Speed Bumps

From Menletter February 2007

By Tim Baehr

We're zipping along the highway in Mexico on a luxury bus. We enter a town. Suddenly the bus slows to a crawl. Bump! Bump! We cross over a speed bump. If the town is large, this scenario may be repeated a dozen times before we exit the town and resume highway speeds.

I first encountered speed bumps in Mexico City in 1960. Called topes, the bumps consisted of rows of brightly painted yellow hemispheres of steel set into the pavement. There may have been speed bumps in US cities back then, but at the time I was living in a tiny Ohio village with no need for such devices. Now they seem to be fairly common: There are three of them on my street in Boston, installed after long complaints from neighbors about speeding teens and three-a.m. drag-racers. We even considered renaming our cat Speed Bump because the lazy lout sits on the stairs and refuses to move, making us step carefully over him. But the bumps in the US aren't everywhere. They're most common on side streets and parking lots, not main drags.

In a return visit to Mexico this year, we found the speed bumps ubiquitous. A few were in the yellow-hemisphere form, but most were built-up humps of blacktop, cobblestones, or bricks, depending on the existing road material. And they were on the main drags as well as the side streets. It was impossible to drive through any town or city without slowing to a crawl every block or two.

Speed bumps have some obvious utility. If you're crawling over one at five miles per hour, and can speed up to only 20 between bumps, you're a lot less likely to hit another car or take out a pedestrian. Fewer traffic cops are needed, and the cost of replacing brakes and shocks is probably lower than the cost of insurance, major repairs, hospitalizations, and lawsuits. There are also some obvious drawbacks. Emergency vehicles are equally slowed. Inattentive drivers can ruin their cars. Poorly designed or maintained speed bumps can cause even a carefully driven sedan to bottom out.

And they're annoying, especially in Mexican quantities.

Or maybe not. I didn't poll any Mexican drivers, but it seems to me that they regard topes with a certain amount of nonchalance. For instance, when a half-dozen or more cars queue up at a speed bump, you don't hear the kind of impatient blaring of horns that you might expect in Boston or New York.

The US has a reputation (at least here in the Northeast) as a hurry-up culture. People hate to wait for anything. Missing an appointment by five or ten minutes is cause for an apology. Twenty minutes' tardiness is considered rude. Mexico seems a bit more relaxed. "Right now" can sometimes be interpreted, without irony, as "tomorrow." The speed bumps seem to fit in with a culture in which time isn't measured in milliseconds and doesn't have a death-grip on daily activities. As we drove over more and more of the topes in Mexico, I came to appreciate the way they slowed my psychic pace along with that of the car or bus.

Ah, psychic speed bumps. What happens to us norteamericanos when life throws a big or little speed bump in our path? It could be an illness - a car breakdown - a late friend - a work delay - a tardy child or spouse - a job loss - a broken shoelace - whatever. I think too often we respond with impatience that morphs quickly into anger or despair. And we meet the admonitory cliché to stop and smell the roses with "Yeah, right" or "Maybe tomorrow." (And for most of us, "Maybe tomorrow" really means "How about never? Does never work for you?")

Sometimes it takes a major tragedy or setback - a wall more than a speed bump - to stop us in our (fast) tracks. We can hope that those more dramatic events will be rare. But the smaller everyday bumps can be instructive and helpful. After all, our lives do not lack speed bumps; they're probably as frequent as the actual Mexican ones. Each of us could probably catalog a couple dozen a week.

And what do we do? Sometimes we speed up, denying that the speed bumps exist. After repeatedly bottoming out, damage to our physical or emotional undercarriages is pretty much assured. Sometimes we feel forced to slow down, building up a good head of self-righteous steam to cook our insides or scald an unsuspecting and undeserving friend or family member.

What if we took a more relaxed attitude? What if we could realize that life's speed bumps, like the Mexican ones, are an unavoidable part of our journey? We can't be nonchalant about all of the bumps - a blown deadline at work or a chronically late mortgage payment, for instance, could have serious consequences. But ignoring or fighting the rest of them can just put us on the road to misery.

Our victory over speed bumps might come from gently applying the brakes, taking a deep breath, and enjoying the ride.