As most of you know by now, I’m very interested in speed bumps (and also speed bomps). That interest became a bit more personal in mid-September, when my Brooklyn block was repaved by the New York City Department of Transportation. As part of that process, a speed bump in front of my next-door neighbor’s house (shown above) was removed. This is a routine aspect of the repaving operation — we were told that a new bump would be installed in a few weeks — but it was still a little weird, because the “Speed Bump” sign was still intact but no longer matched the reality on the street.
It didn’t take local motorists long to figure that out. As I hung out on my porch over the next few weeks, I saw cars roaring down our block at drag-racing speeds. My neighbors and I were eager for the new bump to be installed, but nearly two months went by without anything happening.
That wait finally ended this past Monday, when I awoke to find a work crew prepping the surface of the roadway for the new bump:
The crew had already completed most of its work by the time I noticed them. When they left, I saw that they’d created a “bump bed” — essentially a rectangle just below street grade, with markings dividing it up into a grid of smaller rectangles — indicating where the bump would be built:
A few hours later, the same workers returned, this time with a truck filled with asphalt (or, as one of the workers called it when I spoke with him, “AC,” which is short for asphalt concrete):
I walked over and was surprised by what I saw: They were adding the AC in sections, which they blocked out with a wooden beam — a simple four-by-four — aligned with the grid that had been marked on a bump bed. Check it out: