Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Speed Bumps

Episode Date: October 13, 2025

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why speed bumps are secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Speed bumps. Known for slowing you down. Famous for making you go, hook. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why speed bumps are secretly, incredibly fascinating. Hey there folks. Hey there, Cipelopods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is.

My name is Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden, Katie. Yes. What is your relationship to or opinion of speed bumps? I actually kind of funny, but I have a lot of strong opinions. It doesn't sound like a topic. I would really weigh in on, but I'm very passionate about urban design. And also you right now do not have a car, so surely you're tripping over them on foot all the time. That's why you're so mad.

I know how to drive, and I used to live in L.A., so I used to drive all the time. Right now I don't have a car because I live in a city that is easily walk or make up for lack of a car with public transportation. and I just really love it. The U.S. frustrates me for a number of reasons. One being that I find the lack of infrastructure for pedestrians, bikes, et cetera. I understand that not every city can be a dense walkable city, but I also think that even for larger cities, like it should be way more pedestrian-friendly.

Yeah. I'm excited about this because I don't know that, much about speed bumps, the history of them. I do know that there are a lot of different ways to slow the speed of cars that are effective. One thing is that if you have like a pedestrian area intersecting with the road, you can raise the road up to be flush with the pedestrian area and also change the color of it. It's not just like an obstacle for the car to get through. it's like, oh, I feel like I'm in a different area that's not only for cars. So it changes the psychology of the driver, right, like the thinking that I'm on a road to,

I'm in a pedestrian area. So I've heard those can be really effective. So yeah, I don't know. This is like this is one of the times where you don't really have to convince me that hard that this is fascinating. Usually I'm like, I don't know, man, WD40 other than eating it. I don't know why I'm supposed to be excited about it. But this one, yeah, I'm really excited. Yeah, even though you can't eat a speed bump, Katie is still psyched.

She's still pretty excited about this. Yet. Can't eat one yet. Imagine it. Cheese bumps, right? Right. And then. Right.

What do the cars in the cars universe eat gas? But that goes in their butt. Yeah. I guess it's kind of a like intravene. food of the future type situation. They're like the Jam Hadar in Deep Space Nine, where they live on that white drug that they pipe into themselves. You know, I've watched a lot of Deep Space Nine.

That was a deep cut for me, Alex. So congratulations on that. Yeah, I mean, yeah, my two favorite topics. Trying to understand the cosmic horror of the Pixar Cars franchise and talking about The Dominion War in Deep Space Nine. Yeah, sure. That, yes. And also public infrastructure.

and making it cool and good. And so I'm excited about this. Thank you to Coup Bear for suggesting this with support from Jeff B and Chris and Weig and many other people. On most episodes, we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week's topic is speed. So everything is numbers and it's all takeaways. Speed as in velocity or yeah. Oh.

Not the movie and not another thing. Right, right. We're a clean podcast. The other thing is Speed 2, Cruise Control. And so we're going to get straight into Take Away. Wait, is that... Sorry. Yeah.

Was that actually the tagline for Speed 2? Yeah, they have to keep a boat going fast. That's a cruise control. I probably made some physicists angry when I was like saying velocity, I know speed and velocity are probably not the same thing. I don't know. So, Alex, take it away. Yeah, let's type of takeaway number one.

Most of us have never driven over a speed bump on a public road. Whoa, what? Hey, I don't believe you. It turns out that infrastructure people use the name speed bump for a relatively specific and steep and limiting. kind of bump, like the super jarring one in, mostly parking lots and little private roads. I see. And the ones on, like, regular roads for cars are a lot of other names, especially speed humps, H-U-M-P.

My humps, my hums, my lovely lady lumps. But so, yeah. We had a stats song after all. All right. I feel like that's such a weird distinction. Like, no, this is a speed bump. And this is a speed hump. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's partly because it turns out there's about half a dozen different names for different just ways of putting a bump or hump in the road to slow cars down. Right. Because as Katie said, there's also lots more things under the umbrella of one name for it as traffic calming devices. Right. Yes. If you do that thing Katie described of the sidewalk is the same height as the road and that makes drivers more careful, that is also a traffic calming device.

Right. Or like even having bollards at the sides of the roads because, like, cars instinct, like drivers, when you're driving and you see something, even if it's on the side of the road, like if it's trees or bollards, some kind of structure, you slow down instinctively because you feel like you have less wiggle room if you're really fast and you lose control. So that's another traffic calming technique. And bollards are kind of those posts are like short. Fick posts. Yeah, I have the traffic calming thing. She just spritz some lavender every so often on these big plug-ins, glade plug-ins, but on the road, you know?

I just imagined my car doing yoga, and every pose is a horrible metal crunching noise. And you're just getting smashed inside. Yes. Yeah. Right. In the car, in the Pixar universe, like, do cars eat people? Probably. Or gas in the form of Catricell White from Deep Space 9, yeah. Right. But like if a person wants to get in a car in the Cars franchise, are they inside of their guts? Like, what's, uh...

