SU7205 : Speed bumps in Wade Court Road
taken 16 years ago, near to Langstone, Hampshire, England
Known in the UK as a 'sleeping policeman' and by my Antipodean friends as a judder bar, the speed bump dates back to 1906. In that year The New York Times reported on an early implementation of raised bumps in Chatham, New Jersey. These were needed despite the relatively low speed a car could attain at that time because braking was poor by modern standards.
The next major contribution came from the Nobel Prize winning physicist Arthur Holly Compton He invented what he called the "traffic control bump" in 1953 as a response to motorists speeding through the campus of Washington University in St. Louis where he was Chancellor.
The first speed bump in Europe was built in 1970 in Delft, Netherlands. Three years later, the British Transport and Road Research Laboratory published an examination of vehicle behaviour for a large variety of different bump geometries. By 1999, The Highways Road Humps Regulations Act had set their maximum height at 10cm.