Drive in bus lanes at your own risk - sump busters ahead

If we all drove cars as carefully as the day we passed our driving tests, what a safer and more law-abiding place our roads would be. As it is, once qualified, many drivers take liberties with the Highway Code they once studied so carefully. It's the reason traffic engineers tasked with bringing order to our streets design counter measures that wouldn't seem out of place on a battlefield.

Looking a little like a speed bump crossed with a tank trap, so-called 'sump busters' aim to stop drivers from ignoring road signs to drive in bus lanes.

Sump busters have been around for around 40 years but are used sparingly. They discourage traffic from entering a bus lane by causing vehicles to ground themselves and more than probably damaging their underside in the process.

The video below shows what happens to cars when motorists decide to ignore signs and drive over the sump busters.

https://x.com/NaughtyDrivers/status/1599676950695616513?s=20&t=xPVzIS1cL4x0GhoqYdOcUQ

Sump Busters are far from an ideal solution as they can't deal high-ground-clearance vehicles - one of the reasons that camera enforcement has prevailed. However, they're an example of how difficult it can be to curb illegal driving.

We had a go at designing our own version of Sump Busters, when we developed the CatClaw - an extreme counter measure to the problem of pavement parking.

The Catclaw is the size of half an orange and is designed to be installed in its thousands along kerbs and pavements. When a car drives over a CatClaw, its weight exposes a sharp steel tube that quickly punctures the tyre. However, it poses no threat to pedestrians – a person standing on top of the device would not be heavy enough to activate it.

The project sparked a lively debate about pavement parking, which was exactly its purpose.

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