Ooh, yeah. Let's say, ooh, yeah. Okay. Cachow. All right. Yeah. Cars are funny. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, like, an urban planner would say you haven't been over a speech. bump in most driving situations outside of very slowly going through a parking lot or a little estate or something.

But you have probably been over a speed hump. Yeah. If you've driven to a destination, speed humps might have been in the middle of your path. Yeah. I see. Okay. There's a lot of other features to talk about, too. That's why it's a whole takeaway.

Key sources here are an amazing feature for Bloomberg City Lab. It's written by David Zipper in August 2025. So it's very up to date. Also a feature for the website of 99% Invisible by Kurt Kohlstead, also citing digital resources from the U.S. Department of Transportation. Because I'm confident listeners mean the whole range of bumps and humps and everything with this topic name. Yeah. I was surprised to learn that there's not international rules or government laws for what qualifies as a speed bump specifically,

but Kurt Kohlstead has numbers for the U.S. norms. a speed bump is a long stretch of raised asphalt up to five inches tall, and up to five inches tall is over 12 centimeters. And then the speed bumps meant to slow traffic all the way down to less than 10 miles per hour, which is around 16 kilometers per hour. So you haven't done that on a public road where traffic's moving. Right, yeah. Like this is that really jolting thing that's in little parking lots

where they're trying to basically make your car stop. Right, right. Where you have to really go over it carefully. Otherwise, you're going to go kachunker to chunker. Yeah, yeah. It feels bad to do that. Yeah, yeah. The most common road thing is a speed hump, which is that much more gradual up and down.

And the main difference is speed. It's meant to slow traffic down to around 25 miles per hour, which is still like a driving speed, you know. Yeah, yeah. Like you don't have to like crawl to a stop. but if you fly over it too fast, it's not going to be great. Yeah, it's also about 40 kilometers per hour. That's a speed where your car is still on the move to a destination. Yeah, you're still going.

Yeah. I also was in Durham, North Carolina recently, where we used to live. We being me and Brenda, not Katie. Yeah. Durham is, I think, the only place I've lived with a lot of speed humps. And so I was out of practice and I kept hitting them really hard in the rental car. It was not good. Speed demon Alex.

Even my quiet town of Beacon, New York, doesn't have speed humps. People are just kind of driving, you know. And so in Durham, I was just smacking into them apologizing. And another device here is the speed lump. Right? We got bumps in lumps and humps. Yeah. It's increasingly Fergie.

Yeah. The speed lump, that's the kind of speed hump where it doesn't necessarily extend all the way to each side of the road in a big long strip. And often that's done so that there are specific gaps for the wheel spacing of emergency vehicles. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. We'll talk more about it later, but theoretically an ambulance could aim for the gaps and not have to slow down at all. Nice. And then a regular car has a tighter wheel spacing and needs to go over the lump.

I saw it recently. I'm pretty sure everything was fine. I saw it from my balcony. It looked like someone on, like, a bicycle got hit. Oh, God. Yeah. Bicyclists looked completely fine, but they were still, you know, someone still called an ambulance. And the ambulance just, like, went right up onto, like, the sidewalk area

so that it could go forward because otherwise this is like a very one-lane street for trams, buses. They allow car traffic some parts of the day. But, yeah, everyone was stopped. So the ambulance just kind of went up on the sidewalk. Wow. I saw someone who runs a restaurant who I know and he like runs outside and grabs like a plant that's like outside of planter and like brings it indoors so the ambulance can get past. So it's just really it's really like because you know sometimes you have these ideas of like well what what do you do if like an ambulance needs to get through and like the answer is like basically everyone tries to make it work.

that's so you're up to me yeah or the tiny garbage truck in these little old cities yeah well it's it's really it's really cute too because it's like this guy who runs like a restaurant and then like next door is like a pet shop and like he went over to like help the pet shop first and like take in plants that were like outside of the pet shop and so it's just like yeah like everyone kind of knows each other and tries to help out so it's really nice really cool yeah yeah that's nice device here. It's called a speed table. Ah, okay. So we've gotten away from

the umps. Yeah, finally. The speed table is much flatter and wider on the top, and it's meant to ease the jolting on cars, and also some locales use speed tables as raised crosswalks for pedestrians.

So it's the whole crosswalk with is raised and flat, and then you have a combination of sort of a speed hump and a crosswalk all at once. Because you'd think like Oh well couldn't the car just like continue to go fast But I'd say both drivers don't want to hit people That's like

Usually it's the problem is going into autopilot Or thinking that the road Is just for cars right And driving too fast So when there's something that is kind of like Bringing them at the same level as the sidewalk Something happens psychologically We're like oh like this is not just like

a road it's uh for for cars it's a shared road yeah i feel like the u.s does that the least and then of all the places i've been maybe amsterdam did it the most of combining the roadway and and sidewalks for everything all at once there were trams and bikes and humans and cars in the same thing yeah yet another device here is that the structure is basically two or more speed humps all in a row where you hit them one after another immediately right and the name for it is a traffic undulation. You know, they're really not, can I just, I've been trying to be an adult this whole time.

