Bumpy Road Bill

(originally published March 17, 2008 in The Point Weekly)
by Phillip Moyer

Student Congress unanimously passed a bill to petition Public Safety and the Physical Plant to modify the speed bumps on the north side of campus to comply with city standards on Feb. 25. The current speed bumps are as much as two feet narrower and one inch higher than standard city speed bumps.
The bill, dubbed the “Bumpy Road Bill” by its author and presenter, SC member David Livingston, mentioned that the bottoms of students’ vehicles have been known to scrape the speed bumps while passing over them, which could potentially damage students’ cars. Livingston said he has personally had to spend $500 on repairs as a result of his unmodified 1992 Honda Accord scraping the speed bumps. This figure does not include the cost of fixing his cracked radiator, another damage that he attributes to the speed bumps, which he has not yet had repaired.
SC members also raised a concern about the danger of the high speed bumps. The damage the speed bumps cause to cars, members said, could potentially cause accidents that may lead to serious injuries. In addition, the current speed bumps may be in violation of California fire code, which states, “Roadway design features (speed bumps, speed humps, speed control dips, etc.) which may interfere with emergency apparatus responses shall not be installed on fire access roadways, unless they meet design criteria approved by the Chief to accomplish the purposes of this Code.”
Livingston said he is pleased with the results of the meeting and thinks that the unanimous vote will call attention to the need for lowering the speed bumps.
“With unanimous support, it’s hard for the administration to not see our concern,” Livingston said. “Out of a select elected few that are supposed to represent the student body, every single one of them agreed to this, so hopefully the administration will adhere to the bill and we can actually improve campus life.”
Livingston said he now plans on meeting with Archie Yates, the director of Public Safety and Richard Schult, the director of Physical Plant to try to convince them to lower the speed bumps.
Schult said he had not yet heard of the complaints about the speed bumps, or of any plans to adjust their size, but he acknowledged that the largest speed bump, the one located on the hill east of Nease Hall, as being an inconvenience.
“That [bump] is a tough one even for my trucks to get over,” Schult said. “They just have to go real slow.”
According to Schult, if the administration agrees to lower the speed bumps, the school would hire an outside contractor, such as RCK Paving or Atlas Asphalt, to grind the speed bumps down, possibly removing them completely and rebuilding them.
The work, Schult estimated, would cost less than $1000 per bump, adding that “you might be able to do three or four bumps for a little over $2000.”
Schult said that each speed bump would take about one day to alter.
Yates did not respond to requests for comment.
During the Feb. 25 meeting, members of SC discussed whether the administration would be willing to pay for the work and touched on the subject of whether congress members would be willing to raise funds to pay for the altering. Nothing concrete was decided, but some complained that the students should not have to pay to “fix the school’s mistakes,” while others countered that “it wouldn’t be horrible to pay for it ourselves.”