Bollards: Why and What
josh.works
josh.works
I genuinely can't tell what the author is arguing for, as it's extremely difficult to tell if he's quoting things because he agrees or disagrees with them.
My biggest question is: is the author arguing that there should be spaced bollards along literally every sidewalk in the country/world, and around all edges of every parking lot?
If so, it's an interesting idea, but I also can't help but think that would not just be expensive, but also possibly extremely ugly.
I'm curious if there are estimates of both installation cost as well as lives saved and other damage to buildings avoided.
Everywhere a pedestrian might be? Probably not. But, we can do a MUCH better job building sidewalks and roads to increase safety. Lower speeds (not just posted limits, but road design). Raised sidewalks that are continuous, not the disjointed mess we have in much of the US.
At bus stops, schools, and any shopping area where cars are parked directly adjacent to eh store front? Yeah, bollards should be installed.
Just looking out my front door (suburban DC)… the road is posted 35mm but you can “safely” go 50+ because the lanes are wide and relatively straight. But, there are uncontrolled/no-signal entrances to neighborhoods every 1/4 mile or so, so speeds really should be <30mph (IMO). There are very few signaled pedestrians crossings, so if you need to cross, it’s a game of frogged, or walk a mile out of your way to the nearest full intersection. The bike lanes on the road are just painted on, no protection for cars. And on and on. None of this requires more space - just DOT employees who can think beyond getting around in a car.
We could easily slow the road by narrowing the lane. We could easily add signalled ped crossings. We could easily make the sidewalks continuous (same grade through intersections instead of road level - the benefit is cars enter “pedestrian space” when crossing instead of the other way around). We could add floppy bollards (not sure what they’re called) to give more separation between cars and bicycles (won’t stop a really bad driver, but will at least stop cars from using the bike lane as yet another car lane).
The technical term near me seems to be something like "delineator posts" (or just "orange posts" after the colouring) and I think that's pretty reasonable. As you say, they don't provide any protection against a car or truck, but they do signal where not to be a bit better.
I just picked a random location in Bristol: https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4365588,-2.5893081,3a,75y,28... – lots of Bristol streets are like that, and lots of streets in other cities are like that.
In some places what you're saying does apply, but by and large, it's not like American road design.
The road itself is one way for car traffic, but two way for bikes. This likely allows a non-main road cut though for bike traffic.
The pavement (sidewalk) outside the front of the school is double the width and has bollards along it to stop cars parking on the pavement. This slow massively narrows the road to you’ll likely be driving about 20-30mph regardless of the speed limit.
The junction behind the initial street view has a tiny traffic island with a bollard to protect bikes coming the “wrong way” out of the one way road from cars turning into it. Without that cars turning right into it would always cut that corner.
Given the space constraints it’s actually a pretty well designed street.
In some ways these small narrow roads are better by the way, even for non-cars. Everyone understands the need to share the road. Big roads seem to create a "this is for cars only and everything else doesn't belong here and shouldn't be here" type of mindset.
30mph is more common in towns.
You might see 40mph if going through a rural village.
50mph isn't too common, but you sometimes see it on smaller or busier major road (A roads).
60mph is the "national" speed limit for major roads and rural roads for cars. Some of these are narrow and twisty, so 60mph should be seen as a maximum, not a recommendation of how fast to actually go. For example, this road in Cornwall[0] would be under national speed limit of 60mph, but you'd have to be insane to drive at that speed. The national speed limit is actually lower for vehicles over 3 tonnes or towing (50mph) or heavy good vehicles and busses (40mph), which is why the signpost for national speed is a white circle with a black cross through it rather than a number.
You'll be 70mph on most motoways (highways) and for cars on national speed limit roads with a central reservation.
I'm guessing streets like the one you share are narrow enough that cars don't usually try going 50mph? And as noted, there is a fair bit of thought given - bollards at the intersection and school, etc.
Here's the street I was talking about... https://www.google.com/maps/@38.9397759,-77.353558,3a,75y,12...
Houses don't directly front this road, but there are intersections with housing clusters every 1/4 mile or so, with cars and pedestrians crossing at uncontrolled intersections. Additionally, the bike lanes end before the school complex, then start again, then end before the shopping strip. Presumably to leave space for more turning lanes. But, really kills the purpose of the bike lanes since they don't go to the two places you'd want to visit!
And another... https://www.google.com/maps/@38.928914,-77.3522244,3a,75y,15...
Sidewalk on one side, so anybody living on the south has to cross a wide road. Unmarked parking on both sides. Bike lanes come and go (usually turning in "sharrows"). If I were king, I'd remove the "free" curb-side parking and put in proper protected bike lanes.
No, generally it works reasonably well. Everyone understands it's a small narrow street and that you need to share. Well, most people anyway. But small footpaths are definitely a downside, and unfortunately also without an easy fix in many cases.
If the space for the road is too small for one lane each way plus parallel parking and ample sidewalk and pedestrian safety. The order of operations for determining what should be build it is : Sidewalks, then if there is room for a road - pedestrian safety, then a single lane road (one way) then a two way road, then we can discuss street parking.
Or actually, it's perhaps not ironic, it's perhaps because of the limitations of the existing built environment in the UK, which prevented doing what has been done in many parts of the USA -- optimize for car speed over pedestrian safety.
the road diet is pretty common in the US where roads are extremely wide and plagued by speeding, and where the local political will allows realigning priorities towards safety. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_diet
In fact, it strikes me that "places where you shouldn't try and park a car because your car would probably be hit by a car" would make a pretty decent heuristic for places to start.
Spot on. I'd LOVE to start with bollards, here.
(author of the post. You're picking up exactly what I'm saying. TY.)
100% effective at reducing people driving over the edge or corners of property.
That would be great! I'm imagining a hypothetical future where the city partners with local artists to produce bollards in disguise, each one unique and one of a kind piece of art.
Stones can be also a form of bollard.
You could also turn bollards into art installation, which goes back to first line ;)
I suggest hi-vis vests, helmets, and appearing like you're in the right place just doing your job.
As long as cars have existed they have have been intruders into human spaces.
You seem to be reading into it something I simply didn't say.
It’s not a deep and personal criticism. I think it’s just a sign of how far our society is gone.
I said bollards along sidewalks -- that's literally where they go.
Perhaps you don't realize that roads and sidewalks predate cars? Before cars, streets were full of horses and carriages (and manure). Children were taught to be extremely careful because horses could kick or trample them and kill them.
Streets and sidewalks weren't an invention of the automobile era.
Automobiles fundamentally changed how our society conceived of the street.
it's up to each individual jurisdiction to decide how much they want to protect pedestrians, but when a pedestrian is killed by a car it should be acknowledged that a bollard probably could have prevented that, and not doing the thing that would have protected a pedestrian was a decision that was made for reasons such as "it's expensive" or "it's ugly". The people or organizations making decisions to not protect pedestrians should be held liable for choosing to endanger pedestrians.
too often, the response to a car running into a person or building is to either claim nothing can be done about it, or to blame the driver. no protections from cars is seen as a road designer following best practices, and they've done their job acceptably well. and that should be corrected.
The author writes as if people who work in this space are not smart. I’m pretty sure everyone realizes bollards saves lives, but are cities going to pay for it? Will constituents support it? Will people be okay either ballooning budgets for transportation works? Especially at the same time when people are asking for money for teachers or some other important issue. Paying for miles of bollards is an easy cut.
and this is, i think, the whole point. we're not stupid. we all know that bollards save pedestrian lives. for a relatively low cost. and we as a society have just decided nah, we're not gonna do that. it is, as you say "an easy cut". and some of us feel it should not be that way.
Precisely! This is why I keep suggesting charges of criminal negligence against city engineers, along side stripping them of sovereign immunity.
> Oh no, Josh, it sounds like you want someone to be responsible for the decisions they make!
Yes, yes I do.
(I wrote the article. You very correctly perceive that two-step choice. make it dangers, keep it dangerous.)
Setting aside entirely the absurdity of lining every street and road with bollards from a cost perspective, just the disruption alone of such a massive, decade-long public works project would no doubt enrage all street users alike. This would be the most unpopular policy move ever. Anyone arguing that it should be done anyway seems to deeply dislike the idea of democracy.
Now, the idea that convenience stores and such ought to be strongly encouraged to do bollards is another idea entirely and probably a good one.
