Millennium Bridge workers hang straw bales after ancient bylaw triggered | Hacker News Reader

Millennium Bridge workers hang straw bales after ancient bylaw triggered

theguardian.com

It is worth stating (because the word bylaw is not always understood) that a bylaw (by- is the Scandinavian word for "city", "town" or "village" depending on which modern Scandinavian language you use as your source) is basically a local law. It is not universal. It exists in a single place, and although they can be similar in many locations, they are strictly only applicable in the specific municipality that has them on the "books". They are usually boring things like "dogs must not foul in the streets" and "cyclists may not ride on the pavement (sidewalk in US usage)"... but some are really weird.

I guess the US does use bylaw, but it seems to always be rules and regulations that companies make. This is very much an actual law that will see you fined and potentially in court if you break them.

> I guess the US does use bylaw, but it seems to always be rules and regulations that companies make.

In the USA we call local laws “ordinances”. In US English, “by-law” relates to a set of rules associated with a contractually-created body, like a homeowners association.

In Canada, it's bylaws and not ordinances made by local government.

and they're called by-laws when set by a condo or strata, too! (in Canada)

The US (New England) town I live in calls them bylaws.

the state and local level can call them whatever they want, which is why a lot of older, eastern states in the US have definitions for things like hamlets. the Dillon Rule lets the states define that however they want, and the FedGov ain't setting local HOA rules.

The FedGov is if you take into account stuff like satellite dishes

And in NYC, local laws are quite literally called local laws. These bits of terminology vary widely across the US.

Ah, that's cool, I didn't realise the etymology.

UK east coast has a lot of place names ending in '-by', supposedly from Danish invasions around 10th century (for example Grimsby), it's nice to see there's a link.

Presumably 'by-election' comes from the same place too.

Good point!

Though to confuse the issue... https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/railway-byelaws

(These are actually a part of national law, but scoped to railway travel.)

One of the linked articles is also pretty esoteric. The bale is hung because the bridge is being cleaned, as part of the cleaning project discarded chewing gum will be removed, a process objected to by an artist who paints tiny pictures on the gum [1]

1. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/oct/05/artist-ben-w...

Wow, that is super gross. Neat.

If you think that's gross... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gum_Wall

The ianvisits site is the go-to for this sort of thing, from 5 days ago, the Grauniad is always a bit slow on the uptake:

https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/an-ancient-law-requires...

Want to build a new market? Oh, there's a 775 year old bylaw about that...

https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/the-city-of-londons-mar...

Grauniad:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25922703

This isn't just an old tradition. It's a coded signal - and one that the river users can be assumed to understand. There's no principle difference between this use of straw to caution navigators on water, and the use of (for example) " 300 status codes to signal redirection to to navigavators of the internet.

Ancient website still uses archaic human-centric deci-mal number 301 to redirect traffic. Early humans believed these were powerful and called them "magic[al] strings".

They also apparently communicated the need for a hot caffeinated beverage with the sequence 418. It is unknown how the receiver of this code would communicate their intent to fulfill the request, leading historians to ponder if sending such a signal might result in a torrential flood of the beverage.

incorrect implementation of the protocol AFAIK

> The HTTP 418 'I'm a teapot' client error response code indicates that the server refuses to brew coffee because it is, permanently, a teapot. A combined coffee/tea pot that is temporarily out of coffee should instead return 503.

This isn't a criticism of the practice but I did think it might be more effective to use something in safety green or orange, maybe with reflective surface, or maybe blinking lights. But I'm not an expert with this, and I can see how a straw bale might also catch your attention.

This is 100% pure speculation, but I wonder if, at the time that the bylaw was made, a straw bale was the happy medium of being relatively soft (in case someone passing under the bridge ran into it) but also relatively cheap.

I would also speculate the height of the bale would be significant -- lower the bale to the new safe height of the bridge, and if you can't go under the bale, you can't go under the bridge.

Soft to a boat, but not soft if you happen to be standing on deck and run into it. A modern straw bale is going to weigh about a hundred pounds. When this bylaw was written, straw was gathered and stored loose and they'd have been just tying a bundle together for this purpose.

