I’ve lived in the house that we have now for close to 7 years and over that time I’ve gotten to know some of my neighbors. One of the topics that seems to always come up is how fast people drive on our street. Our road connects to a main road and is the only intersection with a light for several of the neighborhoods around me. So we get lots of traffic coming through our street to the main road. People tend to drive really fast up or down our street and as a dad it made me nervous letting the kids play out front unless I was watching them closely.
Getting speed bumps seemed like the only way to solve the problem of fast drivers. I thought it would be pretty simple to get them, ya know, just email our HOA and boom! Speed bumps.
I started asking my surrounding neighbors to get a feel for the support I might get in proposing this. One of them said he had tried a couple years ago but was told the HOA wouldn’t allow it because the fire department couldn’t get into our neighborhood if there were speed bumps. I took that for face value and didn’t do much with it for a year or two, but after a while I got fed up with the way people were driving in our neighborhood. I decided I would reach out to our homeowners association anyways. They told me they don’t own the streets and to reach out to the city.
I reached out to my city councilman and asked about getting speed bumps in our neighborhood. His secretary directed me to a process called the public improvement advisory council (PIAC) that takes improvement suggestions and approves them based on need, budget, etc. They recommended getting a petition signed from the neighbors and bringing it to the annual meeting in June. So I put together a little presentation showing our street and where we wanted to have speed bumps located. I brought the signed petition from over 15 of my neighbors and presented to the PIAC board. Everyone was really receptive and the councilman even said “yeah let’s do this! we need to get these going for your area”. They put me in touch with one of the city project managers, whom I shall call Steve. One of Steve’s jobs is to evaluate, price and layout speed bumps for the city. Oh boy, what I didn’t realize is, I was about to enter a 10 round boxing match with the heavyweight champion of bureaucratic red tape.
After that meeting, Steve came out to measure our neighborhood. I happened to be on paternity leave at the time so I bet up with him. We walked the full street and looked at various options. However, during the visit Steve told me that in order to get full speed bumps, there needed to be a 15 feet from either end of the speed bump to the next closest driveway. Since the bump itself is 15 feet wide, we needed 45 feet total between driveways. There didn’t seem to be any location in our neighborhood that met that requirement except 1 location, but that had a storm drain in the curb and he said that wouldn’t work. I asked to see if there was anything we could do or if Steve could get an exception for putting a speed bump closer to a driveway or next to a storm drain. He said he would check when he got back to the office. I was pretty disappointed after that visit because I felt like our neighborhood was a perfect candidate.
A couple of days later Steve emailed back and said there was no exception for the storm drain, but that they could install some “half” speed bumps. He said they installed some recently in a neighborhood nearby. I decided to go and check out that neighborhood and see what they actually looked like. Turns out it means they just put a speed bump in half of the road so only one of your tires hits it. I found it was really easy to just drive around those by driving up on the curb. That option just felt like a terrible solution to the problem, and frankly more dangerous. I did not want those in my neighborhood.
I told Steve I didn’t like that option for our street and asked him where these measurement requirements were coming from and why we couldn’t get an exception. He shared with me the city specification document and all the different dimensions required to put in the speed bumps. As I was reviewing it I realized there were several streets nearby that had full speed bumps, so I thought I would compare them to see if they all complied with this document. Turns out hardly any of the other streets followed the specification. I sent him back an email to point this out, thinking now he will agree with me! Psych! He responded with “those were grandfathered in before these speed bump regulations came out.”
So I sat on it for a while. One day I was riding my bike and rode through a neighborhood and realized they had speed bumps and they were just recently installed, like no more than a year ago! And they didn’t comply with the dang regulations! Bam! So I emailed Steve and told him about this. He said, I don’t know what you mean by this? So I told him, the speed bumps were next to a fire hydrant, less than 15′ away from the driveways, and less than 150′ from an intersection. He responded and said, “please note that the latest specs are adopted August 1, 2024”, so I asked him what the previous standard was prior to the new adoption? Crickets.
So I decided I would bypass Steve and go back to the PIAC meeting that was happening in August and ask them for a deviation from the specification (that doesn’t seem to be regularly enforced).
I brought my presentation back to the PIAC, and when I asked the councilmen for a deviation from the specification, he heartily agreed saying “I’m team full speed bumps!”. Great! Well I figured I didn’t need to stay for the rest of the meeting so I got up to leave and Steve was in the back. He must have missed the councilman’s comment because I told him the news and he said, “no, the councilman doesn’t know, you still can’t do this”. So I told him I would wait and we could talk with him afterwards. As soon as the meeting ended, Steve made a beeline for the councilman and began telling him that it wouldn’t work, but the councilman asked why, and he said the fire marshall needs to override the decision. What?? Where did this come? Regardless, the councilman said, ok great give him a call and tell him we are doing this (I think I will be voting for this councilman again in the future). Steve was not happy, but I was pumped!