You've given me hams, lumps and bumps, and yeah, I did make the, the Fergie reference. But I feel like they're really not trying to not make teenagers laugh. Yeah, and the sign looks like boobs, so that's fun. It does look like boobs. Yeah. Yeah. But it's the traffic undulation. Undulations.

Yeah, okay, fine. In the U.S., we basically just use the name speed bump for all of this half a dozen things, even though speed bumps are the least common by far. Well, but also it's the most, it's the least weird thing to say, like speed bump. Like, oh, we're coming across some speed humps, everybody, or some speed lumps. Like, humps obviously is a little bit of a naughty word sometimes. Lumps is just kind of unpleasant. undulations just sounds perverted. So, you know, I don't, you know, I don't blame people for just saying, yeah, speed bump.

Yeah, me neither. Yeah. It's just, it's fun to like sit down an urban planner and ask them how many speed bumps are in the city, it turns out. Because Kirk Colstead also points to a wonderful rundown from Sacramento's public radio station. Sacramento, the capital of California, they talked to Deb Newton, who managed. is the speed lump program, speed lump. And she gave exact counts of all the traffic calming in Sacramento. As of 2014, Sacramento had 1,239 speed humps, 923 speed lumps, 549 traffic undulations,

29 speed tables, four raised crosswalks, and zero speed bumps. She said you'll only find the bumps elsewhere in the county or on private property. To me, bump is just a lot nicer of a word than humps, lumps, or undulations. The word speed bump, was that like first? And that's why we use it the most? It does seem like it's first. We'll talk about that, especially in the next takeaway. And then also outside of the U.S., they don't use those words so much, bumps, lumps, Humps, anything. It's also English, so.

Yeah, but it turns out the UK and the former British Commonwealth, you'll often find different names completely. Are they speed wobbly-tobbies? There's almost speed bobby's, because one of their favorite nicknames is sleeping policemen. Of course, I was joking, but I can't come up with a Britishism that is more goofy than reality. Yeah, because they have apparently speed cushions and speed breakers as nicknames, but my favorite is sleeping policemen. Yeah. Where conceptually, you're driving over a policeman who won't mind. I'm just surprised they don't call them hobbly wobblies or something.

And so there's a lot of different versions of what we call speed bumps and almost never an actual speed bump. And also those modern ones and those humps gets us into that modern practice of them existing, because takeaway number two, a Nobel Prize winning physicist who helped build the atomic bomb went on to invent speed humps. Hey, you know what? Sometimes you blow up a lot of things and sometimes you want to calm traffic. Yes, his name is Arthur Holly Compton, and he did both those things. I'm looking at this picture of him.

Now, that is a man from the 50s. I've ever seen one. He looks like a tech savory caricature. He has that little mustache and stuff? Yeah, yeah. That kind of squared away face? Yeah, the Widows Peak, the sharp nose, the little mustache. Yeah.

And he's got a banjo, so. I'm so excited to link a picture of him playing banjo for a bunch of college undergrads. Because he did this when he was basically goofing off after helping lead the Manhattan project. Sometimes you build humanity's means of destroying itself, and sometimes you're hanging out with a bunch of dorks at a college, a bunch of young dorks. Yeah, and specifically Washington University in St. Louis. If folks don't know, there's a huge college in St. Louis, Missouri, called Washington University after George Washington. Yeah.

They have digital resources from their libraries and also the notebook paper where he designed the speed hump, Arthur Holly Compton. Wow. He's surprisingly not famous, as I learned about him. Born in Ohio in 1892, from an academic family, his brother became president of MIT. Arthur spent the 1920s leading the physics departments at Washu and St. Louis and then the University of Chicago. He's a lot of why the first reactor was built under the bleachers of the University of Chicago football stadium. Gives him a little pep, too. Like a little extra pep, those football players are like, I don't know what I did.

is, but I feel my bones vibrating and I feel like I can do football better. It would explain why they are no longer a football power. They were a football power way back when and then dropped out of the big ten and stuff. So maybe it's because they got irradiated. That would make sense. It gives you that temporary mutant energy. It's good for the season, maybe not good for your overall career. Yeah, it's very radium water from a few weeks ago.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So Arthur Compton then wins a Nobel Prize for Physics in 1927, which is well before the Manhattan Project in World War II and everything. Pretty technical. He found a way to scatter x-rays that helped prove light as made of particles. Well, good for him.