Also, people should learn to f**king back in. It’s not that hard since backup cameras were invented. That would also eliminate ¾ of these idiots crashing into stores.
* if bollards are installed, more pedestrians may start to use the road (because pedestrians now perceive the road as safer)
* if bollards are installed, the average car speed may decrease (because motorists consciously or subconsciously weigh in the potential consequences of hitting the bollards. This has been shown to work with tree lines. Not sure about bollards, as they are less visually prominent).
In America, nobody is driving on a high-speed road only because they perceive it’s not safe enough to walk that road. They’re driving because we have physically laid out 95% of the continent’s surface area in such a way that walking anywhere is impractical. Danger from cars is one reason sure, but time impracticality is the main one. Biking is slightly better, but many people don’t choose to bike, say, 45 minutes to work — even if it would be is as fast as driving in traffic, because they don’t want to be drenched in sweat. Safety improvements won’t actually change that, not by the orders of magnitude that would make a big difference to anything.
It’s a problem of layout.
Half of which cars? Half of the posited 10,000 daily? Are you supposing that the bollards are installed in the middle of the carriageway, and painted the same colour as tarmac, and fitted with robotic machine-guns?
Bollards are not like trees. If you hit a tree in a car, the tree will not move. The tree will not fall over. TFA has some pictures of ancient cast-iron bollards, but those are only suitable for use with low-speed traffic in residential neighbourhoods. Modern bollards are made to have some 'give', as evidenced by the number of bollards I see that have indeed been knocked down. I have never seen a tree knocked down as the result of being hit by a motor-car.
Of course this is supposition and made-up numbers. And yes I was assuming immovable bollards. If they’re supposed to be there to keep pedestrians from harm, a bollard that lets a car push them 2 feet are an even more pointless waste of money than I was picturing.
at least in the US, the root issue is the same, that society has prioritized the fast movement of cars, and ever bigger cars, and so we're reaping what we sow.
You can't just ignore the consequences of vehicles hitting bollards, you have to weigh the likelihood of cars hitting them and the severity of those incidents against the likelihood of cars going past where the bollards would be and the severity of that scenario both when there are or aren't pedestrians that could be struck.
I'm not saying the status quo is correct, but I am saying that the author's tone does not strike confidence that they are approaching this from an objective and rational viewpoint that accounts for all the factors, at least in the case of bollards in locations where there's a good chance of high speed collisions with them.
But by my interpretation of the article the author derides city planners for perceived incompetence/prioritization of motorist safety, without considering any nuance.
I have plenty of nuance, here you go:
- https://zoningverydifferentthanours.substack.com - https://josh.works/issues-in-golden - https://josh.works/parking-in-golden - https://josh.works/about-roundabouts
I could go on. Do you want to start with Donald Shoup's [The High Cost of Free Parking](https://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Parking-Updated-Edition/dp/...) or my friend Alain Bertraud's beautiful book about urban _economics_ as the right frame of analysis for managing shared city resources: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39644188-order-without-d...
There's a deep and intimate relationship between american zoning laws, american mobility regimes, and the american ethnic cleansing of all non-whites: https://josh.works/full-copy-of-1922-atlanta-zone-plan
Tell me more about my lack of nuance. You might be right, fwiw, but it might kinda be the point. I'm not interested in a message of "your opposition of ethnic cleansing is _insufficiently nuanced_.", though it is slightly humorous.
Golden might be an exception though, I do remember seeing a lot of egregious issues back when I lived there.
To continue your analogy, without additional context your message, at least to my reading, devolved a bit into "just stop killing people, easy!" as a solution to ethnic cleansing.
Meanwhile there's often absolute zero empathy to people who are not going to have enhancements available to survive getting hit by a car.
That 'lack of empathy' has killed literally tens of thousands of children, as their parents plead before local municipal planners to do something, anything, to cause their kids to not die.
The planners say "meh, don't know don't care, but I'll sleep fine tonight."
That's not at all what I'm suggesting, just that the author, to my interpretation, has an overly reductionist take that doesn't acknowledge nuance.
By your logic, we should get rid of breakaway bolts for streetlights, etc. because drivers shouldn't hit the posts so in the event they do we should minimize damage to public utilities.
The idea that pedestrians should eat the risk to be a sacrifice zone for bad drivers is just bonkers.
Like here's an idiot cop who can't make a right turn. If that telephone pole hadn't stopped them, they would have creamed the bus stop. I 100% privilege the safety of people minding their own business waiting for a bus over a driver who seems to not be safe to operate a vehicle.
https://toronto.citynews.ca/2024/02/26/police-cruiser-crash-...
That was Feb. Here is a recent fatality last month.
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/pedestrian-killed-on-north-...
Here's another in February - https://torontosun.com/news/local-news/pedestrian-pinned-aft...
TBH - I favour a change in the laws. If you are driving along an occupied sidewalk, you should have a positive obligation to stay off it. That means both hands on the wheel, no drinking a coffee, no phones. If you wind up on the sidewalk, you have to prove there's good cause -- you got hit, cut off, etc. As it is, we consider in reasonable behaviour to just screw up and drive into a store.
we have to consider that bollards look dangerous to motorists. Thus they tend to drive slower and more carefully around them. That leads to lower risk of crashes.
So all in all, we would need more info to actually argue whether they represent more or fewer risks for motorists
That's why the US is full of corrugated steel barriers TFA maligns by association. They use tension cables mounted at the ends to provide the rigidity, requiring just two holes to dig instead of an entire ditch.
TFA does not malign those barriers, it is against their specific placement on the outer edge of sidewalks, rather than in between the sidewalk and the road.
Such placement implies minimizing scratches to the paint of a swerving car is more important than the lives and limbs of the average pedestrian.
P.S.: Or perhaps that cars must be given the ability to drive on top of the sidewalks in order to dodge other cars that are driving erratically, but I feel that logic is still kinda questionable.
I'm weighing _installing a bollard_ against _a person or building or both being destroyed by a regular and routine mistake_.
Bollards are hilariously cheap compared to every single other option, including "doing nothing except cleaning up the damage".
FWIW, I hate the corrugated steel barriers you mention, and they're not cheaper than bollards (if you're at all judicious and thoughtful about the bollard design and installation).
As another commenter mentioned, at the bottom of a post, there's a photo of 'strong' bollards, mid-installation, at the bottom of the post.
Why do you say that it's ironic that I link to the world bollard association?
Indeed, the cost of bollards is _dramatically_ lower than 'not bollards'.
Also, a one time spend for permanent safety, for years or decades. It's a slam dunk.
https://www.transportation.gov/office-policy/transportation-...
For 2022, the US Department of Transportation benchmarks that at $12.5 million and that's the number used to decide if something is cost-effective.
If one is proposing that society spends more on road-safety, that's more or less saying that $12.5 million should be higher. So what should it be? Are we ok with spending $20 million? $50 million? $100 million? Because that's the question we're implicitly answering when we decide if a proposal such as bollards are cost-effective.
Traffic engineers are against bollards because they reduce _driver_ safety, and increase damage to cars that lose control. Traffic engineers consider the sidewalk a buffer zone for cars. Notice that the guard rails are outside the sidewalk next time you go for a stroll.
You'll also notice that street lights, and other utility poles are now mounted with breakaway bolts so they sheer off rather that kill drivers. The fact that they might protect a pedestrian is considered a minor point.
> It's actually much crazier, but you will find it hard to believe.
I kept having this experience, as professional, licensed engineers would tell me, with their whole mouth, and a straight face, things like "we cannot protect pedestrians because it might hurt a car."
Me:
Who _the fuck_ do you think drives the cars?
The false dichotomy in america between 'pedestrians' and 'cars' is entirely downstream of the class-based ethnic cleansing ushered in by municipal planning agencies in the 1920s-1960s. They couldn't say "we don't want black people here", but they could say "we want only the kinds of people who drive cars _here_".
That's correct. I write as if they are not smart, because the other option is that _they are willfully malicious and committed to maintaining a status quo that is not in accordance with any other ethical framework that you and I routinely validate_.
> I’m pretty sure everyone realizes bollards saves lives
No, american municipal "planners" and "engineers" (the people who claim special authority over, and knowledge about, mobility networks) routinely state that bollards are dangerous and _kill people_, because a properly engineered and placed bollard would completely destroy a car, if the car hit it at any speed.
