Speed Bumps
Who Invented Speed Bumps? The 1906 Origin Story
Cojo
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The first speed bumps were installed in Chatham, New Jersey in 1906, and the modern parking-lot speed bump was patented in 1953 by Nobel-laureate physicist Arthur Holly Compton while he was Chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis. Compton called his invention the "traffic control bump." Within a decade it had spread across municipal and private parking lots in the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union.
That is the short answer. The longer story explains why a Nobel-prize-winning physicist designed a chunk of asphalt -- and why the device he sketched in 1953 still defines the parking-lot speed bumps Cojo installs today.
Two inventions are usually conflated: the early-1900s traffic-calming hump poured by municipalities, and the engineered speed bump with a defined cross-section published in the 1950s. The 1906 Chatham installation is the earliest documented reference; the 1953 Compton design is what every modern manufacturer and every traffic-engineering manual still cites today.
The earliest U.S. press coverage of speed-control bumps appears in The New York Times in June 1906, describing five-inch-tall raised humps installed on Chatham, New Jersey streets to slow automobile traffic. According to the Federal Highway Administration's Traffic Calming ePrimer, Chatham was responding to early-automobile crashes on streets that had been engineered for horse-drawn carriages.
These bumps had no engineered cross-section. They were field-built using the same paving materials municipalities used for road repair. Chatham's experiment proved the principle -- vertical deflection slows drivers -- but the device was abandoned within a few years because:
Arthur Holly Compton (1892-1962) was a Nobel-laureate physicist who shared the 1927 Nobel Prize in Physics for the Compton effect. By 1945 he had become Chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis, where he watched a steady stream of student-driver crashes on the campus drive that runs along Forsyth Boulevard.
Compton applied the same engineering rigor to the problem that he had applied to X-ray scattering. He computed the height, length, and approach angle of a raised pavement section that would force drivers to slow to a comfortable speed without damaging the suspension of a typical 1953 sedan. The result, patented as the "traffic control bump," was a parabolic profile 3 to 4 inches tall and 1 to 3 feet long in the direction of travel -- the same dimensions that define the standard parking-lot speed bump today.
According to the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) Traffic Calming Manual, Compton's specification became the foundation for nearly every commercial speed-bump product manufactured in North America. Cojo's most-installed rubber bump on a 14,000-square-foot Salem retail center in March 2026 -- a 6-foot section, 3.5 inches tall, with reflective chevron stripes -- is a direct descendant of Compton's 1953 patent drawing.
Compton published his design in Engineering News-Record in 1953. By 1960, traffic engineers in Portland, Oregon, Los Angeles, and Detroit had adopted versions for municipal and private installations. The British Transport Research Laboratory ran field trials in 1973 that confirmed Compton's height and length specifications, after which the United Kingdom adopted speed bumps for residential streets under the name "sleeping policemen."
A separate device -- the longer speed hump (12 to 14 feet long) -- was developed in the 1980s when traffic engineers wanted a less aggressive profile for residential streets. According to the FHWA Traffic Calming ePrimer, speed humps were specifically designed to let buses and emergency vehicles pass at 15 to 20 mph without the harsh impact a Compton-style bump produces at speed.
The dimensional spec is essentially identical. What has changed:
| Element | 1953 Compton design | Modern parking-lot speed bump |
|---|---|---|
| Height | 3 to 4 inches | 3 to 4 inches |
| Length (travel direction) | 1 to 3 feet | 1 to 3 feet |
| Material | Cast asphalt or concrete | Asphalt, recycled rubber, or HDPE plastic |
| Marking | None specified | Yellow and black chevron, reflectors |
| Approach taper | Recommended | Required by ITE standards |
| Sections | Single field-built unit | Modular sections (4 ft, 6 ft, 8 ft, 10 ft) |
The cross-section has not changed. Material science and adjacent products have. Three modern improvements that did not exist in Compton's day:
Modern rubber bumps -- typically manufactured from recycled tire rubber -- give a slightly softer impact than asphalt at the same height. They can be unbolted and re-installed seasonally, which Compton's permanent asphalt design could not do. See rubber vs asphalt speed bumps for the trade-off in cost and lifespan.
A speed cushion is a split-hump device with wheel-track gaps wide enough for a fire-truck axle to straddle. The National Fire Protection Association NFPA 1141 and most local fire codes now require cushions instead of bumps on designated fire-access streets. Compton's solid bump did not address emergency-vehicle access; cushions, which appeared in the 1980s, do.
Modern speed bumps carry a yellow-and-black chevron pattern with reflective tape, an advance-warning sign, and (for some jurisdictions) tactile detection. The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices does not formally adopt speed bumps as a traffic-control device, but ITE's recommended practice has driven near-universal adoption of the chevron pattern. See our note on speed bump marking requirements for the Oregon-specific rules.
When a Salem property manager calls Cojo for a parking-lot speed bump in 2026, the device we install is dimensionally identical to the one Arthur Compton specified in 1953. What changed is everything around it: the recycled-rubber sections we anchor in two hours instead of pouring overnight, the chevron paint we apply per ITE recommendation, and the Oregon DOT-aligned spacing we use to keep drivers from accelerating between bumps.
The history matters because it answers a question every property manager eventually asks: "Are speed bumps actually engineered, or did someone just dump asphalt in a parking lot?" The answer is that a Nobel laureate ran the math 70 years ago and the math has not changed.
If you want a speed bump installed on a parking lot in Portland, Salem, or anywhere along the I-5 corridor, contact Cojo for a quote.
Industry Baseline Range for a single parking-lot speed bump installation:
| Item | Industry Baseline Range |
|---|---|
| Rubber speed bump (single 6-ft unit, installed) | $280 to $1,000+ |
| Asphalt speed bump (single, poured and screeded) | $300 to $1,500+ |
| Concrete speed bump (single, precast or cast-in-place) | $400 to $2,000+ |
| Reflective marking and signage (per bump) | $80 to $250 |
2026 installation pricing in the Willamette Valley runs higher than published averages because of fuel-surcharge volatility, prevailing-wage labor on commercial sites, and Oregon-specific traffic-control requirements that did not exist when most baseline figures were last updated.
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