A plague of ramps in the land

EMISSIONS: It was with some satisfaction and sense of justice that I read of a motorist being awarded damages of over €18,000 for injuries received while crossing a speed ramp in west Dublin.

It appears the unfortunate fellow walloped his head off the roof of his car while negotiating said obstacle, cutting his forehead and damaging his spine in the process.

Admittedly, it was a special case: the ramp in question was under construction and wasn't signposted, thus taking our scalped friend completely by surprise and not affording him the chance to slow down. But it's a start.

For these "safety" features are a pernicious presence spreading like an anti-motorist plague through the land. No longer content with placing them strategically outside primary schools or old people's homes, county councils and contractors have completely lost the run of themselves and their ramp-building mania.

Now, I don't wish give the impression I think anyone with an engine under them should be allowed careen about with impunity and utter disdain for the safety of others. Speed-bumps certainly, placed intelligently, have points in their favour. Speed kills kids, and the scourge of joyriding has yet to be addressed with any success. (Although, to be frank, if I was a teenage car thief in a boosted BMW, the first thing I would look for is a nice ramp to launch off in my quest for air-time).

But it's the sheer weight of numbers that is infuriating. Their ugly tarmac heads are rearing everywhere, from carparks to dual-carriageways, tormenting the unwary and unwarned with increasingly frequent bone-shuddering, teeth-chattering thuds.

They wear one down like the boulder did poor Sisyphus, for every time the battered driver recovers from the shock of hitting an unexpected foot-high slab in his path, another appears to judder him back into submission.

The average suburban drive requires the navigational skills of a swallow tootling off to Africa for the winter, to avoid a subsequent trip to the garage, osteopath or maybe both.

The most insidious are those "ramps" which appear to be little more than huge gaspipes rolled in molten asphalt, and invariably placed just around blind corners in supermarket carparks.

The deviant who designed these quite obviously had a deep-rooted childhood loathing of people with functioning axles. How this particular trait embedded itself in their young psyche - skateboarding accident, crushed puppy? - one cannot say, but there can be no other explanation.

Methinks another tribunal is in the offing - one to uncover the insidious carryings-on in the ramp building industry of which we here have long been suspicious.

Have they been infiltrated by the manufacturers of cushioned underpants, 18-hour support girdles, denture fixative, or indeed an Unholy Trinity of all three? Eh?