The Road Hump Campaign

Often, a politician will choose to implement a potentially divisive scheme with the best intention, believing it will improve quality of life and save lives. Once a politician has bought into road humps, they will generally stay as protagonists of road humps. Who likes admitting they are wrong?

Consequently, we see councils spending our money to provide free brochures selling a scheme, including sometimes loaded questions asking if you support their idea. Councils call these consultation exercises, and use the results to justify deploying a scheme.

Of course, if your council has provided a consulation which includes lots of information, pictures etc, and the questions are either long, complex or loaded, then you should be suspicious- Are they are really consulting, or using your money to push their political opinion on you?

Roadhumpcampaign.org is a non-profit public effort to raise awareness of road hump issues, encourage democracy and to provide a public discussion and information centre for safe street technologies, slow-zone engineering and to determine the costs and benefits of different approaches. I will try to redress the balance by including information often missing from these 'consultations'.

If you don't want road humps, then please tick NO to question 2

For info about a printable consultation form, visit our scheme in Bellingham page. The consultation form. Please visit the Catford and Bellingham discussion forums

You may well know of the oft-cited claim from 2002 that 500 people a year die in London as a result of road humps. This claim is based on the idea that road humps slow down ambulances, and prevent proper treatment in the back of ambulances. This is very easy to imagine, but could the deaths really be on this scale? Nobody knows. Should we be laying road humps without such knowledge? I think not!

How does a claim of 500 deaths a year in 2002 stack up against the potential benefits of road humps, after all, if road humps save so many lives, surely if 500 people could be a drop in the ocean? Well, it appears not. in 2002, we had 30,000 road humps in London. 500 deaths across 30,000 humps works out at one death for every 60 humps every year. The recently-deployed Catford South scheme has 371 humps. Everything else being equal, this could result in 6.18 deaths per year amongst the scheme population of around 20,000. That is actually feasible. If each person has only one time-critical ambulance call in their lifetime, the Catford South and Whitefoot North population would need 285 time-critical ambulance call-outs per year. If the death rate from time-critical call-outs is increased by 2.5% as a result of humps, we have our 6 fatalities per year. So, in order to break even in terms of lives saved, the Catford South road hump scheme has to save 7 or more lives a year. We need to know, how many people die on the roads of Catford South every year, and estimate the number of lives saved.

All these statistics are available from the London accident unit. I have figures for the last 10 years. (If you would like to verify the figures, the Catford South and Whitefoot North scheme covers nearly all roads bordered by Bromley Rd, Brownhill Rd, Verdant Lane and Whitefoot Lane). The figures show two road fatalities in the last 10 years for the area. One girl, one boy. one 14 & the other 13 years old. One was run over by a bus on Sandhurst Road, the other by a car bypassing humps on Bellingham road, on Daneby Road. It is possible humps could have saved one of these fatalities, but at the same time, were a contributory factor. Let's give humps the benefit of the doubt and assume that in Catford South, they will reduce the level of road fatalities in Catford south by one every ten years. So we have humps causing 61 fatalities every 10 years, and saving one fatality every 10 years. That is a nett death toll of 60 people dying every 10 years because of road humps in Catford South alone.

A properly comissioned and executed study into the actual number of deaths caused by road humps is long overdue. Why haven't we had one?

According to these figures, there have been 15 deaths caused by road humps in Catford South and Whitefoot North since 10 Jan 06. The counter will be updated on Tue 9 Sep