I see the ramp fascists are on the march again. These are the people who believe that even though the rest of us have paid for our roads with our taxes, the stretch of it outside their home belongs to them alone, and that it should be turned into an amusement park for their children.
Well, I have news for them: this is not 1960, and the road is not a suitable place for your children to play. A good rule of thumb is that play areas are green, while the road is black.
Hapless local authorities everywhere are being bullied into erecting more and more ramps in residential areas. Their idea of "consultation" before a ramping spree always involves asking residents if they would like less traffic, but they never seem to get around to asking the people who use the road if they would like to be hindered.
Emotional accusations
The purpose of ramps is what the local authority will call "traffic calming", that is traffic irritating. They slow traffic down to around 15 miles per hour; they also dissuade some drivers from taking a particular route. If you do indeed find this irritating, and object to ramps, get ready to receive a series of emotional accusations.
You are a "rat-runner", that is, someone who uses a shortcut to avoid a traffic jam. Of course, residents who champion ramps would never, ever use a short-cut. They would rather sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
You are a child-killer, because just the other day a child was killed by a speeding car. Of course, parents who place their own children in danger by letting them play unsupervised on roads are entirely blameless.
You are anti-environment, a polluter. If only you would go on someone else's road, your car would pollute a lot less.
You are being selfish and anti-social by using a car at all and should switch to public transport. Except that our public transport system is so lamentable that for hundreds of thousands of people it simply does not provide a viable alternative to driving.
We all know it's going to get worse, not better. The Republic still has fewer cars per head of population than any other EU country except Portugal; and as the economy booms, many of those people who have up to now been stuck with CIE will be able to afford cars.
More cars will generate more pressure on the local authorities to erect more ramps, which will divert more traffic into bigger jams.
Other effects
And, as we can tell from the experience of other countries, the ramps will have other, less obvious, effects.
Studies in Britain show that each ramp slows down a fire engine or ambulance by a minimum of six seconds. So next time someone calls you a childkiller, ask them as a test of their will to put their hand into their nice turf fire for six seconds for every ramp between the fire station and their house.
Think of the child - perhaps the one who escaped your speeding car - trapped in a burning house. Think of the father having a stroke who might not become a vegetable if only the ambulance could get there just a little more quickly.
Of course, we could just have a few ramps, but more research shows that unless they are placed between 40 and 60 metres apart, they are completely ineffective. Drivers simply speed up between them.
For bicycles, scooters and motorbikes - all much more environmentally friendly than cars - ramps are more than an irritant, they are a hazard. Hit one the wrong way in the wet, and over you'll go.
Now try hitting a ramp on a bike after it has snowed. Perhaps the residents who demanded it will visit you in hospital, but I doubt it. But, according to reports from the United States, one person you might find hovering around the bottom of your sick bed is the local authority's lawyer. You see, while building the ramps is the cheap option for your council, settling the legitimate liability claims might not be. A ramp is, after all, intended as an obstacle, so it would be hard to argue otherwise in court.
In fact, residents who demand ramps are actually being somewhat dim-witted, Experience shows that many drivers tend to recover lost time by accelerating even between closely-spaced ramps. Also, some discover that ramps are actually less disruptive to their make of car at 40 m.p.h. than at 20 m.p.h., so they speed up.
Increased noise
Another bad thing, from a resident's point of view, is the increase in noise. Drivers who have to keep shifting gears generate more engine sound, and specialists say the noise level increases by between 10 and 20 decibels. So while children can play on the road for perhaps four hours a day, and there might be two daily traffic peaks of two hours each, the ramps are there with all that extra noise for 24 hours a day.
Then there's the question of social cohesion. In the United States, many drivers have taken the view that it is the residents with ramps outside their homes who are the selfish, anti-social ones. It has become a "them and us" scenario.
Every time drivers hit a ramp they rev their engines. Sometimes, the shock of the ramp propels their bodies forward and they accidentally beep their horns. Even in the middle of the night. They have bumper-stickers that say: "Honk if you hate speed-bumps."
Soon afterwards, the residents act again in their own narrow interests. The local authority starts to get telephone calls and letters, and the ramps start to disappear.