Basically, I'm ranting because the people who say "there can be no bollard here" justify their decision with "because it would function as a bollard, creating a 'shadow' or 'eddy' of safety behind it, but at the cost of being able to stop a car, and what if the vehicle driver was inconvenienced or annoyed?"
I'm not suggesting miles of bollards, I'm suggesting that every intersection have two bollards on each corner, pointing towards the street in such a way that if you are standing in the vicinity of the corner, you could be positioned relative to passing vehicle traffic with a bollard between you and it.
If there is money to pour concrete and place rebar in the ground, there is money to reshape some of the metal so it protrudes from the concrete instead of being _exclusively_ embedded within it.
Also, youre "who will pay for it" is simply opposing the energy of anyone trying to create safety. It's not welcome. You're straw-manning me, I didn't say 'miles of bollards', I'm saying 'that bollards exist should be professionally relevant to anyone who claims special knowledge of roads and cars, and it's dedignifying to pretend that they don't know better.'
Seems a bit extreme. If the incidence of pedestrian accidents is relatively low, it's perfectly reasonable to prioritize aesthetics and cost considerations.
[1] Keep in mind that a single new housing unit that reduces the owner's commute by 40 miles/day is good for eliminating more than half a million vehicle miles, in addition to all of its other benefits.
If a local government can get together a million bucks to install some bollards at one or two dangerous intersections, that's a win. That million dollars could never have been spent on a national emission reduction effort.
Whereas if you're asking whether they should remove other waste from the transportation budget, or any other budget, which is money spent with low value (e.g. overpaying to use a politically connected contractor), and use that money for cancer research, the answer is yes.
So why don't they do that?
And once you're already paying the cost to build and maintain the roads, you might as well use them for general purposes.
That's simply not true. If people combined the money they spent on car payments, insurance, the opportunity cost from lower average lifespan due to car emissions and children being run over by pick-up trucks, and used it on taxes for busses, we could very easily have a high availability public transit system, even in suburban hell.
Though of course to achieve maximum efficiency the government must create tax incentives for dense housing and tax disincentives for suburbs.
Your points about busses don't make sense - a bus takes up 2 or at most 3 car lengths on the road. One nearly empty bus with three people in it is thus more efficient from every angle, including time because those people aren't traffic.
Your idea that point to point travel is faster with cars is false: come to Houston and I'll show you why (traffic). You can get around cities and even suburbs with public transit much faster for all rides. A great example is the train from the airport to an Airbnb in NYC. Only a fool would attempt that in a cab to save time.
In other countries, soccer clubs hire busses and vans for meets and the like, or individual children simply take public transit to events. This was true in America in the 70s as well according to my grandpa.
Building a road for emergency vehicles and commercial deliveries is one thing. Just needs one or two lanes. But for every person and their car: Houston. 8 lane nightmares.
This is simply false. There is an unavoidable problem in suburbia: During parts of the day the number of vehicles that drive down certain roads is one vehicle with one occupant. Replacing a single-occupant car with a single-occupant bus is not more efficient. But running the bus only once every four to eight hours is unreasonable latency and objectively worse than the status quo where you can leave whenever you want.
> One nearly empty bus with three people in it is thus more efficient
You're assuming the bus will have more than one person on it. That's the unavoidable trade off. If there is one traveler every 90 minutes then getting a bus with three people on it would only be possible if there is only one bus every 4.5 hours.
> Your idea that point to point travel is faster with cars is false: come to Houston and I'll show you why (traffic).
Traffic is caused by bad design. Ironically it's the density separation that does this. You put all the density downtown but people live in the suburbs. Then there is no traffic in the suburbs but, because you need a car to leave the suburbs, unreasonable traffic downtown where everybody takes their cars, and on the main road that leads to downtown.
If people lived downtown then they wouldn't need to drive. But if every place was medium density instead of separation of high and low, you also wouldn't have a problem because some people could walk and the remaining traffic wouldn't all be concentrated in one place.
The problem is entirely caused by zoning rules and I'm not at all convinced we wouldn't be better off to utterly abolish all density restrictions whatsoever.
Politicians obviously and frequently don't get the math right (or even do the comparison), but that doesn't affect what they should do if they were making better policy choices, or what voters should ask for if they're doing the numbers.
1. taxes - I pay hefty taxes on fuel (in the UK) and tax on owning a car 2. insurance - I have to have an insurance policy that will pay for any damage to third parties. The payment for those externalities is pooled, but paid.
Not perfect, and not entirely, but a lot of it is paid.
> I think that it's in fact quite immature to act like we must always optimize for lives saved, no matter the cost and no matter how small the gain.
This is plainly incorrect, as Sweden and the Netherlands demonstrate.
They've chosen to lower the speed limit rather than add bollards.
- deliberately mix pedestrians, bicycles and vehicles
- remove all traffic signs, traffic lights and markings at intersections
https://bigthink.com/the-present/want-less-car-accidents-get...
Most of (new) Dutch road design is designed to give pedestrians and cyclists multiple safe options, while cars have to take the long way round. You can in theory still get basically anywhere with a car if you need, but often (especially in cities) it easier to walk/cycle/take the train/tram/metro. The result is that things can be closer to each other (no parking moat everywhere) so in the end the trip is shorter and safer for everyone, including people choosing to take the car.
Or to put it in another way: https://i.redd.it/auq600rozlsc1.png – pretty sure that road has very low cyclists and very low cycle accidents.
Of course not every road should have cycle lanes and bollards, but in general there's a huge lack of attention to the safety of anything that's a non-car.
A common retort is that bridges aren't built where most people swim across the river. It's a chicken and egg problem, and you are absolutely correct in what you address.
To use a popular HN quote: build it and they will come.
It might be true, but it might not be.
Many places in UK have put a lot of effort into providing cycle lanes, prioritising cyclists over cars and pedestrians to do so. It has not worked. They built it and no one came. Its pretty clear that the solution here is more and cheaper public transport. I think fixed price tickets giving you unlimited usage, better bus services to rail stations, etc. are the right approach.
I hate driving, but there are some places that it is impractical to go to without a car, and times when public transport is not available. These should be minimised.
But if that lane is only a small stretch of someone's commute, they won't suddenly start cycling because one of many stretches got a cycle lane. Or change which road they use if they already cycle.
But that lane is a start. When the next street and the next street and the next street all get lanes, you suddenly have not only lanes but a connected network. Only then do you get new cyclists or change of behavior.
London alone is an extreme counterexample:
- "Cycling levels continued to increase where we invested in new infrastructure, such as Cycleways."
- "13% increase in cycling between 2019 and 2022, or 155 per cent since 2000"
- "[In the 20 years before the pandemic] Among sustainable modes, cycling grew the fastest, with 126 per cent more daily cycling journeys, compared to a 68 per cent increase in public transport and a 15 per cent decrease in car journeys."
(https://content.tfl.gov.uk/cycling-action-plan.pdf)
And the kicker:
"Concerns over road danger and fear of collisions is the most common barrier to cycling, with 82 per cent of non-cyclists citing it as a deterrent. This is despite cycling becoming significantly safer in the last two decades. These concerns are common across all demographic groups, regardless of gender, age, ethnicity, or disability. However, women, children and older Londoners are more likely to be put off cycling by road danger and have a stronger preference for protection from motor traffic."
"[...] the number of collisions resulting in death or serious injuries for people cycling is higher for cars than any other vehicle types. Between 2017 and 2021, cars, private hire vehicles and taxis were involved in collisions resulting in 2,770 serious injuries and 12 fatalities, 65 per cent of all people killed or seriously injured while cycling. This reflects the fact that cars make up most of London’s motorised traffic."
I don’t have data on hand, but just a casual glance on an average day suggests that fewer than 1% of road users in my neighborhood are on bicycles—and that’s in Downtown Culver City, a mixed-use/pedestrian-friendly urbanist oasis. I’m sad to say that Culver City recently decided to dismantle its dedicated bike lanes, despite reported figures of >50% increases in bicycle traffic.[0]
I want more bicycle infrastructure, but I do not feel well-equipped to argue my case when even with the bike lanes in place, I’ve never seen two bicycles waiting at the same red light—all while car traffic is piled up as far as the eye can see.
[0]: https://ktla.com/news/local-news/culver-city-bike-lane-proje...
First off, the starting point matters. As you show with your example, trying these ideas in US cities is... hard to say the least. There is way too much cultural momentum behind car infrastructure.