I used to help out on a farm in my youth.

Collection of bales was manual. Picking them up with a hay fork and lifting them up to an increasingly high person on a trailer.

This was ok with the ancient baler, but when that broke and he borrowed another the bales were twice as heavy, which isn't fun when the pile on the trailer is 9ft high.

At night, a white light is required to be hung. As the rule seems to be quite old, high vis hay bales were unavailable, and noticable lighting during the day would also be unlikely.

Daylight Savings Time was first proposed to save candles, everything after is a forced retcon.

This equally anachronistic law fits with that quite well.

We are all very good at being modern humans.

As electricity gets more expensive, that purpose may become more relevant again. Every 5W LED counts!

Why do you think electricity is increasing?

Inflation adjusted electricity costs have been steady or even falling. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610

In August 1990 average retail rates where the equivalent of 20.49c/kWh (8.7), and 2010 18.35c/kWh (13.0), but in 2023 it’s only 17c/kWh.

mine is closer to 30c/kWh currently... and thats cheaper than it was before...

My brother always said, 'why can't people just do the things they were going to do 1 hour earlier/ later rather than changing the clocks'

Sometimes the obvious is too sensible.

Probably because a clock is an easily changeable thing, but a schedule or an announcement is less so.

Putting a "Opens at 8:00" on sign on your door involves a fair amount of effort of buying a physical piece of equipment. Changing an appointment may have required walking somewhere and talking to the right person.

Before modern luxuries a million of such tiny adjustments would have required a lot of time and effort.

One clock may be an easily changeable thing, but is it really that much easier than changing one sign?

Besides, if you knew you'd be changing your opening times throughout the year, then when you ordered a sign you'd just order both signs at the same time, or maybe get a sign with replaceable numbers, or a sign with washable/writeable numbers for your opening times. Or you could just not bother, and pick a time that was "good enough" all year round.

Why would you need to change an appointment? You'd just make it for the time you wanted on the day you intended to start with.

But changing all the clocks, in a whole country (or on a whole continent), on the same day? You think that's easy? You've never got that wrong, or known anyone who got that wrong?

> One clock may be an easily changeable thing, but is it really that much easier than changing one sign?

Mechanical clocks are imprecise and so need periodic adjustment. If you need good timing, then adjusting your clock periodically would be already baked in. Adjusting it differently would be essentially free.

Communicating that you've changed your schedule though, that's a lot more work. Phones are a new tech not everyone has. Telegrams and letters cost money and labor.

Plus there's an issue of synchronization. Imagine a whole bunch of people changing their schedules at different times. The barber changes schedule one day, the bakery the next, and the post office decides to wait until next Monday. It'd be pretty rough.

> But changing all the clocks, in a whole country (or on a whole continent), on the same day? You think that's easy? You've never got that wrong, or known anyone who got that wrong?

It's far easier and more reliable for a government to make a big announcement (radio, newspapers) and make a single, global change than for a lot of people to communicate with everyone else.

In modern times this is a lot more practical, but communication used to be a lot harder.

Cascading scheduling is really hard, especially when some of the things won’t need to change and others will. Which is inevitable. It can take months for things to stabilize again.

Have a look round at how many social distancing signs there still are. Signs don't get updated, so is that 8am opening the actual opening time or have they not updated the sign?

And if you make an appointment for 8am at the other side of a (not) time change. Does that appointment change, or do you need to attend an hour earlier or later?

I wonder, what business/appointment would even need the extra hour of daylight? Not many. Many businesses already have seasonal hours that aren't affixed to the clocks changing.

Compare this to the deaths due to the confusion, loss of sleep, deer not realizing way more cars are going to be on the road, etc.

Changing the clocks has a serious price. The benefits are not apparent though.

Wasn't it to do with factory workers in ww1? It seems easier to change the start time of a few factory shifts than it would to mess around with clocks.

> why can't people just do the things they were going to do 1 hour earlier/ later

That's pretty much the result of the summer-winter time changes, but you don't have to have the plaques with hours of work read "9:00–17:00 Mon-Fri in winter; 10:00–16:00 Sat in winter; 8:00–16:00 Mon-Fri in summer; 9:00–15:00 Sat in summer".

I guess it keeps things uniform - would all jobs follow that pattern? All schools? Pubs? When would the lunchtime rush?

I mean there could be some great benefits (spread out the rush hour crush) but I think it would cause more confusion than the current system.

It might have been proposed for that reason but it was actually enacted in England (in 1916) for war time productivity during WW1.

It’s not really clear if it ever would have been adopted if it were not for the war.

Edit: really interesting snippet I happened upon:

> This Bill, as your Lordships know, will have effect only while the war lasts. It may therefore be regarded in the light of an emergency measure, and as an experiment. If the public are dissatisfied with the results produced, the Bill can easily not be renewed at some future time.

That didn’t turn out as expected eh

Nothing is more permanent than a temporary measure.

I believe income tax in the UK was a wartime measure during the Napoleonic Wars that never got removed, and the national speed limit of 70 mph was another 'limited' measure after someone hit 185 mph in an AC Cobra during the 1960s.

That came later. In 1895 a New Zealand entomologist first floated the idea to gain more insect collecting time after work.

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/TPRSNZ1895-28....

Ben Franklin's candle satire was over 100 years earlier than that.

Source: He was long dead by 1895.

Here's the charity responsible for this bridge and several others in London: https://www.citybridgefoundation.org.uk/about/history Founded in 1122, which is quite something!

They used to obtain funds by renting out space on the bridge, so the old bridges used to have houses and shops on them - cantilevered or to the sides.

I thought this was a more interesting story

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/oct/05/artist-ben-w...

Painting dropped chewing gum (600 works on the bridge) seems heroic to me.

Years ago I worked in Soho and watched him paint a piece of gum outside my office - it was stunning and real piece of art. I got a few photos that evening. The next morning it had already been scrapped out - I imagine by an art collector of sorts, as the rest of the gum on the pavement hadn't been touched. Shame to see it go, but interesting while it was there.

I met him on this bridge once, he was polishing an old work. He told us that he had the blessing of the owners of the bridge. Other places where he worked, he didn’t have permission.

Reminds me of the tradition of topping out a finished roof. You often see 100m+ skyscrapers with a pine wreath hanging on top as if we were still worshipping some forest gods.

> You often see...

Where in the world is such a thing a frequent enough sight to say that?

The US for one, where it evolved into a Christmas Tree at the top upon "topping out".

Is that done just at Christmas or all year round?

Year round. And it's just a pine tree. It's not decorated for Christmas or anything.

The town in Scotland nearest to where I live, Burntisland, has docks and they have a huge crane there - at Xmas the company puts a Christmas tree on top of the crane about 65m or so up.

It's quite bizarre as when it's dark (and days are quite short in Scotland at Xmas) you can't see the crane just this lit up Xmas tree hanging in space above the town. It's very cool.

the US. not just wreathes: whole-ass trees and specially-painted beams. i can speak for the mid-atlantic region; basically, any building that has a ground-breaking ceremony might also have a topping-out one.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/12/why-do-construction...

https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/Topping_out

All over Northern Europe surely.

Personally, I'm in Poland but I've seen them in other countries too. That's the most recent one from my city: https://radiopoznan.fm/informacje/pozostale/to-nowy-najwyzsz...

Or burying a horse head in your house in Ireland:

https://daily.jstor.org/the-horse-skulls-hidden-in-the-dance...

Ah, yes, England and its innumerable traditions; turns out, Gormenghast is actually a documentary.

Up to 1973, London Taxis were required to carry a bale of hay (for benefit of the long absent horse). https://www.ludlowthompson.com/property_news/searching-for-a...

Is that really true? Section 51 of the London Hackney Carriage Act 1831 (to which the article refers) doesn't seem to require that; it (among other things) forbids a taxi driver feeding another driver's horses with anything other than corn or hay - but doesn't say anything about requiring them to carry hay for this purpose. There is no other reference to "hay" in the act.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1831/22/pdfs/ukpga_1831...

I think you're right, the relevant part is actually forbidding feeding your own horse with anything but hand-held hay or corn, implicitly requiring carrying the same, but if you don't have a horse, that's moot ...

> Section 51 of the London Hackney Carriage Act 183

I think its one of those cause and effect things.

You have a horse-drawn taxi. You wish to feed your horse at some point during the day.

The law says you can only do so with either (a) your own hay or (b) hay or corn held in your hands.

So the restrictions of the law push you in the obvious direction of keeping a stack of hay on your carriage.

Well, how would you alert boat traffic of work going on under a bridge?

I got to thinking and a bale of straw isn't a bad idea.

My first thought was a flag on a rope, but wind can make it blow up and become less visible. So it needs to have weight in order to hang down and be visible at the right height. It needs to be disposable and cheap. And it can't damage boats.

So a bale of straw is not a bad idea even in 2023.

This is what I was thinking as well. Everyone is kind of "teehee"ing about this but it seems like a pretty damned good solution. PLUS if a boat accidentally hits it, it's relatively soft and not going to cause any damage which something like a barrel full of water could (plus that'd weigh a lot more)

It'd also make a nice soft but loud bump on a boat for any skippers that didn't see anything

I'm from the continent and it doesn't seem particularly strange or quirky to me. Just a practical thing that hasn't changed since many centuries ago because why would it.

The news the next day "Barge worker injured by a straw bale falling from a bridge."

British people love old stuff like Americans love cars and guns.

I don't know if you've ever been to London, Rome or Kyoto, but Americans actually fucking love old stuff

Only because they're so deprived of it in their own country.

They should visit our thousand (nearly) year old door: https://www.westminster-abbey.org/history/explore-our-histor...

I'm a Brit and didn't realise until recently that England is one of the world's oldest countries (927 AD).

And as a Scot I should point out that Scotland is about a century older at 843 AD - but then neither have really existed as separate countries for centuries. ;-)

927 - 1066 doesn’t seem that old to me ;)

Show your working.

Cf. Bayeux tapestry

1066 was just another guy coming to claim the throne. You wouldn't say a company was abolished when it gets a new CEO, and you shouldn't say a country is no more when someone claims the throne.

I would if the new ceo quartered the old one.

So France only dates from 1945?

Gosh, that's a bit over a thousand years.

How do you define country? Continuous occupation and law?

I remember talking to David M as a kid about the works he kept touched up and the stories that went with them.

https://www.magabala.com/products/yorro-yorro

https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/australia-s-oldest-k...

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature21416

From when Æthelstan the Glorious created the kingdom.

//edit// Some of your links just show that some people lived on that bit of land. I think you need more to claim a country.

They establish continuous occupation by the same bloodlines, I asked what the definion of country is - there's oral history and law going back along with the paintings.

Bear in mind passports are only relatively recent objects.

Also worth pointing out the British tried that "I think you need something more" line with Terra Nullius .. and their own legal system ditched that as rubbish:

https://australian.museum/learn/first-nations/unsettled/reco...

> How do you define country?

Not having anyone say you're a different country, aka sovereignty.

That's your "definition" of country?

These countries:

https://mgnsw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/map_col_high...

remained sovereign for tens of thousands of years.

Whereas, for example, the "United Kingdom" as a country (of four kingdoms) only dates back to 1801, prior to which there was a long history of contested sovereignty claims, there's some interesting paperwork declaring a King of Scotland as a the King of England, etc.

My OP specifically mentioned "England".

That might have some relevance were you 'relaxing' who I was replying to.

Do you have a definition of what makes a country yet?

This question of oldest country that you've laid claim to does rather rest on something that works about the globe so that we can compare.

The "definition" (as such) provided by 'relaxing' fails England as England has been claimed by a Scottish King to be his realm.

I'm with you though, I reject that definition.

