If ever there’s a case of wealthy people playing by their own set of rules, it’s this one:
As supercars flood the streets of Kensington, Chelsea and Belgravia, the people who live in London’s most affluent corners are battling infuriating levels of noise and the ever-present threat of a deadly accident.
Driven by young, rich and largely Middle-Eastern men, the high-performance vehicles can be heard tearing around late into the night.
And last week, an Audi Q7 4×4 caused £1million of damage when it wiped out a £200,000 McLaren, £40,000 Porsche, £200,000 Bentley along with eight other cars when the driver ploughed into the vehicles in a shocking crash caught on CCTV.
It left the well-heeled occupants of Moore Street and the surrounding areas fearing that muscles cars will one day kill one of their neighbours after the Audi’s driver was taken to hospital with a serious head injury.
Ooooh the humanity!
Here’s the problem with all this. If the local councils wanted to eliminate street racing completely, there’s a two-word solution: speed bumps.
Let’s see how Abdul El-Speedah reacts when his Lambo hits one of these puppies at 50mph:
Now before the Anti-Speed Bump Brigade comes at me with pitchforks etc., please remember that what we’re talking about here is city streets, not exurban ones (which local town councils seem to install just for spite, sometimes).
There is no excuse — none — for speeding in London’s narrow streets, and as I said, if the borough councils were willing, they could end it in a couple weeks.
Said councils would probably not follow my other suggestion (ambushes featuring local volunteers armed with AK-47s), so they might as well follow the Wussy Highway and pop in the bumps.
Problem is that the Ryche Pharts who live in Chelsea, Pimlico and Belgravia also face damage to their own low-slung road rockets like Ferraris and Lambos (although most seem to own Chelsea Tractors — Range Rovers — so maybe it wouldn’t be too bad on the locals).
Fact remains that there is a solution to Arab boy racers, and it’s effective, cheap and easy, so why don’t the councils just do it? Oh wait… “effective, cheap and easy” and “government”: I just answered my own question.
The obvious solution is to ban supercars.
Only highly trained race car drivers on designated speedways should have such things.
Citizens have no legitimate need for them.
And besides, its for the [rich] children.
These are race cars that belong on the track, not the road, anyway, aren’t they? After all, don’t they have two of the seven features of a racing car?
Forget speed bumps; install speed troughs. My school put those in back in the 90’s. You can hit them doing about 10 mph. Anything over that and you’re looking for a fix to the front end alignment. Plus, they don’t wear down over time.
Of course, we students hated them…
Problem with speed bumps is that often they’re very poorly designed.
The ones in my suburb are so bad, I bottom out my front fender going over them at under 20kph where the speed limit is 50.
They’re high, steep, and narrow, worst combination.
Doesn’t help the street itself is subsiding, leaving a hole right behind the speed bump that your front wheels go into…
My mother once bottomed out and needed a crane to get her car off of one doing maybe 10kph.
My nephew totalled his motorcycle going over one at 30kmh in a 50kmh zone.
Well designed speed bumps and chicanes do wonders to reduce speed through streets, poorly designed ones do wonders for the income of garages for all the body work on fenders and loads of replacement shock absorbers.
In this case, the rich locals’ attitude is “I’m different. Noise bothers ME.”
Only a slight variation on every sociopath’s attitude, “I’m different. Pain hurts ME.”