He and another guy won a Nobel Prize together. Yeah. Yeah, you know, that sounds smart, I guess. Yeah, and because he was one of the only Americans with a physics Nobel Prize, Prize. He was one of the leaders of the early version of the Manhattan Projects. He was part of a secret uranium committee that led to being the chairman of a public committee to evaluate use of atomic energy in war. And then he was a senior mentor to people like Robert Oppenheimer. Another source here is Car and Driver magazine, a piece by Brendan McAleer. He points out that when Arthur Hallie Compton was winning a Nobel Prize, Robert Oppenheimer was still finishing his PhD. Compton was so in charge of this project. He is the reason Oppenheimer was the top theorist on the Manhattan Projects and also not replaced when the army took it over.

He had a huge role in creating the atomic bomb. If Oppenheimer's the father of it, Compton is the grandfather. Right. Very important. Wow. So he's really Oppenheimer's Papaheimer. Exactly. I really like that Brendan McAleer also points out that the recent movie Oppenheimer

fails to depict Compton at all and his guess which I agree with is that if you depict this crucial father figure who was also the specific guy that put Oppenheimer in his job on the Manhattan Projects that would kind of decrease the great man narrative around Oppenheimer

because like you got to set us up for seeing Killian Murphy's full frontal and if we're not completely sold that Oppenheimer is like just doesn't need to stand on the shoulder of giants, I think we would otherwise find a naked Killian Murphy to be a little awkward. If you see a much bigger Compton frontal first, it's like, why I'm looking at this. Right.

If we see a naked Killian Murphy riding on the shoulders of a naked, Arthur, Holly, Compton. More nudity in our movies about atomic bombs, please. Compton. He also led the setup of reactors in Hanford, Washington that made the bomb material. He was in favor of using it in Japan and helped lead to that happening at all. He should be famous if Oppenheimer's famous. Yeah. Yeah. I mean. And I know there's negatives there. But, you know, I mean, yeah, there's the little detail of the, you know, killing all those innocent people. but like, you know. Obama's do that? Interesting. Yeah, yeah, okay. Learning about someone in history is not the same thing as approving of what they did or like adulating them, right? Yeah. And that also is necessary foreground for why this guy invents its speed humps, weirdly, because... Guilty conscience. He's like, oh man, all those people I killed. Well, maybe I can save a few of them.

oddly almost not so much like what happens is so world war two ends he wants to kill more people so world war two ends and compton is in a spot some academic especially people can reach where they are kind of passing middle age and almost being elderly and incredibly distinguished and so he says i'm going to quit the demanding job of chair of physics of the university of chicago I'm going to have the basically do-nothing job of Chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis. I've never understood what a chancellor is in my life. It's basically a guy who has an amazing resume and makes your university distinguished seeming, as far as I can tell. Okay.

Maybe they also do stuff, and I apologize. Right. He was like- If someone knows what a chancellor does, let us know. What happens is then he mainly becomes famous for being a funny guy who plays the banjo for incoming freshmen and is like interesting around campus. And he's a Nobel Prize winner who helped win World War II. So they're glad he's around and making Wash You prestigious. Right.

Yeah. And then he also is hanging out on a campus where there's a main road that drivers go really fast down. And he is a Nobel Prize level physicist with nothing to do. so he works out the physics of a gentle yet slowing down cars hump instead of a bump that would make them basically stop. Right. Like if there wasn't this perfect storm of brilliant physicists with nothing to do, maybe this happens differently or a lot later.

And he's just like, it wasn't like preceded by some horrible accident. It was just like he's trying to play his banjo and he keeps hearing cars whooshing by. He's like, it's not just trying to play my. my banjo. Yeah, he did this in 1953, so I feel like it was those tail fin Cadillacs. Yeah. With horrible gas mileage and loud engines, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. You know, like Fonsie going down the road. Yeah. Right. Man, those kids, like the Fons, driving too hard and their firebirds, I don't really know. And he also didn't completely invent bumps to slow down cars, but also. So the history of those is kind of fuzzy.

If folks have heard past episodes about topics like road atlases or car horns or stop signs, there's a lot of people just kind of piecing together what became the features of our roads, anarchically and across the world. There's a loose claim that the town of Chatham, New Jersey, invented the first version of a speed bump in 1906 with a raised crosswalk. But either way, the initial speed bumps tended to be that kind of bump, especially because cars were slower. But we don't know exactly where it started or how popular it got.

But Compton helped spark significant humps on roads for significant traffic safety. I guess you'd want some sort of calculations to make sure cars aren't just going airborne. Right. Quoting car and driver here. As you'd expect, Compton did a number of rigorous calculations to determine the correct angles and height. concluding that a car traveling at 20 miles per hour over his hump would experience just 0.4 Gs, but one hitting 50 miles per hour would be subject to four times the force of the gravitational constant, end quote. So he did like actual G force physics calculations to get a decent bump right where you can still go 20 and not feel too bad. So because like the idea with the speed, speed humps, you're not trying to like kill the person.

the car. I try to cause them to fly off and get wrecked, but it's meant to be not, it's meant to be not a fun experience if you're going too fast so people are motivated to not go really fast over them. Does it like, do they, do they ever like actually cause damage to cars? They can and we'll talk more about that in later takeaways. Yeah. Okay.

