Bangalore and Mysore are connected (or, separated?) by 140 kms of a State Highway. This stretch passes through 4 towns and numerous villages. While the quality of asphalt is good, the highway is liberally decorated with speed breakers (or humps, if you like). How liberally? The stretch has over 100 speed breakers and makes the journey equivalent to driving in Bangalore’s off-peak traffic. Mileage drops scarily and is nowhere close to what your car would achieve on other hump-free highways.
Firstly, there is no place for speed breakers on a highway. Forget highways, one is not supposed to put up speed breakers even on main roads inside a city.
Secondly, these speed breakers are not scientifically designed. Some may be single, large breakers, some small but acutely sharp and some, which are small but 8-9 laid together, to create a rumble strip.
Thirdly, most of these humps have no markers, so one has no inkling of impending doom until after it hits. All of them have been laid either by inhabitants of the various villages or by commercial ventures wanting to slow people down in front of their establishments with the hope of enticing them.
Driving on this stretch was a joy in the earlier days, when it took about 2.5 hrs to cover the distance, with excellent curving roads, nice sights, the promise of rain always on the horizon. It is a major headache now, with your eyes glued to the roads, in the vain hope of detecting that dangerous breaker in time! Some of the rumble strips cause traffic jams all by themselves. The roads are empty ahead and on all sides and the only reason one loses a good 15 minutes is because of the speed breakers which all vehicles try to circumvent, thereby causing a major traffic jam!
Speed breakers are not exclusive to the Bangalore Mysore highway. The city of Bangalore has a rash of speed breakers, some as close as 50 feet away, of varying designs and serving no purposes. They jar you, frustrate you and make your cars rattle. They exponentially increase traffic woes and our traffic police loves them!!! On their Facebook page, they had a question for visitors: “Can you guess how many speed breakers Bangalore has?” Wow!!! They are actually proud of it!!! Strangely, you will hardly find any humps as you traverse other parts of the state and/or country. Countless articles have been written, quoting rules and what not, but our authorities do not budge. They are steadfast in their belief that speed breakers are good for you.
The biggest pain with speedbreakers is that they are there 24x7. Even if you plan your travel in the dead of the night, your travel time hardly decreases! One cannot maintain a steady speed for even 5-7 minutes at a stretch. This is plain tardiness on the part of the administration that they do absolutely nothing to ease travel. At the end of every journey, one is left with severe knee pain and abject helplessness.