As for the low bike lane usage you noticed, a lot of factors are involved.
1. You say "bike lane", is that a lane on the road, in effect shared with cars? Forget about high usage. The key is to get as much physical separation from traffic as possible. An easy rule of thumb is: would you let your 12-yo kid travel on said lanes on their own? If not, there's your answer. The paths must feel safe to people other than 20-40 y/o able-bodied males.
2. Once your paths are nice and separated, consider that the number of paths, how connected they are, and where they lead to all matter. A single path from nowhere to nowhere will not be used. 200 miles of paths can mean a strong network or 200 1 mile long disjoint paths.
3. You need the law to prioritize cyclists (and pedestrians for that matter). See another user's post on how the law is in the Netherlands: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29878551. The bare minimum would be giving cyclists on cycling paths the right of way at intersections.
4. The rest of infrastructure, especially intersections, must be built with cyclists in mind. The Netherlands is again king at this, e.g. https://youtu.be/g0F_hTGYa0Y?t=712. The difference between the thought Dutch traffic engineers put into designing for cyclists and the US engineers should be evident. At the very least, the bike path asphalt should be colored differently at intersections.
5. It takes time, especially somewhere as car-centric as the US. You can't expect people to switch to biking overnight.
6. Car-centric design stretches cities out, lowering density. Cycling and walking have limited range, so the average US city is going to inherently get lower cycling uptake.
There aren't sidewalks everywhere.
In farm country, not really.
Places in between are debatable - and as an inveterate pedestrian who's never learned to drive, I'd tend to be in favour of many of the places in between having sidewalks.
But still, a blanket "you can't afford roads" is a bit much.
What it costs you to do the job isn’t the reality of it, sadly.
Bollards like in the article are usually a few feet tall. Like, 30-40" tall, like 800+mm tall.
Note these are literally just the hemispheres, not any of the related mounting equipment. For these to actually be useful at stopping cars, you'll then want additional mounting equipment. So its not really $20 anyways for these things which as mentioned aren't even going to be very useful at stopping any cars.
Finally, shipping from Russia to the US is probably pretty expensive and difficult these days.
2) F-150 being considered a reasonable car is a whole another problem
3) They aren't there to protect against speeding cars, but to delineate parking lots and other similar places where a car might suddenly hit you
4) For the same reason they aren't usually fixed to the ground, they function as 100kg paperweights absorbing the car's momentum
5) Finally, I don't suggest importing them, but I don't have American concrete plant websites handy and I don't expect the economy of casting concrete hemispheres to be that different across countries.
2) Ok, but we shouldn't design our safety infrastructure based on some hypothetical, we should base it off the actual realities of the spaces the equipment will be operating in.
3) So essentially just those little parking stop blocks, not actual bollards.
4) 100kg isn't going to do much to stop a 1,300kg vehicle going even 20km/h. You think two people are going to stop a car going that fast? The car will just keep moving after hitting one of these, assuming it doesn't just go right over it.
5) You really don't think there's a difference in export/import valuations internationally or that manufacturing costs differ between countries? A chunk of concrete made in Russia has vastly different economics from a chunk of concrete made in Germany from a chunk of concrete made in the US.
For example, a small parking stop block in the US costs like $60+, before delivery costs.
https://www.nitterhousemasonry.com/our-products/concrete-par...
Here's an example of an actual concrete bollard sold in the US. Starting at $835/ea. Note these have a hollow core; they're kind of intended to be put on to a metal post embedded in the actual concrete because in an actual collision with a moving car the car would just push these out of the way. So really this is $835, after spending almost a thousand dollars on the metal post solidly integrated into the concrete slab below.
https://www.belson.com/Round-Concrete-Security-Bollards
An example of the kind of post these would slip over: (only $2,800USD if you buy 50-99!)
https://www.reliance-foundry.com/shop/bollard/crash-rated/r-...
These (or the cheaper ~$1,000 ones) are the kinds of bollards 7/11 would be installing in front of their stores to protect customers. Which, comparing $2,800USD to $20USD, you can see why I had skepticism.
There's ~9,400 7/11 locations in the US. Lets say they install 6 bollards per location, and they go with the about $1,000 option. That's ~$56 million in just the costs of the bollards, without factoring in delivery to 9,400 sites. Also without factoring in any of the labor to install them, or the other material costs like the new concrete for the pad they're embedding into or the concrete filling the post. And the material cost for these bollards are cheap compared to paying the people to actually plan them, source them, install them, paint them, and inspect them. So realistically I'd imagine it would cost 7/11 probably at least a couple hundred million dollars to just install six new bollards at every one of their US locations.
I think it's reasonable for a non-US person to discuss safety infrastructure based on the actual realities of non-US spaces - I agree that things need scaling up to work equivalently on your side of the pond but europe is not actually a hypothetical :)
Remember that a combination of stupidly written emissions regulations and the ... uniqueness ... of the USian psyche lead between them to your vehicles being comically huge to the rest of the world.
The first thought that comes to mind for a european when we see an F-150 is to feel sorry for the owner's girlfriend.
> Bollard posts typically measure between 90 and 130 centimetres in height.
https://www.bollardsdirect.co.uk/blogs/news/guide-to-bollard...
90cm ~= 35", so roughly the height I was talking about before. Most other countries I've visited had bollards at ~90cm as well. Do you really see a lot of 20cm bollards around that are to actually stop a car and not just deter people from driving over something?
If you drive a car, you increase the risk of cyclists and pedestrians to get hurt or killed. Hurting or killing pedestrians also harms the society in several ways. Tax the car sales appropriately to the risk imposed on individuals and the society and you have enough money for bollards.
[0] https://fortune.com/2024/02/28/how-expensive-new-used-cars-o...
That statement is both too generic and too specific. It's mainly driven by narrow sentiment, perhaps understandably since we're all pedestrians, especially the "choosing" part.
"Endangering" is very generic. Does a functionality in your software that could be beneficial to or facilitate endangering people but you chose not to disable it fit the assessment? Is E2EE helping criminals endanger people, or protecting honest people?
"Pedestrian" is too specific, there's nothing exceptional about pedestrians compared to any other mode of transportation so the statement above would need to be extended to "any decisions that did not protect people". And then it becomes very generic again.
i explicitly said bollards should be up to the jurisdiction. it's reasonable to prioritize other things. that's fine. all i'm saying is that decision should be intentional.
if you're going to make a decision to prioritize aesthetics or cost, it should actually be a decision that gets made somewhere along the line. the status quo is that "should we install bollards here" is not even a question that gets asked for most applications, whether the answer to that question is yes or no.
And it isn't as reasonable as it seems to hold the designer liable for statistically inevitable deaths. Everyone dies. Statistically, someone will die in your shop, car park or whatever sooner or later. At some point engineers are allowed to say "this is rare enough" and accept a certain level of collateral damage in their designs - if society can't accept this then it can't have engineered designs for a bunch of things. The costs would be impossibly high and we'd probably have to do away with driving as a mode of transport; it is too risky. It is statistically inevitable that someone will kill themselves on the bollards.
No, the obvious engineering solution is to ban cars, the worst means of transporting humans ever conceived, and design for pedestrians only. If we want motorized vehicles sharing space anywhere near pedestrians, they should be operated only by highly trained professionals (e.g. taxi drivers with retest licensing requirements, commercial truck drivers, bus drivers, etc), or, by vehicles on rails (subways, trolleys, trains).
If we added mandatory formal methods use (mathematically proving the code's invariants) during development, and gave full criminal liability to the managers in charge of the project when someone is injured/killed, then it probably would, but we clearly aren't there yet.
Yes, maybe someone will walk in to a bollard once every 10 years and die. It's noting compared to the tens or hundreds of thousands of people dying every years from cars (direct accidents, air pollution, microplastic pollution), never mind the environmental impact, city design impact, and many people "merely" injured rathter than killed. There is no equivalence here on any level.
And the "obvious" solution is to ban pedestrians? I don't even...
If you want a grey area, we're already in one. How do you want to navigate it? How do you want to work out where the level should be? And why do you feel that is better than the current status quo?
We can always say "do more", but without deciding what we're optimising too before building the designs it just ends up with a series of knee-jerks every time there is an accident until cars or pedestrians are banned. We need to set a tolerance for accidents, and there needs to be an argument for why it isn't the current level of tolerance that we are displaying.