But it's mostly if you go really fast over them or have a really low clearance car. You could, like, break stuff. I saw a car on the Internet the other day where it was, like, a super low rider where they cut a car in half. I guess managed to get all the engine and all the stuff in there. I don't understand how it works, but it's a super low rider, and the guy is all crouched up in the car. It's very funny. I'll send it to you. Yeah, really low or high vehicles are funny.

Speaking of Durham, North Carolina, I will link about a bridge that's nicknamed the can opener. Because it's relatively low clearance and trucks keep cutting their tops off trying to go under it. It's great. It's really fun. It's a local celebrity. And also, Arthur Hallie Compton helped coin the name Speed Humps because when he had his design installed on each end of their campus road, which was private enough where he could just order it. The locals nicknamed them Holly Humps after his middle name Holly. He's one of those guys who was known by his whole first middle last.

Sounds like something someone would write on a bathroom door in the 50s. I'm looking at this car gatey set thing. It is, it's like a submarine, right? Yeah, it looks like the, it makes it look like the asphalt makes it looks like the asphalt is a liquid and the car is sort of like half submerged. I'm not really sure where the wheels and everything is. It's very stupid. Wow. Okay.

And, yeah, I would get to stride by any hump or bump. Yeah, people do a lot of stupid things with cars, and I approve of it. Me too. I'm not a car guy, really, but I like stunts. Yeah. And so this physicist who's won a Nobel Prize also changed the physics of speed bumps pretty much worldwide. According to Bloomberg City Lab, it was a very slow process, and also probably a lot of cities adopted it based on other cities. They didn't specifically know Compton was the spark.

But his prototype pretty much changed the world. And ironically, a later Washew Chancellor removed Compton's original humps. And then in 1992, to celebrate what would have been Compton's 100th birthday, Washew installed temporary new ones as a monument to Arthur Hawley Compton. I see. So he's the grandfather of the atomic bomb and also created speed hump. Fathers, father of speed humps, I guess. Why did they remove them? They just were like, actually, we do want the cars to go fast here.

That is apparently why the later chancellor wasn't so bothered by the traffic. Right. Or else, like, the police enforced better or something. Yeah, they just decided they weren't necessary anymore. I feel like it'd be nice if we had that feeling about his other invention. Oh. Right. There's a speed hump race between the Soviets and the Americans.

and uh right that's arm yeah yeah global de-humpanning and we also have one more takeaway before the break because takeaway number three there is a published medical study of whether speed bumps can help diagnose appendicitis well okay this is cool because yeah like sometimes when I hit a

speed hump too hard. Sometimes it feels like my stomach kind of goes out of my butthole. Right. It doesn't. Like, it stays, everything's fine with me. But it feels that way. And it's not good. And it makes me drive safer.

But, okay, I'm really curious about this. Yeah. And this is wonderful because it's real science that also everyone knew has a funny vibe as they did it. It's real research. Sure, yeah. This was a study in 2012 by British doctors of whether speed bumps can be a diagnostic medical tool. To me, the one flaw in this study is they aren't specific about whether it's bumps or humps or the other devices.

They're using the word speed bumps as the general term. Wow. Wow. Gosh. So that frustrates me. What idiots. What dumb-dums don't know the difference. I read the study. There's no map of the route or specifics about whether it was in a parking lot. or a road or whatever but that seems actually pretty important i think so too yeah yeah like because it i think there's a big difference between one of those parking lot ones and the force it exerts on your body yes so i otherwise this is cool but i wish they it's best by that and key sources are

this study also coverage by ars technica and further contacts from npr this was in the 2012 Christmas issue of the BMJ, which is a real medical journal. It's formerly known as the British Medical Journal. In 2012, doctors from the University of Oxford, working with surgeons at Mandeville-Stoke Hospital in Aylesbury, they collaborated on a diagnostic accuracy study. So they took a sample of 101 patients who went to that hospital with significant abdominal pain, and they all wrote in ambulances to this specific hospital. And then they checked, what diagnosis the patients ended up having and whether they reported greater pain than usual when the ambulance hit one of a few speed bumps.

So the idea is that when they go over the speed hump or bump, their appendix hurts more? Basically, like whether you feel more than the average jolt. Yeah. I see. Okay. And of that group, 34 of the patients went on to have a diagnosis of appendicitis. and 33 of those 34 described feeling noticeable greater pain than usual over the speed bumps. And there were also seven other patients who ended up having other significant abdominal trouble like diverticulitis or a ruptured ovarian cyst. And all of them also reported speed bump issues. Well, but I mean then, okay, so that doesn't sound like it's specifically diagnosing epitocitis.

