It would take three years to install a speed bump. So I bought my own | Hacker News Reader

It would take three years to install a speed bump. So I bought my own

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58 pointssebg45 comments

The author made two mistakes:

1. Disclosing the existence of the speed bump they installed. 2. Disclosing that they installed the speed bump.

If they had "forgotten" to do at least the first of these things, in all likelihood the speed bump would still be there.

Sometimes the right thing to do is to break the rules.

Speed bumps do have downsides: More breaking-related fine dust, more vibrations and noise for houses around them.

It doesn't mean they shouldn't be placed, it means they should be considerately placed. Not just by "some dude, somewhere".

Sure, but the proven alternative here are a lot of instances of personal injury and property destruction, it's a pretty straightforward case.

The upside of adding "traffic calming" features needs to be weighed against the downside. If you only consider the upside of reduced accidents, then we'd have speed bumps and stop signs every 100 meters on every road.

>I did get the SFMTA’s attention, they let me know a month later that my application was approved.

Does this "approval" mean that at some point in the future, the relevant authority will look into things? Or that some traffic calming measure was approved, now the waiting for implementation is underway?

On residential streets where you want slow traffic yes. When you have a wide straight road people go fast on it. To prevent that you narrow the road, install curves and bumps. These require to the driver to slow down and be careful, which means they also notice when there are children nearby playing and don't run them over.

In my early 20s I loved the traffic calming curves, it was a really fun challenge to go just as fast as you possibly could through them

Your license should have been taken away, until you'd learn, preferably before you'd kill a child.

Sure, but they didn't, and I didn't harm anyone.

The actual point, is that not every action has the intended consequences. In this case, traffic calming curves do the opposite for a non-zero percentage of people.

The way I read the article, the author removed the speed bump of their own accord.

Accelerate decelaration. Break the rules to restore order.

Especially since the only camera facing the street is the author's own! The city would have to ask the author if his camera happened to pick up the "culprit" responsible for the rogue speed bump

That's a bad idea - the speed bump can be semi-invisible in bad weather, and you'll have cars hitting it at high speed, going airborne and crashing.

There's a reason they have large warning signs before a speed bump.

There is also the implication that speed is the issue - but the linked video shows a car crash with slow cars, so they problem may lie elsewhere (visibility probably).

I was thinking the same!

Especially when he says "I wish this story had a happy ending. Spoiler: it doesn’t.

I couldn’t keep the Amazon Bump out there; there were some serious liability issues. I did get the SFMTA’s attention, they let me know a month later that my application was approved. That was 35 months ago and we still don’t have a bump."

There's actually even a name for such actions: tactical urbanism.

It reminds me of the old story about the guy who had been calling the county to fill a pothole for months and finally as soon as he started filling it himself and let the county know, the crews came out to fix.

Or there's stories in Atlanta of steel plates being laid for months to years (a common scourge in Atlanta) and then magically they get fixed and removed once someone spray-paints dicks on them.

This story kind of reminds me of the time when an artist in L.A. covertly installed a helpful, but counterfeit I-5 sign, because there was no clear official signage labeling access to I-5 North[1].

1: https://www.thedrive.com/news/how-an-artist-helped-millions-...

From the SFMTA FAQ:

  Why are applications required?

  Applications are required to identify locations where there are speeding concerns.

Applications seem like a very poor and slow way to identify locations when records of actual accidents, injuries and fatalities are available from police reports. Better to build where the most lives are saved, rather than where there are the most squeaky neighbors. But it's a well designed program for the purpose of shutting people up and deferring their concerns for many years.

Perhaps applications are required because there is no automated way of knowing where those "actual accidents, injuries and fatalities" occur. The "squeaky neighbors" are needed to help point out those locations so they can be examined more closely as there is only so much manpower/money to go around, even for a government agency.

It takes time to do the right thing. After all, do you do things of consequence without planning?

Based on the video, it looks like Vimeo's co-founder lives in the Mission district of SF. In my experience living hear for nearly a decade, the traffic norms around here are terrifying. I lived in the area years ago and the number of times cars would blow through stop signs in broad daylight around pedestrians stunned me.

I'd love to see more flow-control measures like speedbumps, etc. Walking around the area should be enjoyable - lots of trees & shops. The potential for erratic drivers causes me to avoid the place.

Other parts of the city are much safer (at least outside the main high-speed corridors). The Mission is full of stop signs and what you'd expect to be slow-speed traffic - reality is far different.

Tangentially related: I read somewhere that there is no pothole in the entire Disney World resort because Disney basically "owned" the district and has their own fire and public works department, and as a result they can fix potholes as soon as possible. (Correct me if I am wrong.) While generally I don't believe in "we should let private companies take care of infrastructure", that sometimes does seem very effective.

It's not going to be effective for much longer. DeSantis dissolved the governing entity - Reedy Creek Improvement District - and turned its replacement over to his appointed cronies.

EDITed for copy, correctness, and to add the better wiki link

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reedy_Creek_Improvement_Distri...

it’s only effective because disney has high paying customers and disney wants to please them. i have no idea why you think that would generalize to the general public.

why would a private company, put in charge by the government, not do the bare minimum to maintain their contract, and pocket the rest as profit? Disney isn’t maintaining their potholes out of the goodness of their hearts.

Where I live, much of the road maintenance for potholes is done by private companies.

The motivation to do a good job is that they also take on liability for damages caused by lack of maintenance that is either foreseeable, or non-foreseeable issues that had been reported to them in their area of responsibility. The government tracks pothole reports, and if you hit a road hazard that had already been reported with enough time to repair it, the company pays.

Its all about lining up the incentives properly. Plenty of government road maintenance departments are perfectly capable of not fixing things and wasting money without the profit motive nvolved.