No one claimed that it's not; they just said "let's have a wee bit more protection, which rarely exists today, because thousands of people are dying needlessly every year". That's it. You're argueing on your own against things that were never said.
I have no interest in continuing this because I no longer believe you're engaging in good faith but are merely trying to pull some "gotcha" zinger or whatever. Talking to has all the appearances of being utterly pointless because you seem unable or unwilling to read what's being said.
We add a wee bit more protection. Maybe it cuts the rate by 80%. Why do you think it is acceptable to stop adding protection? We've already added protections like that, the rate has already been cut 80%, and people are still saying it should drop.
You're applying a knee jerk algorithm - asking for increases in the controls every time you see something you don't like. That path ends with complete isolation of cars and pedestrians, ie, pedestrians and cars can't occupy anything that would reasonably be seen as the same space. Otherwise you'll keep seeing things you don't like and there will always be more that can be done.
There isn't any reason the rate has to be positive. We can ban pedestrians from being anywhere near cars. If you're not happy with this positive rate, what rate do you want and why? Or even how do you want it determined?
There's no algorithm to make this decision. It is best to do it iteratively, intelligently, and wisely. You use a bit of science and statistics, read the room to make a vibes-based analysis of what people want, present the public with a proposal that matches their principles with your own principles, and to finally look at the results after some time. You mention yourself what is basically the 'optimal engineering outcome' is apparently to eliminate pedestrians altogether. If that's what engineering wants, then engineering is wrong.
That would be pretty stupid. We should do what I'm doing instead and focusing on what the acceptable rate of accidents is.
If you check you'll notice I've talked about literally 0 "what ifs" or hypothetical situations beyond picking an arbitrary 80% to showcase that even an arbitrarily good improvement won't make a difference to the process of demanding improvement [0].
But if we're going to demand 0 deaths then the obvious solution is to completely isolate cars and pedestrians. I've seen some similar work to this in the past, and a lot of money thrown at it didn't come up with a better solution for perfect safety. Even isolation won't actually achieve a perfect rate, but it gets it low enough that people won't cotton on for a few decades and that has to do.
If we're not demanding 0 deaths, then the process we use can't be "see a death -> demand improvements". That is like a while loop with no stopping condition - and we're implicitly heading to 0 with it anyway so we may as well short circuit the needless deaths along the way. Someone needs to explain what the target rate is, or how to figure it out.
> It is best to do it iteratively, intelligently, and wisely.
This is road engineering. Engineers have been building roads for 3 millennia, roads for motor vehicles for more than a century and modern statistics has been settled enough for this sort of work for about the same length of time.
We're way past the point where we need to iterate. Say what is acceptable and the engineers will build it. That, in fact, is likely what happened to get the current rate of deaths and injury - someone did a cost benefit and tried to set design standards as close as possible to an optimum point.
If you want them to optimise for something, tell them what you want and they can build it. There is no need to play games with the civil engineers, it is cheaper to just be upfront with design constraints.
[0] If anything, it makes than backlash worse. I've seen people demand Boeing get nationalised for a safety record that is still better than what happens on public roads. The consensus position seems to be investigations and punishments for Boeing management. There is no pleasing some people.
Now you’re thinking in portals
in New York alone there were three million pounds of horse feces being produced every day in 1894. https://danszczesny.substack.com/p/the-great-horse-manure-cr...
One day, as I was walking to the local grocery store while choking in said gases, I heard a guy say this to his kid: “Quick, let’s get into the car because the air’s horrible”. Can you appreciate how surreal and fucked up this is, that people can just pull up somewhere in their rolling couches, pump stinky toxic shit into the air, and then they, the people who do that, get to be protected from it while pedestrians and cyclists have to breathe it all in?
So yes, over choking in fumes that will probably give you cancer, I absolutely would choose horse manure that might be a biohazard if you rub your face in it but is otherwise completely harmless. Luckily though, this is all a false dichotomy thanks to the invention of the so-called bicycle.
I don't think you appreciate the scale we're talking about. If you replaced all cars with horses now, we'd be quite literally drowning in horse manure. Nothing resembling modernity is possible with horses being the primary mode of transportation. Or bicycles, for that matter.
> Luckily though, this is all a false dichotomy thanks to the invention of the so-called bicycle.
Let me know when bicycles can deliver food to cities or move heavy construction equipment.
> Can you appreciate how surreal and fucked up this is, that people can just pull up somewhere in their rolling couches, pump stinky toxic shit into the air, and then they, the people who do that, get to be protected from it while pedestrians and cyclists have to breathe it all in?
Not nice, but it's just an usual case of people reinforcing the problem by trying to shield themselves from it. Tragedy of the commons.
Amsterdam has somehow managed to solve it (with bikes, not horses). I think the biggest blocker is people unwilling to give up their unhealthy lifestyles. But there must be a way out of that. Amsterdam used to be a car-centric city too.
> Let me know when bicycles can deliver food to cities
They’re already doing that in Hungary, I thought this was commonplace everywhere.
I do admit that cars have many valid use cases, but everyday personal transportation is rarely one of them. They are massively overused. Most of the problems cars solve were caused by cars to begin with, and most of the problems caused by cars are exacerbated by cars instead of being solved by them. It’s a negative spiral.
OP's talking about delivering food in wholesale boxes to grocery stores, not pizza deliveries to apartment blocks.
All those cars out there are delivering food and/or moving heavy construction equipment? I'll be damned.
The incredibly sad thing is, you're just so used to the horrible smell, you don't notice it anymore. Just like smokers who do not think they smell.
one could, for example, make light poles actually intended to wreck cars that trespass into pedestrian spaces. Target's bollards look decent IMO.
So I'd argue that to avoid competing objectives/priorities one should not combine bollards and light poles, otherwise one goal or the other will get compromised, quite possibly in opposite way than they should for given location.
Essentially, making them separate is a physical infrastructure form of making incorrect states non-representable.
Huh, that's a great example, because it also shows why making light poles double as bollards is an alluring idea. A scenario I see somewhat often is when you need to change some existing code working on a piece of state, because now that piece of state actually has two mutually exclusive substates. Say, Auth = {username, password} becomes Auth = {username, password or path to certificate }.
The easy solution would be to add the new properties and perhaps mark them and their conflicting counterparts optional - this means you have to refactor only the type definition and maaaybe some points of use of the now-conflicting substate. In our example, Auth = {username, password?, certificate? = nullopt}.
The proper solution would be to "make incorrect states non-representable", representing the substates directly -- Auth = {username, {password | certificate }. Or perhaps, Auth = {PasswordAuth | CertificateAuth}, PasswordAuth = {username, password}, CertificateAuth = {username, path to certificate}. Now this is a much more substantial change, and you'll end up touching and possibly changing every place Auth is used.
Under resource constraints (such as time), the easy option is very, very tempting :).
Streets and roads must be designed differently, but I see stroads in the US that are multilane roads with the only nod to safety towards anyone outside a car being low posted speed limits, incongruent with the design safe speed of the road itself.
OTOH a bollard has an explicit different purpose that makes it easy to design for it.
Which makes sense...you have thousands of drunk pedestrians and lots of cars on a busy/giant two way street with potential drunk drivers as well.
- shitting on the city engineer of Loveland, a public servant.
- taking a break from bollards to remind the audience about his good feminism.
- taking time to webster the definition of bollards and dance around the idea of them, but never once mentions ASTM F3016 vs. ASTM F2656 or other standard test methods for bollards.
we stay out of the technical here because youre not being taught, youre being told about bollards by the 21st century equivalent of a fucking victorian.
In some areas like Manhattan, where the average economic value of a life may be higher in some areas, bollards may be a good investment, if for example they save the lives of some high net worth individuals.
This does not reflect my personal opinion though so please don’t downvote me. I value all human life highly, except of course rapists and murderers, etc.
The death cult aspect of it is assigning value of life based on capitalist net worth.
> You are putting a finite dollar value on your own life each time you get out of the bed, or cross the street.
Can you explain how? I'm extremely confident I've never put a dollar value on my or anyone else's life. To me, human life is immeasurably valuable.
Say you decide to grab a coffee from a coffee shop. You need to cross a busy street for that. If the coffee costs $5, and the chance of you getting killed by crossing the street is 1 in 100 000, then by getting that coffee you demonstrate you value your life at less than $500 000 --- value of life * probability of death < cost of coffee.
