Agreed; at a place called Tockholes near Darwen a massive amount of money was spent installing the full panoply of traffic calming devices and it's almost a three-mile linear museum of devices to slow down racing cars and motorbikes, but within weeks half the residents were campaigning to have them removed. What's worse is that the changes in surface and the joints allow water to penetrate and Tockholes being high in altitude, frost has done massive damage and after 15 or so years the road is a terrible mess; in fact now it's the unintended potholes that slow the traffic. The modern table top is installed much more carefully and sealed around the edges. It can be straddled so that you don't even feel it so I reckon the effect is more psychological than anything. In our street, LCC rebuilt an old stone bridge and reinstated the roadway with a one-way working system. That alone dissuaded drivers from cutting through and there was a 24% reduction in traffic. It's a simple question of where drivers think they are less likely to be delayed so that if you offer them a choice between the main A road with one set of lights and a straight B road, which bypasses the lights, they will of course take the B option. Now that we've got a 20 mph limit and the table tops I'm hoping we might get another 25% reduction and fewer souped-up Audis and BMWs racing through with their over-tuned engines popping on the overrun. It also requires residents to park strategically so that short-cutters are forced to drive over the humps and can't straddle them.
There's certainly a bit more to making drivers slow than humps.
A few roads around Seven Dials in Covent Garden, central London, were levelled, as in the road surface and the two pavements were made all on one level.
Spaced wooden posts were used to mark the boundary, rather than continuous railings.
This had the effect of making drivers slow, even though the speed limit at the time remained 30mph.
I drove there before and after.
The after gave me the impression of driving in a pedestrian precinct, rather than on a clearly defined road.
No doubt I went more slowly, which also had the effect of making the cars behind me go at the same speed even if their drivers wanted to go faster.
