Bumping The Curb Again
It would happen again sooner or later. The front of my Honda Stream bumper got nicked by a curb that was just slightly too high, and now there is a streak of black plastic revealed in the front left corner of the bumper. Unlike the previous incident which scratched mostly just the underside of the bumper, this time around the scratch is slightly more obvious from the front.
The curbs in Singapore are built too high. It is somebody’s smart idea that high curbs improve pedestrian safety, because it makes it more difficult for a car to accidentally mount a curb and collide with a pedestrian. I wonder if it has actually been shown statistically or otherwise that the high curbs do (or not) in fact make a significant difference in vehicle-pedestrian collision rate.
One thing for sure is that many other developed countries have gotten by with much lower curbs. (I don’t know about the vehicle-pedestrian collision rate in those countries of course.)
I wonder about the cost of all the damage caused to cars due to excessively high curbs.
Thankfully I still have touch-up paint. But my dainty paint brush has gone missing. So after giving the car a quick wash, I applied some touch-up paint using tissue paper. It touched-up area looks quite rough, but that is also partly because the plastic has really been scratched rough. It looks like it might need some hard polishing to smoothen out the area. I think I will save that for another time.
My Honda Stream is “stock”. No additional body kit or what not. But it already cannot clear many curbs. It must be so much more difficult for others who have add-on body kits.
Somebody should invent a mechanism to help determine whether the car will clear the curb height. It is going to be a pretty useful device.
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Someone did, way back in the 1950’s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curb_feeler though I think they now have fancier ones that use lasers…