Great, now I had the councilman’s approval and we would get speed bumps. I sent a follow up email reminding them of our discussion and the next day Steve responded and said, “after further discussion, we will need an additional signature from the property owners where the speed bumps will be installed”. I had already gotten most of the neighbors signatures on the original petition so I just went and got the couple of neighbors that hadn’t signed the original petition. However, when I sent it back, Steve said it had to be on this new waiver petition that absolved the city of any unforseen conditions by putting the speed bumps within 15 of a driveway. As if any of the neighbors knew anything about this requirement when they originally signed the petition… Well ok, if that’s what it takes, sure I’ll go get these signatures again.
This time I only needed to get 8 signatures since there would only be 2 speed bumps, with 4 houses around each one. I didn’t think it would be a problem to get my immediate neighbors to sign because I had already been talking with them about this for months. It was the second location set of neighbors that I didn’t know as well or at all. So I went up the road to the proposed location of the other speed bump. The last time I had walked the neighborhood for signatures only 2 of those houses had answered. 1 of them signed it no problem, but the other was really hesitant. And now I had to go get his signature again and tell him it would be right in front of his house. Well he wasn’t home, but I had his phone number from the last petition. So I texted him to see what he thought. Well turns out he put his wife’s phone number on there. Which I think turned out to be a good thing because she seemed to like the idea and told me when her husband would be home. When I went, he happily signed it! Haha so I think the wife must have changed his mind.
The other 2 neighbors happily signed, but they told me the fourth house would never answer the door. And sure enough, one time I was walking to their house just as the were pulling up and I waved and walked up to them. But they just drove their car right into the garage and closed it before getting out. Haha, turns out they were renter so I figured the city wouldn’t need that signature.
So I had the signatures for the speed bump up the road and now just needed the ones for the bump in front of my house. I got my neighbors pretty easily, but when I went to one of them who signed the original petition, she suddenly had cold feet! I was devastated! What had changed her mind?? I decided to sit on it for a few weeks and then one day we were both outside so I asked her about it. She mentioned a few of her concerns and I asked her if she would sign it if the speed bump was on the far side of her property where she wouldn’t have to pass it coming in and out of her driveway. She said yes, so I asked Steve from the City if that was a problem and he said no, so I got the signature and sent them back to Steve.
He had them a day or two and emailed back saying I needed the house with the renters in it to sign the petition. I could not understand how that made any sense. So I called him up and tried to explain the situation. He just said he needed every home owner signature or else we can’t do the speed bumps. So I told him “fine, but I don’t know who the homeowner is since they are renters. You get me their info and I’ll call them.” He agreed.
A few weeks passed and I asked him if he had the homeowner’s info. He said something like he didn’t think we were going to get that homeowner because it was a business. I looked them up on the county register to try to call them. Turns out it was a home rental group from California that owned over 60,000 homes. There was no way I was going to get a signature from them. I texted Steve back and said that he was being unreasonable to expect a large group to sign a document like that. I was fed up, it was time to go over his head. So I texted him:
Maybe we can speak with the councilman about forgoing the final signature. The home is owned by a large real estate company in California. Just doesn’t make sense to require that. I’ll go ahead and send him an email about it tonight.
I could tell Steve knew he had pushed it too far. He tried to back step and kept asking me to just send him the remaining signatures and we could at least get one of the two speed bumps, but I was done. That night, I sent the councilman an email and copied Steve. And guess what? First thing in the morning Steve texts me and says, “Got the go ahead to move forward. Will be sending an email.” He then responded to the email with the councilman and said the whole situation is being handled and no need for the councilman to respond. Hahahaha! Finally! I got past the freaking bureaucratic red tape and got what the whole neighborhood wanted.
At this point it would be great to tell you the story is over. But it ain’t!
A few weeks later they came out to mark the speed bumps. Steve tried calling me but I was in a meeting at work. I texted him back and asked if he needed anything. He said no, and he let me know that he had marked the speed bumps with paint. I felt like he wouldn’t have called me if something wasn’t wrong. I had my wife go check where he marked them and sure enough he marked the one by my house on the wrong side. The only reason my neighbor signed was because the city agreed to put it on the other side. I texted Steve back and told him he marked it wrong. He said he couldn’t have put it in the other location because there were storm drains at the curb. I had already reviewed and gotten his approval on this location, so why the heck was he backing out?? I called him. He tried to tell me that the speed bump would get in the way of rainwater runoff. I told him that’s not how the drainage on a road works, it will still make it to the drain. So then he said it would get in the way of maintenance. But I told him there was a manhole on top of the drain for maintenance, not in the road. So then he got mad and says, “well then it’s going to be right in front of your driveway!”. And I said, “great! That’s where I wanted it the whole time!” Haha! I’m not sure why he was so set against not putting speed bumps in our neighborhood… But finally he said he would come back and remark it in the correct location. Bam! He came and spray painted the new locations, but I could still see the old incorrect location so I went out with black paint and crossed out the old markings just in case. I didn’t spend 4 months on this to have it go wrong at the last second!
2 weeks later crews were at our street and we finally got our speed bumps! Every time I hear a car slow down going over them I have to yell with excitement.
I don’t have Facebook but my wife says there were tons of positive comments on the neighborhood FB page. A bunch of neighbors were asking how they could get them on their streets, to which one of my neighbors responded and said, “we had to sign 2 waivers!”. Oh if they only knew what was behind those 2 waivers…