I don't think that one works for England; see W. T. Conqueror.

Just because a country gets conquered, it doesn't stop being that country. England didn't change borders when the Normans invaded.

You might as well say France only dates from 1945 if we follow your logic.

Or world's oldest "cat flap", https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-66665613

I think the best we have is a 300+ year door here in Massachusetts, USA that has scars from a Native American raid on the town:

http://1704.deerfield.history.museum/popups/artifacts.do?sho...

> but Americans actually fucking love old stuff

to visit, absolutely. But you don't see the Americans insisting on getting their own ceremonial King as head of state in name only. They prefer to love that stuff at a visiting distance. This is also why "Downton Abbey" etc does so well in the USA.

Unlike the Brits, Americans only worship other peoples' landlords.

The city adjacent to me has a law that all heads of households must have a firearm. In response to the gun law, the next city over created a law everyone need to have a rake for leaves. Unlike the straw bale laws, we don’t take it seriously.

It’s also illegal to tie a giraffe to a telephone pole or street lamp. In another city it’s illegal to eat fried chicken with anything but your hands.

> The city adjacent to me has a law that all heads of households must have a firearm

Oklahoma?

Dunno about Oklahoma, but Kennesaw, Georgia, does have a gun ownership requirement, passed in 1982 in response to Morton Grove, Illinois, banning handguns. Kennesaw's neighbor, Acworth, is the one with the rake ownership requirement -- passed in response to Kenneswaw's gun law -- though it is not immediately clear to me whether that ordinance is still in effect.

Kennesaw's law allowed for conscientious objection and had no penalty for non compliance so it was effectively dead when passed but did make quite the splash in the international press. Crime rates in Kennesaw did drop significantly after the law was passed but the same was true for surrounding communities without the law, most likely due to them becoming affluent bedroom communities for Atlanta's white collar class.

I wish we had the back stories on more of these. Who was it who tied a giraffe to a telephone pole? What disaster ensued, such that "there oughtta be a law!"?

> I wish we had the back stories on more of these. Who was it who tied a giraffe to a telephone pole?

(Teeters on the edge of this rabbit hole. Pulls back just in time)

I would guess it's not giraffe's specifically, but anything besides a horse or any animal more massive than a dog in the actual law.

Most of these wacky laws are usually special cases rather than the verbatim text of the law. At least the ones I've looked into.

> British people love old stuff like Americans love cars and guns.

As a British person who was involuntarily dragged around countless ruined Abbeys, castles, and monestaries for hours as a sprog by my parents, I can assure you that there exist plenty of British folk with an active disinterest in "old stuff", as you put it.

I think most of Europe is like that.

It is true that British people do make more of their identity about it, and they tend to ignore _really_ old stuff (i.e. most of the quirky stuff is Victorian, not _that_ old).

(disclaimer, am British)

I wouldn't say British people themselves really care (I don't).

It's just London especially has been around for so long that this sort of stuff just accumulates. The charity that exists purely to help look after just the Thames crossings in London that was doing this is itself almost 1000 years old for example. There is lots of old stuff - it's just part of life, not something that people go out of their way to give a shit about.

If it works, and is practical and understood by many, why change it?

British people love old stuff like Americans love old British stuff.

You should go to Boston someday…

Boston doesn't have any old stuff.

For USA it's old. Our country is not even 300 yr yet and some of this New England stuff was settled in 1630s.

Along a deep 50/50 split?

I wonder what the cost of implementing this bylaw was on the tax payer, here is a guess:

- Health and safety assessment by specialist HSE officer - £10k

- Procurement of organic sustainable hay bale - £2k

- Consultation with local community to ensure hay bale is not offensive to straw bale enthusiasts - £5k

- Transportation costs - £500

- Lawsuit from worker hurting shoulder when mounting the hay bale over bridge side - £80k

- Admin and project management costs - £12k

Did I miss anything?

Yes, a sense of proportion

Yes; this is HN, and not the letters page of the Daily Mail, to which this sort of content is traditionally addressed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com