It sounds like if you've got something wrong in your abdomen and you go over a speed bump, it's going to hurt worse. That's true. Yeah. You know, how does that, like it doesn't seem like that would actually help you diagnose anything. It's just like, yeah, something's wrong in there. They came to the same conclusion. In their study, they say that the high sensitivity of pain over speed bumps gives it a strong rule out value, but not a strong rule in value for appendicitis. I see.

Because also the patients who ultimately didn't have anything serious and it was kind of a false alarm, they also tended to not feel additional speed bump pain. So you're exactly right. It just separated out the complainers from the ones. Sorry, I'm joking. Right, right. You should never feel bad about using emergency services because you never know until you go over that speed bump and you're like, actually, that wasn't so bad. Maybe I'm not having this baby. Baby is fun

Do you think Do you think anyone Like I know that probably There's not as many women Delivering in taxis as you see on TV But do you think there's ever been a case Where someone's driving or in a taxi With a baby

And then they go over a speed hump And then that just like causes the baby to shoot out Like boing? Yeah yeah Yeah Like Sarah's study on that out Like

So it's exactly right Like, this is most useful for ruling out false alarms. And then also, if you're ruling out false alarms, that helps you divert resources to people who need the help the most. Yeah. It's surprisingly useful. Someone's just, like, got terrible internal bleeding. And they're like, hey, did you notice anything doing your ambulance ride?

I was like, no, I'm just in pain. And it's like, ah, you're faking it because we went over a speed hump and you didn't say anything. So, uh, get out. So leave, please. Turn it around. Bring them home. And yeah, this actual medical study won essentially two different awards in the specific field of funny yet real science. According to NPR, the BMJ specifically rounds up and publishes studies that are legitimate yet kind of funny every Christmas. It's an annual trope of their journal. Oh, fun. So that's why it was featured at Christmas. Right. And then in

2015, this won an Ig Nobel Award, which is, I'm sure Katie knows, it's an award for actual meaningful science that is also funny to think about. Yeah, pooh-boo-doodoo science. That's like, but it's usually pretty good. Yeah, like they do it at the big universities in the Boston area, either MIT or Boston University and actual Nobel Prize winners usually give the awards. Like, this is a real award that's also funny. Like, I think either a candidate for it or an actual winner was one that looked at the velocity of penguin poop that they used in defensive pooping. So like they look at the anatomical, anatomical mechanics of penguins, because like penguins and their chicks, when like certain species when they like are nesting, they will shoot high

velocity poop at albatrosses or other predatory animals that are trying to get at the eggs or at the young. And so they were doing, they did a whole thing about how the penguin is able to build up that much pressure to do the high velocity poops. Which we need to study. But also that's funny. It's legitimate science. And it's very funny.

So yeah, speed bumps are this for significant abdominal issues. And it's really cool to me. Yeah. And folks, that's three big takeaways all in a row. We're going to hit a speed hump and then come back with more physics. and launching cars into the air. Fun. We're back, and we have two further takeaways for you,

starting with takeaway number four. Some parts of the world are experimenting with optical illusion speed bumps. This is so cool. I love, like, this is so trippy. Yeah, and this will be quick because it's mostly visual. There's also at least one major drawback to this version of traffic control, but it's a thing that at least three countries have tried in the last 10 years or so. One not drawback is it looks really cool.

Yes, they look amazing. And key sources for this are two articles for popular mechanics, one by Andrew Mosman and one by Sam Eifling. Three examples from England and from India and from Iceland where the roads are painted to appear to have a speed hump or lump or something else. The most realistic one is in England, it's painted as if there are speed lumps there, the separate raisings. It's just that they only painted the square outline and arrows of paint that would be on a speed lump and it's flat. But it also, I mean, it also looks like, because it looks like the inside of the square area, is a little bit of a different color than the road itself, or is that just kind of, because

they, it's newer or something? I wanted more information on that. I really couldn't tell, yeah, because it does look that way, but maybe it's just my eyes seeing the paint's outline, you know? It's great either way. Right. Yeah. It's much weirder in both India and Iceland in different styles where the paint is a fake raised

crosswalk where it's very wide. And also, in one of them, the crosswalk just looks like levitating records. rectangles that would spear the front of your car or whatever. This one is just really cool because I think it would also make drivers question their sobriety. Yeah, it looks like you're going to smack into floating Legos or Roblox or something. Yeah. So these are, you know, an attempt to get all the traffic control benefits of a speed hump with none of the jolt at all. Maybe the biggest drawback is that local drivers will get used to this being fake and start ignoring it and start driving the

same speed or maybe even slightly faster because of telling themselves fake every time they approach it. Right, right. So that's not good. No. And that could also have a knock-on effect where they start thinking all speed humps are fake. To me, this is actually not a great system, but it's very creative. Yeah, like I like the, I like looking at the illusion. It's really cool.

