Coming to a Boston street near you: speed humps. This jolting method of speed enforcement involves a large mound of asphalt — 3 to 4 inches tall and 11 feet across — placed several hundred feet apart along many residential roads.

The city is installing over 2,000 of them as part of a program called “Safety Surge” that is aimed at slowing down vehicles, reducing crashes, and improving safety for pedestrians and cyclists.

Boston Chief of Streets Jascha Franklin-Hodge said his team has created speed-hump zones within every city council district to ensure that they’re spread out fairly.

“Historically the city has sometimes over-indexed for being responsive to the people who ask for things or who have the strongest voice and know how to get ahold of folks in the city,” he said.

Franklin-Hodge said he didn’t want residents to view speed hump installation as a competition for safety. “This shouldn’t be a lottery.” Streets are prioritized based on crash data and demographics — like the number of children and seniors living in a neighborhood.

“We are going to the places where we have the most vulnerable people, and that’s where we’re delivering this service first,” Franklin-Hodge said.

There were more than 3,500 traffic crashes in Boston last year, according to police and emergency service data. A report from the nonprofit WalkMassachusetts found 16 of those crashes resulted in fatalities.

In the Jamaica Plain neighborhood, where new speed humps have popped up over the last few weeks, resident Jason Heinbeck said he’s relieved to see them on his street.

“We live on Park Lane, which is a dead-end road. And Google Maps, I think, sends people down there mistakenly all the time,” he said. “So, everybody goes down, and then they get pissed off, and they come back up really fast.”

He thinks the humps will help. “Car traffic is the number one thing that scares us,” he said. “I’m glad they’re doing it.”

Not everyone is delighted. The humps, which are much more prominent than speed bumps, can be an annoyance. The city says it notifies residents of affected neighborhoods by mail before the humps are installed, but they can take residents by surprise when they first appear.

Rob Simmons, a Jamaica Plain resident of three years, said, “I’ve encountered the, ‘Oh, I’m going a little bit too fast and this is a new speed hump — like, whoops!’” But, he added, “They’ve certainly been installed on streets where you’re not supposed to be going that fast anyway.”

In most of Boston, the speed limit is 25 miles per hour. But it’s tough to enforce, according to WalkMassachusetts Co-Executive Director Brendan Kearney. Police can’t be everywhere at once. “If you install speed humps, that is 24/7 enforcement,” he said.

Physical changes to the road, like speed humps, are the most effective way to get drivers to slow down, said Catherine Gleason, the policy director of the Boston-based nonprofit LivableStreets Alliance.

“Lowering the speed limit alone, unfortunately, doesn’t necessarily change driver behavior,” Gleason said. “Having that physical addition to the road that really forces drivers to think about how fast they’re driving and slow down their speed so that they don’t experience any, you know, discomfort when they’re driving over it or potential damage to their vehicle.”

The city claims you can take speed humps at 20 miles per hour. But this reporter doesn’t recommend it. On a test drive, the rosary beads hanging from the rearview mirror were banging against the dashboard at 15 mph.

That appears to be the point. On a recent morning in Jamaica Plain, a crew in neon shirts was putting the finishing touches on newly installed speed humps on Peter Parley Road, which intersects with Forest Hills Street, an area that has seen 21 accidents since 2015.

The workers placed white decals on each hump, assembling them in a chevron-shape to indicate direction and to alert drivers to slow down.
“And you think doing puzzles when you were a kid wasn’t important, right?” joked Joe Bocchetti, a Boston Public Works employee supervising the operation. Once the pieces are placed just right, the men used a blowtorch to adhere the markings. “It kind of melts it in. It’s like a grilled cheese sandwich,” he said.

They install the humps on clusters of streets at a time. That way, speeding traffic can’t just move over to a parallel street, according to Franklin-Hodge. Some 400 miles of residential streets are eligible for the humps, he said.

“Some folks don’t like them. They find them annoying to drive over,” he said. “But the overwhelming feedback we get has been positive — enough so that we felt that we could start to treat speed humps as standard infrastructure on our streets.”

Franklin-Hodge aims to put speed humps on every eligible residential street. So, whether Boston drivers like them or not, they’re going to have to ease off the gas pedal and learn to live with them.