Driving me mad

Maniac drivers have prompted this post today.

In the town we live in we have road bumps along just about every road. They ruin your car suspension, knock your tracking out, and if you've got a bad back you're definitely better off living somewhere else. They have these bumps, and the 20mph speed limit to accompany it, on roads where children don't even live let alone play. But actually right from the start my husband and I have said that if there is one road in our whole town that should have road bumps, it's ours. We live in a long straight road, with children living at nearly every house, two schools, and a history of children being run over. Typically our road must be one of the last ones in the town to get road bumps put in it.

Eventually the council decided to put bumps and crossings in our road, starting at the Catholic School end of the road, where mainly older people occupy the houses and the children arrive on coaches from out of town. They didn't progress any further along the road for ages, after changing the priority of traffic so that a "T" junction became a bend in the road, nicely separating the row of privately owned houses occupied by the older generation from the row of council houses filled with children of disfunctional families. I'm surprised they didn't also change the name of each end of the road to "Upper" and "Lower" to segregate them even further. And that was it. They did no more work for ages. Our end of the road where the local children live, play, and go to school was still used as a race track.

One day I was driving down our road towards my house when the sight before me threw me into a complete state of panic. Imagine that your spouse is in a very fragile state of mind, and you arrive home one day to see an ambulance on your doorstep, with flashing lights and everything. I slammed on my breaks and ran over to the scene, leaving the engine running, the door wide open, and my handbag in the car. As awful as it sounds, I can't tell you how relieved I was when I realized some poor kid had been run over and had his leg broken. I suppose it's then that the council decided it would be a good idea to put bumps and crossings in this end of the road too. We now have a crossing right outside our house (we live next door to the school gates), and at night the area is very well lit, which is all good.

However, I still don't understand why the road bumps stop a long way before you reach this crossing (which is flat, not raised like it is at the other end of the road) and start again a long way after it, just before you reach the end of the road. This means that maniacs still accelerate past our house at well over 30mph, although the speed limit is now 20mph. They've made our end of the road even better for these amateur racing drivers by putting railings along both sides of the road, so that no one can park there, thus keeping their "track" free of obstructions.

I'm convinced that the people who make these decisions can't possibly live in this town, or even on this planet. Another classic example is the main road that runs through our town centre, which is obviously very busy, being changed into a single lane of one way traffic. It also has several sets of traffic lights along it, so quite often there is a row of traffic at a complete standstill. Can you imagine what happens when an emergency service vehicle tries to get through?