Speed humps first appeared in our neighborhood with the Mount Hope-Canterbury Neighborhood Slow Streets installations a couple of years ago, and they have just been installed on the first couple of blocks of Poplar Street leading away from Roslindale Square/Washington Street toward Canterbury (we anticipate signs and more paint alerting drivers to the presence of the humps soon, as is typical). It seems this installation is both part of the Poplar Street safety improvements project for which we recently reaffirmed our support and also the Boston Transportation Department’s overall program of deploying 500 of these humble yet highly effective traffic calming devices citywide on an annual basis. It is worth noting that these are speed humps, not speed bumps – humps like these are much gentler on vehicle suspensions while still being highly effective and sized/placed to achieve the 25 mph citywide default speed limit on streets such as Poplar Street.
The folks at the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) have a useful explainer of the general concept behind speed humps here. We expect more speed humps soon in a nearby part of Roslindale with the imminent installation of the Lower South Street Neighborhood Slow Streets interventions, but we’d love to see them in many more places as quickly as they can be deployed. More of this please!