Of course I make risk assessments but they have nothing to do with money. You might try to measure the value of my life in dollars by measuring my risk assessments, but because I'm irrational and human you won't get very far I don't think, and besides, dollar value doesn't really correlate well with actual value anyway.
I'm not arguing that you're running this calculation in your head, nor that any of us makes rational risk assessments. My point is that every such assessment implied by doing anything implicitly establishes a dollar value for life, that this value is always finite and must be so, and that you can learn something from looking at them in aggregate.
Doesn't this only work if there's consensus on these dollar values? So first of all, weird anarchists like me are a lost cause, because we refuse to participate in measuring human lives in dollars. You might then argue that's fine, normal people like yourself will continue to measure things in dollars, however I'd point out, that even normal people like yourself fail to achieve consensus on dollar values for things like risks, lives, etc. From where I stand, it all looks very arbitrary, and completely detached from any kind of reality.
For example, real estate. Many would say the market finds the "real value" of a house. It's so expensive right now, because we don't have that many houses to live in. Right? Yet rent is rising higher against salaries year on year: https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/average-rent-by-yea... despite vacancies seeming to never move below 4% and above 7% https://en.macromicro.me/charts/22864/us-house-vacancy . And now we find out some of the reasons for that are collusion among landlords and agencies: https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-r... (reported on as early as 2022).
So if you normal folks can't even decide on the value of the house (or stock, or NFT, or pokemon card), or can simply manipulate this value, why should it be believed when you claim to have figured out the value of a human life? Especially because none of these measurements take into considerations things that actually matter for humans, e.g., that housing is necessary for a reasonably comfortable life and should simply be guaranteed in a society this wealthy?
There's not a single global dollar value for a life; a value can be established in context of some specific things, and then there is consensus pretty much by definition.
The whole point here is to make safety measures comparable to other important expenses. You can't say whether they're more or less important without a common base of comparison, and you can't run the budget assuming a life has infinite value, because then you'll have zero funds for anything. So, when you do a consideration like: a marginal extra bollard costs $10k, and saves one life per year, how many more bollards should we fund from our finite budget, where this money would otherwise go to fund schools or social programs? If you say "all of them", then you won't have schools.
That same life may have different value when different tradeoffs are considered, e.g. when discussing automotive safety (see the infamous case of recalls), or ordering evacuation of a city (you need to compare lives saved from a probable calamity vs. total destruction of local economy), etc.
And on a more general point, there is no single fixed thing as "monetary value" of a thing. The price is always a consensus of market forces, a measurement of a dynamic system. The value of your house may be $4M if you're selling now, or $1M if you want to sell it right right now, or just $0 if you literally can't find a buyer for it. Fixed price is an illusion.
Since I don't think about life that way, I'm not sure it works.
Besides, money doesn't correlate with time spent at all. Sometimes I make lots of money per hour, sometimes I don't, but every second bill gates does nothing he makes huge amounts of money per hour. It would be absurd to suggest his life is more valuable than mine as a result, wouldn't it? Just doesn't make any sense.
But it’s the opposite, they’re really, really dumb and shallow thoughts. Obviously capitalistic value is not the same thing as human value and trying to say they are is just silly.
However, I’d rather focus on the parent comment. When you think about it, it’s really really shallow and narrowly focused. The value of Manhattan is far more than “wealthy people do stuff here”, there is value around every street, there is value in general safety, there’s value in emotional connections like nostalgia and family ties. The equation is far more complex.
It’s also interesting because this is what libertarians do all the time. They’ll say things like “why should i pay for that street if i don’t use it?” And don’t think about nth-order effects like maybe the people who do use that street might indirectly bring value to your life. Perhaps grocery items get delivered that way for example.
- guardrails should always be between the sidewalk and the road. Not after the sidewalk
- in places where statistical data shows collision or where there's a high risk of cars going on the sidewalk, bollards should be installed. A prime example is in parking lots where cars park facing the sidewalk.
Presumably in cities with enough traffic it's possible to empirically measure number of times a car jumps the curb per year, but in other areas maybe not?
> If so, it's an interesting idea, but I also can't help but think that would not just be expensive, but also possibly extremely ugly.
We do this in London and it's fine. I don't know if it's a legal requirement, but car parks have barriers around them and pavements are protected with bollards and occasionally fences.
The cost is simply factored into construction and some effort is made to make them blend in with the surrounding area.
> My biggest question is: is the author arguing that there should be spaced bollards along literally every sidewalk in the country/world, and around all edges of every parking lot?
Absolutely not, not even close.
I'm suggesting that wherever there are cars parking while pointed at buildings, considering them as you would a loaded gun. If you don't feel comfortable with them pointed at your building, being willing to drive _through_ the thing, if the vehicle operator makes a mistake, _add a bollard or a large rock or a strong art installation or anything that keeps the vehicle from being able to drive into the building_.
I'm further condemning the entire American transportation planning industry that _expends effort to prevent individuals from adding safety to their own paths, routes, commuting habits_.
It's interesting that you go straight to costs, which makes me think you don't viscerally feel the danger _you_ are routinely exposed to by unprotected exposure to cars. Otherwise, you'd get it.
That said, the costs of _not_ doing anything are well-established. Entire industries exist to prevent occasional bad things from happening, and their ethical standing is sound. Insurance of all kinds, fire extinguishers, fire detectors, fire suppression systems, seat belts, air bags, guard rails, term life insurance plans, cargo insurance, and more.
It's also ugly, however, to see car parts and oils and fuels sprayed about an intersection. It's also ugly to see the human carnage that cars leave behind them. I don't like seeing the insides of a body on the outside, spread across the ground.
It's a shame that so many US cities are focused on installing pseudo-bollards and flexible strips of plastic, rather than putting down permanent protections for cyclists and pedestrians. One recent example of this is NYC's Gowanus[1]: they're redeveloping the area for residential use, including bike lanes and daylighting down 4th avenue (historically a high-volume, industrial avenue). But these bike lanes and daylight zones are protected only by plastic bollards, which even a sedan can comfortably park over.
[1]: https://www.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/plans-studi...
I don't object to the idea that EMS or other emergency responders might need roadside access. From my experience, many European cities do this admirably by having retractable bollards embedded in the street, or by redesigning streets to have a bollard-free section (e.g. by the fire hydrant, where it's already illegal to park or idle).
(There's also the irony of not placing bollards into a street crossing because emergency services might need it, when bollards might prevent the need for many emergency responses.)
[1]: https://www.reliance-foundry.com/bollard/flexible-bendable
I doubt that? If a bollard stops a car which would have caused an emergency that is often reason enough for an emergency response in itself. It doesn’t change the number of emergency calls, just changes the form of the emergency.
Also the whole argument you are making is silly. A bollard on a street crossing can prevent some kind of emergencies (the kind a runaway vehicle would cause). It absolutely does nothing to prevent other kind of emergencies (like fires caused by faulty wires, or hearth attacks) but might lenghten the response time for those. There would be maybe some form of irony if emergency responses were only required because of runaway cars, but that is far from the case.
A somewhat common automotive accident in NYC is one where a driver falls asleep or unconscious at the wheel, causing (or nearly causing) a mass casualty event on a sidewalk. These kinds of tragedies can happen at low speeds, since the car rolls forwards silently over the curb and hits pedestrians or cyclists from behind. Bollards would stop this, just like they would stop cyclists from being backed into by trucks in bike lanes, and pedestrians from being sideswept on non-daylit corners, etc.
Of course, these are contrived examples. But the larger phenomenon holds: a single driver injured after collision with a bollard requires fewer emergency resources than a driver plus pedestrians injured after collision with a building.
I'll point out again: other cities have solutions for this that clearly work without impeding emergency response. Compare London's emergency response times[1] to NYC's[2].
[1]: https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-do...
[2]: https://www.nyc.gov/site/911reporting/reports/end-to-end-res...
That's a commitment to walk-drive balance
Anyway. Idly chatting with the driver, I asked 'I wonder how sturdy those are, what happens if someone hits them?' A minute or two later, when there was no oncoming traffic, the driver jerked the wheel and put the van in the center of the road. BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM at 60 mph. Then back in our lane, glances in the rearview mirror, and calmly announces that they go down and stay down.
I nearly crapped myself laughing. What a crazy SOB. Still makes me chuckle at the memory, 30 years later.