You really want the classic traffic calming solutions. And the other weird thing here is the fake paint doesn't really save you money as a city. Going back to David Zipperspace for Bloomberg City Lab, he says that in the U.S., a new asphalt speed hump only costs around $5,000. And in a city budget or a transportation budget, that's nothing. That's a drop in the bucket. And you get a lot of slowdown for that little amount of money. Yeah. So just doing faky paint isn't some kind of cost savings.

Also, you need to hire an artist to get the perspective right on these fake bumps. I don't know. It's true. Yeah. I agree with you. It looks really cool, very creative, but in practice, it seems like it's just kind of, the one I like the best is in Iceland because it just looks like kind of an art installation. It doesn't necessarily seem disrespectful.

But when it's more or less just kind of a trick, I feel like that's not a great kind of like, I don't know, rapport to have. between drivers and city planners, if that makes sense? I agree. Yeah, the Iceland one is almost verging on public art, and that's cool. Yeah. And also with cost, that $5,000 figure is even lower if it's the screw-in kind of speed hump. Because folks might have seen, if you've ever seen a speed hump where it doesn't look like it's made of road asphalt, it's a material called thermoplastic. But if it has big visible bolts or screws in it, that's the one where you can install.

install where you just drill it into the existing road and do no other work. And those are super cheap to put in. Yeah, a cheap screw and speed hump. Yeah. Why are you laughing? And then just the beat from Fergie's song comes in. So yeah, the optical illusion is very interesting all around. It's not cheaper and it has a huge drawback.

And also it's fun. It's really weird. Yeah. All of that, that gets us into yet another fun trick in one last, Takeaway number five. There is not a magic car speed for neutralizing the jolt of a speed hump unless you drive fast enough to take flight. Whoa. What? If your car fully takes flight like an airplane, you won't hit the speed humps.

But otherwise, there's sort of a myth out there that if you hit speed humps fast at a specific speed, you won't feel it. That isn't really true. so you would need you're just saying you need to have a levitating car once you just become an airplane that's the only way to not feel them at all yeah okay well i'll work on that key and very fun sources here writing for popular mechanics by andrew mostman another pop-mec piece by ben steward and then also writing for the what-if website and book series by randle monroe of the xkCD comic strip he's amazing yeah and then also an episode of fifth gear which is British Automotive TV show. It's hosted by John Bentley. There's a somewhat true,

mostly false claim out there that driver behavior can neutralize how much you feel a speed bump, but there's no magic speed where you won't feel it at all. And especially if it's a true speed bump where it's the most steep. Right. It's just not true. Yeah, I mean, like just driving over it slow seems like the best thing because, yeah, you feel it, but it's not bad. Right. They really do that thing. They really slow your car down, because otherwise, Otherwise, it'll feel horrible. Yeah. Yeah.

Your stomach comes out of your butthole. And John Bentley did one of the many demos that have been done of this. He drove with an electronic vibration meter under his seat, like a gadget that measures the vibrations. Every time his speed increased, he felt an increase in vibration. The main way you can mitigate it is to get a very heavy vehicle or a vehicle with particularly cushy shocks. Right. That will make you feel it less, but those are obvious solutions, and again, you have to feel it a little bit. Right. What about like a tank?

I guess switching to treads. Maybe treads are good at this, yeah. Would that, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. How do tanks do with speed bumps? I feel like they're so heavy, they just destroy the whole roads. So probably fine. Right. I think they probably, that's the answer is they just flatten it. So it's more of a speed flat. Yeah. And I'll link the. scientific documentary film Golden Eye, starring Pierce Brosnan, where he drives a tank on Russian roads. And, you know, we can see this, see this workout. It's why military parades are such a good idea. That's right. Especially so you can sit at them looking sad, like a little birthday boy

who's having a bad time. Yeah. It's the strongest the man could be. Yeah. And also another thing here is that some of the most sporty looking vehicles actually need to be the most careful about these speed bumps and humps. You can't just speed through them because if you have low ground clearance like many sports cars or also some people put huge spoilers on a car and then also huge side skirts along the bottom. And the faster you go, the more you'll destroy your side skirts. You just actually have to take them seriously, the speed humps.

I mean, that makes me feel good because, like, you know, I don't, I don't, I don't want people to be able to buy their way out of dealing with speed humps. Me too. I like it. Yeah. Yeah. Because there is, I don't know if everybody's heard this myth, but there's a persistent myth that if you just go fast enough, you'll sort of blow through the speed hump and not feel it at all. And Randall Monroe points out something amazing. And again, XKCD's great. Then the what if books are about great and unintuitive answers to scientific questions. He points out that for One thing, a relatively healthy person is unlikely to hit a speed bump at a speed that would definitely kill them. You'll just feel bad and maybe hurt your back.

And people can't injure themselves on these. What if I have a bunch of knives in my car? Just sort of free knives, freestanding knives. I knew you shouldn't have invented the knife freshener. Right. Where you hang it from the rear rear and it has a mincy smell, but also it's a knife. It's multifunctional, Alex. I don't know why you're such a hate.