Are potholes much of a problem when there aren't frequent freeze/thaw cycles or heavy trucks?

If a decorative black and orange plastic thing covered with construction adhesive on the flat side fell out of some sort of unmarked construction vehicle, the author could have reported it immediately. I am sure the city would take care of it in 3-4 years.

Not quite, an effective bureaucracy like the city of SF is undoubtedly extremely efficient at responding to things that subvert its authority and require no effort to fix, like removing a rogue speed bump.

You are correct - the hypothetical reporting individual would need to wait 24 hours before noticing the speed bump thereby allowing the adhesive to cure sufficiently.

That's what I was thinking, the liability of slapping it on the road at midnight and never mentioning it again isn't much

San Francisco is broken. Utterly catastrophically broken. I lived there for a decade and at first enjoyed many of the ways it is broken. It’s virtually impossible to get a moving violation in the city unless you’re doing something egregiously un-neighborly. But after a couple crap experiences with insidious corruption in the planning and taxation offices I left in disgust. I’ll never go back and I would certainly never again operate a business in the city.

Tbf, there are similar stories out of other California cities, and even other places.

But fair it not, California seems to set the standard for how not to govern

America has become a nation of people who cannot get anything done.

I think this is the end result of a system that has no external threats - once people get power, they use that power to cling to the power instead of using it externally to get things done.

>I couldn’t keep the Amazon Bump out there; there were some serious liability issues.

Just spit-balling here, but what types of liability would generally crop up from installing vigilante speed bumps?

I’m all for speed bumps but I could imagine issues with an Amazon speed jump being out of spec/poorly made resulting is durability issues that make the plastic break and create shards, being too slippery causing issues when bicycles ride over it. Stuff like that.

And litigious people are almost certainly more imaginative about these things than you and me.

The "a guy texting while driving is gonna rear end someone, sue him and actually win" type.

If a speed bump isn't clearly visible to drivers they might drive into it at speed and damage their cars or maybe themselves. I have a mildly low car (factory parts, just an inch lower than standard), and driving into a deep pothole at more than a crawl will bottom out the suspension. It sounds like an explosion as all the energy goes into the car's frame. If I drove into a too-tall speed bump at speed it'd probably shatter the tip of my bumper, too.

The city speed bumps here have signage and highly visible paint, and a shallow enough curve that I can drive over them at the intended speed.

There's something distinctly Kafkaesque about a bureaucracy that requires multiple years to install a $98 piece of plastic you can literally order from Amazon overnight. Ironically, what's trivially achievable even in places labeled "failed states"—say, Somalia or Afghanistan—is outright impossible under the watchful eye of Bay Area local government.

Imagine: the co-founder of Vimeo, a person presumably equipped with resources, connections, and media savvy, finds himself reduced to helplessly installing a CCTV camera to document crashes instead of preventing them. He’s left sending annual appeals to bureaucratic email addresses that no longer exist.

It might sound absurd, but in a scenario like this, you're genuinely better off with mafia management. At least the mafia would deliver your speed bump within 48 hours (fees negotiable), no paperwork required.

Jokes aside, the deeper problem here is that bureaucracy isn't just slow—it's optimized toward risk-aversion and self-preservation rather than actual outcomes. This inversion of incentives creates paralysis masquerading as accountability. Bureaucrats face career-ending risk from mistakenly installing a bump, but zero consequences from doing nothing.

If governance becomes indistinguishable from satire, don't be surprised when people start seriously discussing alternative power structures—even troubling ones—just because they get things done. Bureaucratic dysfunction at this extreme level isn't merely inefficient; it's a symptom of systemic rot.

In 2019 I toured the suburbs of Montevideo, Uruguay, with a group. We noticed that in a residential district, the street signs on the corner had Netflix logos on them. We concluded that these were somehow permitted by the local authority. Meanwhile, Uruguay in general seemed to be implementing high speed internet faster than, i.e. ahead of, our wealthy neighborhoods back home.

I can see it from the City's POV.

It's not just installing it - it's making sure the thing won't end up making the problem worse or causing other problems.

Or rather, it's like when you have a huge backlog of bugs, you are going to de-prioritize the ones that are minor and have workarounds. For the city, they have got too much to worry about than a "optional" speed bump. Not saying it is ok, but it kind of explains the delay.

I like considering _why_ the government is like that. I would suggest that the suspicion, disdain (evident in your comment) and outright hatred of government (particularly from sections of the political and capitalist classes, particularly in the US) are all large drivers of the extreme risk aversion and resulting inefficiency of government agencies that develops over time.

That is, there is nothing inherent about it beyond the inevitable inefficiency of all large organisations, the government was shaped to be like that by external pressures.

Viewed in that light, your favourable assessment of mafia rule is even more obviously a false alternative.

>Bureaucrats face career-ending risk from mistakenly installing a bump, but zero consequences from doing nothing.

I don't live in the area, so I'm out of the loop. Is there a publicly available list of SF municipal employees getting terminated from their jobs over the past, say 10 years? It seems like something that might already exist. Even if things like names were redacted for privacy reasons. It would also be great if that list had a reason for each termination, like "went to prison for embezzlement", or "overly aggressive with speed bump approvals".

Probably no one’s really getting fired but moved to a less fortunate, careers dead-end position.

Maybe "zero consequences from doing nothing" is all the explanation that is needed?

> you're genuinely better off with mafia management

When enough people want mafia management - they will get mafia management.

What I see is kafkaesque character assassination and psychological violence against government employees and institutions for profit reasons, with then the additional violence of blaming the victims. I tie you to a chair and then complain that you're not doing your job right.

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