There is no point to that story, really, although perhaps that modern flexible bollards like the ones you link to claim to stand back up if they get hit. But do they, if the car is doing 60 mph? Hmmm. Lucky for those bollards, I don't drive a big ugly blue Air Force van. And I'm too much of a rule follower.
Eventually they break off.
Staggering bollards and fake bollards could be an effective cost-saving measure, if for some reason the city finds bollards too expensive to put everywhere. If the drivers know that 10-20% of the bollards are the real deal, they'd steer clear of all of them.
https://shur-tite.com/WebData/images/ca74404b-a476-4826-8e47...
They're somewhere in between a line and a fixed bollard. They are more effective at encouraging drivers to voluntarily stay in their lane than a line is, but they still don't do anything to prevent vehicles from crossing in emergency situations, accidents, or people who don't care about the paint on their car. It would be cost prohibitive to replace this usage with retractable bollards because these often extend for long distances.
There's a T-intersection near my house which is more of a 30°/150° split, and I'm glad they finally upgraded to those not-quite-barriers: It has reduced the number of people who were ignoring the stop-sign and driving straight through as if it were just a curve in the road, which could easily cause head-on collisions. (The gore-point is also paved, not a raised curb.)
Even so, some of the sticks have been lost to attrition now, and I kinda wish they'd get replaced with much heavier ones guaranteed to leave big dents and scratches...
NotJustBikes just posted another video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRbnBc-97Ps) about the speed limit but touching on the same issue - less speed x less mass = safer environment -> less need for physical barriers (they even removed some street lights). Honestly, there wouldn't be that much need for bollard is majority of cars would be city-car like the one in 4:39 min (https://youtu.be/JRbnBc-97Ps?t=279)
Twenty is plenty and I don't see why that can't apply to rural roads too. For too long we have had motorists be able to terrorise any other lifeform off the road in the countryside.
If you have dedicated car only infrastructure then that is one thing, but everywhere else, twenty is plenty. This might seem absurd given the lack of cyclists on the road, but it will foster growth of lightweight EVs rather than monster tanks.
As a cyclist I want to see all the speed bumps, traffic lights, bollards and much else banished. Bring back trees, hedges and greenery. Whenever I see footage of places in China I see fantastic landscaping and wonder why we have to have broken glass, graffiti and rubble.
I am with NotJustBikes all the way.
That said, two cars hitting each other's large crumple zones is probably safer than a car hitting a bollard or something else unforgiving.
> It's a symptom of american culture being highly individualistic and selfish.
Your comment is a bit on the nose.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/1994-_Mo...
See also this chart: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatalit...
Showing per capita deaths coming down from a car-boom peak of 27 in 1969 down to 11 by the 20-teens.
Vastly, vastly, safer.
That's not even getting into how things like energy absorbing bumpers have turned low speed collisions that might have results in injuries 50 or 60 years ago are now non-events. (probably no seat belts, certainly no shoulder belt, and the dash is full of chrome and zero padding)
Clearly not: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/road-users/pedestr...
And again, prior to the covid years the numbers show a DECREASE from 1990 up until 2019.
So, what was the point you were trying to make here exactly?
Typical HN anti-car sentiment without hard grounding in facts.
Regardless, here's a different source, search for "Pedestrian deaths per 100,000 people by age, 1975-2021": https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedes...
The 2021 death rate is 2.2, that's the same as what it was in 1993. Looks like it's only gotten worse since then too: https://www.ghsa.org/resources/Pedestrians24
The point remains the same, vulnerable road user deaths are the more important statistic and it's not looking good whatsoever.
The Car Obesity Crisis in USA is related at least partially to tricking NHTSA regulations related to mileage (IIRC), which take into account platform size of the car, which in turn drives other design concerns.
Car manufacturers had a lightbulb moment and started making regular cars FUCKING HUGE, thus slipping into the magical weight bracket.
A Smart car starts around 1500 lbs without driver. Something like a Smart fourtwo can be as much as 2300 lbs.
No person or bike is going to stand a chance against a vehicle weighing an order of magnitude more, even if they look visually smaller.
The idea that Smart car sized vehicles would remove the need for bollards is not realistic at all.
You also can’t judge vehicle safety by appearance. There are a lot of lightweight, small, low front end cars that actually have poor pedestrian crash ratings because the low front end takes people out at the knees. The Honda S2000 is a classic example.
A lot of the internet anti-car anger likes to idolize things like Smart Cars as solutions to everything, but the reality is that any time you have a vehicle weighing an order of magnitude more than a human capable of traveling at 40mph in a matter of seconds, humans don’t stand a chance against it in an impact. Smart cars are great for parking and fuel efficiency, but the idea that they would automatically solve pedestrian safety issues as well is just fantasy. Marginal improvement? Sure. Solution that removes the need for bollards? Definitely not.
Not disagreeing with your overall point, but vehicle size and weight still contribute an awful lot to the >40000 vehicle fatalities in the US each year.
About half of all pedestrian deaths are caused by drunk driving, so that's another relatively low hanging fruit we could aim for if we really had the political will to do so.
But other comment suggesting to lower it to 20mph (or 10??) is egregious. It's standard for a pendulum to swing from an extreme to an extreme I guess.
If you want to step on it, leave the city. Most non-access roads in non-built-up areas are 50mph, and more for motorways. Some major urban thoroughfares are also 45mph.
If there is a tree between me and a speeding car, I would much rather it be a Smart car than just about any other car.
Also, bumpers on pickups are actually pretty low. Any normal bollard or concrete planter is going to be pretty effective. No pickup is going to drive over something like that.
The scenario I was discussing is when there isn’t a bollard but some other barrier specifically designed to stop a vehicle.
A higher center of gravity and larger wheels will certainly help get over many obstacles that would otherwise stop a smart car.
If you had to bet which car was more likely to be deflected by a curb strike and which would not, I have a hard time believing you would put your money on a truck vs a small car.
This is another area where looks can be deceiving. Those large vehicles also have large frontal areas and large crumple zones to absorb impacts.
Those small smart cars have small frontal areas and relatively rigid frames because they can’t crumple on impact.
It’s not hard to imagine scenarios where a small, narrow smart car would literally slip between obstacles where a larger vehicle would get hung up on them. This is especially true for typical bollard spacing.
> If there is a tree between me and a speeding car, I would much rather it be a Smart car than just about any other car.
I think you’re overestimating the difference it would make. Like I said above, the smaller area of a smart car makes it less likely to actually catch the tree (by definition) and the relatively rigid frame isn’t doing much to dissipate the energy it’s carrying.
Looks can be deceiving. I know everyone wants to believe smart cars are super safe alternatives, but any of these thousand pound vehicles isn’t going to be good to go up against. The differences are more nuanced than your eyes would tell you.
I would love to see something more than conjecture about a VERY unintuitive idea.
Newton was pretty adamant that an object weighing 5k lbs (an F-150) would impart quite a bit more force than an object weighing 2k pounds (an economy car).
If all of the force is being imparted into a planter, a tree, or the front of a 7-eleven, I'm still inclined to believe that more force, higher off the ground, is going to matter a whole lot more than a few extra square feet. One way or another the energy is going somewhere, and there is A LOT more energy in a pickup truck.
Also, keep in mind, the crumple zone protects the passenger compartment, not the object being hit. The bumper of an f150 is right in front of a ladder frame to which several thousand pounds of iron machinery is bolted.
I'll still take the smaller, faster stopping, more maneuverable, less energetic battering ram.
You'd think with the massive size compromises you'd get a lot better mileage tradeoff. Maybe they'll release a hybrid version and get some real impressive mileage.
Yes, colission with Smart would still be probably quite nasty but probably way less than with F-150.
Just for the kicks of it: https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/smart-fortwo-2014-3...
In case of Ford it is like hitting vertical wall while in Smart case you have angle which limits impact surface.
(and last but not least: with city-cars (and not oversized bulky pseudo-suvs) you can actually see over the car, as they tend to be lower, to orient yourself better on the situation on the street)
"Across 2000-2019 I estimate that 8,131 pedestrian lives would have been saved if all light trucks had been cars. The reduction would be equal to avoiding 9.5% of all pedestrian deaths"
https://www.justintyndall.com/uploads/2/8/5/5/28559839/tynda...
Other countries who have seen large increases in SUV ownership (i.e. other parts of the anglosphere) have still reduced pedestrian fatalities.
https://www.ft.com/content/9c936d97-5088-4edd-a8bd-628f7c7bb...
