me to see the massive speedbump… A speedbump on the highway! At 80 Km/h my car did a double back-flip summersault before landing on the silky smooth asphalt again, that is illegal subsidy for local car industry, where is the UN?

So yes Cairo traffic is notorious, and it doesn’t help that all our main roads have speedbumps in them. Speedbumps make you decelerate then re-accelerate effectively going through the most polluting driving cycle. Not to mention that when you slow down traffic, cars are operating at lower efficiency for longer times. I wonder what the economic cost of wasting all these people’s time is.

Sometimes I feel like the government knows what it’s doing though, I have a sneaky feeling that this whole messing up the traffic and increasing pollution in Cairo is part of the strategy to get Cairenes to move out elsewhere. After the population has been more spread out (25% of Egyptians live in Cairo, and 100% live on 4% of the country’s land) I am sure the government will adopt more sensible solutions. After all, big brother always knows best.