Speed Humps

Speed humps are raised sections built across a traffic surface to make drivers slow down. They turn up on residential streets, outside schools, in retail and hospital car parks, along apartment and body-corporate access lanes, through industrial yards where trucks and people share the ground, and on private roads and long driveways that visitors treat as open road. Most people reading about them are not traffic engineers. They are a property manager fielding complaints about speeding through a car park, a board member at a school, or a resident wondering who they have to ask. The answer to that last question depends entirely on who owns the surface, which is where this guide starts.

Humps, bumps and cushions

The words get used interchangeably and they describe different things.

A speed hump is long and rounded, so a vehicle rides up and over it. That length is the point: it slows traffic without throwing the car, and humps are typically designed to bring vehicles down to somewhere around 25 to 40 km/h depending on the profile chosen.

A speed bump is short and abrupt. It is the kind found in car parks and private lanes, and it forces near walking pace because there is no comfortable way to cross it at speed. Useful where you genuinely want vehicles crawling, uncomfortable anywhere else.

Speed cushions are humps built in sections with gaps between them, so a wide-axle vehicle such as a bus or a fire appliance can straddle them while a car cannot.

Ordering a bump where the situation called for a hump produces exactly the complaints the installation was meant to end.

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Where humps belong, and where they do not

Humps work where the traffic is local, the speeds are low to start with, and there are people on foot. Car parks, service lanes, school grounds, apartment basements and industrial yards are all natural fits.

They are a poor answer on a steep grade, immediately after a blind corner, across a driveway entrance, or on an emergency access route. On a long straight where drivers accelerate hard between obstacles, a single hump often just relocates the problem. Sometimes the better control is a narrowing, a raised crossing, marked walkways or a bollard line.

Who decides

This is the part people get wrong most often, and it is simple once separated into two cases.

On a public road, including the street outside your property, the decision belongs to the road controlling authority. In Canterbury that is your local council, and for a state highway it is the transport agency. Humps on public roads go through the authority’s own traffic calming process, with design standards, consultation with affected residents, and a decision made on crash and speed data. You can request one. You cannot install one, and neither can we.

On land you own or manage, the decision is yours. A private car park, a yard, a body-corporate lane or a private road is your surface to control, subject to any consent conditions, body-corporate rules or easement rights over the access. That is the work we do.

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Same crews, same towns

Speed control often gets looked at alongside the entrance itself. Security gate work, town by town:

• Security Gates Amberley
• Security Gates Ashburton
• Security Gates Christchurch
• Security Gates Darfield
• Security Gates Kaiapoi
• Security Gates Methven
• Security Gates Rangiora
• Security Gates Rolleston

Get the right control chosen first

A hump is not always the answer, and installing one where the real problem is sight lines, layout or pedestrian routes just adds noise and maintenance to a site that still has the original issue. If the speeding is happening on the street rather than on your land, the request goes to your council, and no supplier can shortcut that. Where the ground is yours, the useful first step is having someone look at how vehicles actually move through it.

Phone us on 027 424 0600 or email info@groupone.co.nz, 7am to 3pm Monday to Friday. Group One New Zealand, Unit 1, 37 Foremans Road, Islington, Christchurch 8042. NZBN 9429053752833.

Call 027 424 0600 to Request a Free Quote