Keeping your citizens safe comes first, if you’re an American town or city. If anything comes second, it’s probably shaving another few dollars off your expenses to help your budget, if you can.
Traffic calming innovations like the speed cushion are an exciting way to accomplish your safety goal, but then the budget question can get in the way. The easiest way to save money up front on speed cushion cost is to buy the cheapest product you can find from overseas.
In this article, we’ll discuss why you shouldn’t. Here are four key takeaways why:
- Speed cushions balance traffic calming and emergency response needs
- Cheap products are cheap for bad reasons
- American-made isn’t just about jobs
- Durability, easy maintenance, and convenience pay off long-term
What’s so great about municipal speed cushions?
Most municipalities that are willing to use physical impediments like speed bumps and speed humps for traffic calming already have them. Those that don’t usually are worried about hampering emergency response vehicles like fire trucks and ambulances on important thoroughfares in town.
Speed cushions solve this problem with cutouts on either side of the cushion. They allow large vehicles to straddle the cushion and pass unimpeded. Regular passenger vehicles instead have to cross the cushion on one or both sets of wheels and must slow down or risk damage or loss of control.
Speed cushions are an excellent way of gently calming traffic on major roads without hindering any emergency response.
What’s the risk of buying cheap?
Like any other product or service, cheap speed cushions are made by cutting corners on material, manufacturing, quality control, or all three.
Manufactured speed cushions tend to be rubber or plastic (or in the case of our RubberForm Speed Cushions, a recycled rubber and plastic composite), so you can only cut costs by using a cheaper, more brittle type of rubber or plastic.
The only real way to save money on manufacturing is to go to a foreign country and use inexperienced workers with high turnover. Without experience, they won’t really understand what they’re making (and won’t know if and when it’s going wrong). Why would they care? It’s not like they’re making these flimsy cushions for their friends and neighbors. It’s for some stranger overseas.
The last way to save is by minimizing quality control. The less time you spend ensuring your product is safe, the less you can sell it for. It’s brutal, but simple math.
Why buy American?
It’s true that folks are more careful making products they may be driving over some day. But the advantages of buying American are deeper than that. American standards for materials are far higher than many overseas.
RubberForm manufactures products with 100% recycled post-consumer or post-industrial rubber and plastic. Recycled materials in America have strict non-toxic requirements. But all “recycled” means in a lot of other places is “reused.” We’re not guessing about that.
We actually went out and took samples of our own products and competing safety products and sent it to labs to be tested. Ours came back clean, and theirs came back with totally unsafe levels of toxic chemicals. Those foreign safety products will leach toxins into the ground and water supply for as long as they’re here, whether installed on the road or later tossed into a landfill.
American-made quality at RubberForm
Every member of our team, from the engineers, to the sales team, to the factory floor workers, to our shipping team are experts in what they do. They’re also innovators. Each member of our team has contributed ideas that make our products (like our speed cushion) and our process better.
Our RubberForm Speed Cushions are made from a special 100% recycled rubber and plastic composite material. It’s light enough to make installation, removal, and relocation a breeze. It’s also strong enough to last years and years without chipping, cracking, crumbling, or corroding in the heat, cold, or heavy traffic.
Our speed cushion installation is blessedly simple. You won’t need heavy machinery or large work crews. You won’t even need to close the road for a few days. A small crew with hand tools can install a row of speed cushions in just a few hours, only closing the lanes they need.
Our speed cushions are modular too, so if you do somehow manage to break one, give us a call. We’ll send out a replacement part. Remove the offending module and pop in the replacement. That means your RubberForm Speed Cushions will last even longer.
8 things you won’t have to worry about with RubberForm Speed Cushions:
- Heavy machinery
- Large work crews
- Long road closures
- Chipping, cracking, crumbling, and corroding
- Difficult maintenance
- Leaching toxic chemicals
- Creating future waste for American landfills
- Replacing your new speed cushions in a few short years when they break
So what are you waiting for?
If you’ve put off installing traffic calming tools in your municipality, speed cushions are an excellent compromise that keeps emergency services running smoothly while calming other traffic. American made speed cushions from RubberForm will look beautiful on your roads, require minimal maintenance, and last for years and years keeping your citizens safe. The best part? You keep your citizen’s tax dollars right here in America. When you’re ready for the simplest traffic calming tools on the planet, give RubberForm a call.
Date Published: July 17, 2026