Sometimes I need to cut a pizza in a car. Well, then you should do like Sylvester Stallone and Cobra and use ordinary office supply scissors. That's what you should do. Right. I've tried to cut a pizza with kitchen scissors before. It's not great. Yeah, there's kind of a way, but I don't like it. Yeah, just use a knife.

I don't like it either. Or the wheel. Or the wheel, yeah. And, yeah, so like people have injured themselves by trying to truly. sports car through these. But usually it's very unlikely you would die. But on the other hand, all cars experience lift is sort of like the wing of an airplane because there's the air going under it and above it. And there's a thing that especially racing fans, like NASCAR fans talk about where there's a true idea that if you drive a car fast enough, it will achieve lift off of the ground

from its peer speed. Yeah, if you put like a rocket booster on a car, uh, Yeah. You might not even need total rockets if it's, but you need pure racing power. Right. So quoting Randall Munro here, the bottom line is that at somewhere in the range of 150 miles per hour to 300 miles per hour and pausing to do kilometers, 150 miles per hour is over 241 KPAH. But at the range of 150 MPH or 241KPH up to double that, a typical

sedan will lift off the ground, tumble, and crash before you even hit the speed bump. So there's no speed where you won't feel the bump at all. And if you try to go up and up and up and up and speed, your car will take off and then because you don't have wings, do a terrible barrel-roll type crash. Right. Yeah. But for a few moments, it'll be really cool. Yes. Then it'll s' like tremendously after that. Like, your car is at some point just a plane on a runway trying to fly out of an airport. Right. But it doesn't have wings and you'll die.

So, oh, well. Dang old Bernoulli and his effects. Exactly. And Monroe also says that if you truly try to build a car so that it doesn't achieve that lift, for one thing, you won't achieve this. But for another thing, the panels and doors and other parts will start ripping off. You know, like there's just no speed situation where you're, you won't feel this.

And just treat a hump normally, please. What if I make a car out of concrete? Okay. Cool. And... Carcrete. The wheels have spikes on them. Smart guy.

How do you deal with that? James Bond does that in the next movie. The car does not break. Q is actually very happy. He brought it back. Yeah. It's great. Yeah.

Some of Q's adventures are. a, you know, subtle, but this one is the concrete car with spaggy wheels. Hugh is always like, do take care of this car. I don't want it to be damaged. But then the whole car, except for the gadgets, is one of those Aston Martins that needs a lot of tune up. That is very breakable. Yeah.

So who's the dummy now, you know? Yeah. Should be Katie's concrete car. The car creed. Yeah, exactly. That's the car that spies truly want. And it also, like, you'll get a lot of ladies interested in your concrete car. A Fultz, that's the main episode for this week.

Welcome to the outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode, with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, most of us have not driven over a speed bump on a public road. They're almost all speed humps or lumps or tables. Takeaway number two, a Nobel Prize winning physicist who's the grandfather of the atomic bomb also invented the modern speed hump, the story of Arthur Holly Compton. Takeaway number three, there is a published medical study of whether speed bumps can help diagnose a Pendocitis. Takeaway number four, some parts of the world are experimenting with optical illusion speed bumps, even though they don't really save money and might be counterproductive.

Takeaway number five, there is no magic speed for a car that neutralizes the jolt of a speed hump, unless you drive fast enough to launch your car into the air briefly and terribly. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode, because the there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at maximum fun.org. Members are the reason our podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the paradox of nearly universal political support for speed humps. Visit sifpod.f.fffn for that bonus show for a library of more than 20.

22 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of MaxFund bonus shows. It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Thank you, Siflopods. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximum fun.org. Key sources this week include three different websites that I really want to thank. Those are Bloomberg City Lab, especially writing by David Zipper.

also the 99% Invisible Website. Again, that's a podcast you should totally check out. There's also tons of additional things to read on their site, written by Kurt Kohlstead. And then lots of different writers for the wonderful website and magazine Popular Mechanics. Want to thank Andrew Mosman, want to thank Sam Eifling, and want to thank Ben Stewart. Key sources this week also include the What If Website and Book Series by the Amazing Science Writer and XKCD cartoonist Randle Monroe, also an episode of the British Automotive TV show Fifth Gear and their presenter John Bentley, leaning on digital resources from the libraries of Washington University and St. Louis, as well as further biographical information from the Nobel Prize website, and then

civic resources and information from Sacramento, California's public radio team, and from the U.S. Department of Transportation. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking, the traditional land of the Muncie-Lanape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skategook people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, and in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about native people in life. There is a link in this episode's description

to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode, because each week I'm finding is something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 241. That's about the topic of copper. Fun fact there, the ancient Romans mined so much copper from the island of Cyprus. They named that metal after the Latin name for Cyprus.

That's why we call it copper. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unchaven by the Budo's band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Sousa for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members.

And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network. Of artists-owned shows. Supported directly by you.