And the NYTimes found that pedestrian fatalities only increased at night, not during the day, suggesting vehicle size isn't the primary factor.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/11/upshot/nightt...
Even a microcar still weighs 350kg
https://www.carmagazine.co.uk/car-reviews/microcar/microcar-...
Even a circa 1995 era car moving at 32mph has a 25% fatality rate on pedestrians.
https://aaafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/2011Ped...
Even at 23mph there is still a 10% fatality rate. At 16mph there's a 10% risk of severe injury. So you'd need to have residential speed limits something under 20mph and probably under 15mph. Right now residential speed limits in the US are 30-35mph in most jurisdictions. With some places making it actually illegal to go slower than 20mph. And those speed limits largely unenforced anyway, as anyone with children who play outside can tell you.
Wales did a 20mph in all urban areas thing and it's been a bit mixed I think. Some people ok, some changing back.
For example, the Scottish Parliament has a number of benches and ornamental ponds: https://maps.app.goo.gl/biSpACmL1fSihqPL7. Or there's the classic ARSENAL: https://maps.app.goo.gl/xopzGGu8rUdWaTCe8.
We're even getting better at providing more than merely paint as protection for cyclists: https://maps.app.goo.gl/2VT3SbjrK27w72826.
https://www.driveway.com/learn/selling-trading-in/what-paper...
The use of cars in the US is almost entirely unregulated by the US government. And for the requirements imposed by state authorities, many of them are implemented as prerequisites for registration, not for ownership.
You can walk up to a dealership or car rental place and drive off in minutes. You can't walk into a Walmart and out with an AR-15, much as whatever propaganda you've been watching might imply that.
I would say that the UK is awful at implementing separated infrastructure for cyclists (and e-scooters etc). That picture is an example as the cycle lane on the opposite side of the road appears to have had bollards removed. Also, there's no bollards where the traffic island is located and that's exactly where you'd want more protection from drivers as they're likely to be swerving in towards the cycle lane.
"Not merely paint" is a really low bar.
To make it worse, there's lots of places where pedestrians and cyclists would inevitably cross paths to get to the traffic lights and of course there's no indication of where people should cross the cycle lanes.
Unfortunately, Google streetview is too old for me to provide an illustration of how bad it is.
There's some amount of malicious joy as errant cars are punished by contact with bollards, as well as the gratitude for safety of pedestrians this purchases.
It might be worth a scroll through:
But bollards on bike paths can be deadly to cyclist. My area used to place them at path-street crossings, to keep cars from turning onto the bike path, but after a few cyclists clipped them and died, the bollards were removed. The incidence of cars turning onto the bike path is low enough they weren’t worth the risk to non-cars.
The primary bike path that I use for commuting is the Hudson River Bike Path in Lower Manhattan, and there are bollards there at every intersection as a reaction to this terrorist attack: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/sayfullo-saipov-be-sent....
I sometimes find the bollards annoying, but I can't disagree with the city for placing them after that...
Still, I guess they’re better than the concrete jersey barriers they installed initially, and still have in some places along that route.
The amount of stupid cycling infrastructure I see is pretty mind-blowing. It’s very obvious traffic engineers have zero interest in actually building multi-model infrastructure, instead just doing a box-checking exercise to get those federal road dollars.
That doesn't make sense to me. The entire reason the bollard exists is to stop cars from turning into the bike path.
It has nothing to do with non-thinking engineers. It has nothing to do with saving money.
It's because if there's space for a car to fit between them, then the bollards will not fulfill their one and only purpose.
EDIT: Note that I'm not saying that it's a good design. But I am saying it didn't come about for the reasons you're saying.
- Let's put bollards on the bike path to prevent car entry
- Ok, lets put them on the sides, out of the way.
- Oh no, that won't work, the trail is 10' wide, so cars can fit through
- Ok, lets put one in the middle, that'll keep cars out.
- Thought process ends here, no thought given to other users of the infrastructure.
Still, it happens, and the designer of the infrastructure must be aware of that.
To take the devil's advocate role, people will keep traveling long after they exhausted their ability to pay attention, and/or keep reasonable distance from the next one in the front.
While this is true, we haven’t stopped selling knives because a few people use them irresponsibly. By the same token, we shouldn’t discount infrastructure because a few people drive when they shouldn’t.
You can also twist the bollard when you are bored. The downside is that it probably doesn't stop a car with enough speed.
That's better than a bollard. It keeps cars off the sidewalk, but a glancing collision won't total the car.
Redwood City is finishing up the bollard project from hell.[1] (The picture shows a similar bollard, not the Redwood City installation.) It's taken a full year to install two moving bollards. There's an underground parking garage under the street, so the bollards can't retract into the ground. So an unusual type of bollard that moves sideways was installed. Even that requires a base about six inches thick, which in turn requires a foundation. Construction couldn't go down more than a few inches. So about 50 feet of street, paved with decorative blocks, was torn up, raised, re-graded, the prefabricated bollard unit installed, and the vicinity repaved, with new drainage.
Who would place them at a red light?
In any case, if you are following another vehicle so closely that you cannot see a hazard in the road in front of you, it is your fault for hitting that hazard (by law in most places).
https://westevan.org/bollards/cannonbollards3.htm
> The one on the right is a real cannon outside the main gate into the original Chatham Dockyard. It is one of a pair (see the gateway photograph in the gallery below). It had been one of the Royal Navy's biggest smooth-bore muzzle-loading (SBML) guns but when it was no longer fit to be used on a warship it was buried breech-down to protect the brickwork of the gatehouse from damage by carts and other vehicles. The muzzle of this one has been sealed off with a cross-shaped piece of iron.
You can also see them as mooring bollards in harbours around the world.
I've had a few buddies injured, one severely, because the well-meaning bollards interfered with organic cycling paths and led to collisions.
An organic cycling path is one where either there's no formal cycling path or the painted path is not actually safe for cyclists.
Often engineers who install these devices are not regularly cycling on the routes, or even cycling at all. They are not aware of the natural flow of cyclists and how they interact with vehicles. They see a deterministic cause and effect of road markings to road behavior. True road dynamics among cyclists & motorists are non-deterministic.
Another terrible example was installation of bollards along popular "group" ride routes where hundreds of club cyclists ride before commute times (before dawn). Thankfully we worked with the city to have them removed, but it likely cost $500k+ for the installation & removal.
My point is that often well meaning safeguards end up causing harm, and that policy makers don't actually use the systems they are managing.
In intersections, pedestrian islands are protected by bollards. In Singapore for example many of the busiest roads even have pedestrian bridges.
It’s a major contrast with my experience of California, where any non-automobile transportation method is an extremely hostile experience. Pedestrians and bicyclists are truly second class citizens on the roads unfortunately.
I can btw recommend following the World Bollard account the images are sourced from. I find the playful seriousness hilarious.
It's sad that we need bollards so many places. Both for safety in regards to accidents. A more humane design of a street would make it impossible to speed too much or put pedestrians in harms way - if you need two hundred bollards somewhere along a street, other measures should've been taken instead (like traffic calming). But also because without them, some drivers will drive wherever, park wherever. No pedestrian zone remain untouched by cars without bollards. In my city we had to petition to get them up to keep cars out from somewhere they weren't allowed to be.
1) (paraphasing) "why was it relevant to say he was wearing a helmet". To raise awareness that it's critical that cyclists wear helmets to increase their chances of survival.
2) "he was struck...use of passive voice , not the result of one or other party's action", maybe because that information isn't available yet? And part of journalistic integrity is to not report that which isn't proven.
It baffles me why cyclists expect to have any lower incident of traffic accidents than any other vehicle using common roadways.
What do you mean? The article they analyse says that a van struck the cyclist. The information is available and is disclosed in the very same article. Yet they use a passive voice.
What information they can be missing that they can write “he was struck by a van” but not “the van struck him”?
> I imagine 100% of the journalism is written in a passive voice
Only if there were some way to prove or disprove your imagination. Maybe like reading any newspaper from the UK and seeing that not all of it is written in a passive voice.
Post some initial confusion about whether the road is on the inside or the outside of the sidewalk, this wasn’t very hard to follow.
It's one thing to be useless at your job. It's another thing to punch down at others trying to make their way through the world.
When I talk to professional planners, they're always so cute. "Wow, Josh, you're so interested in this domain, why don't you get into planning?"
I always say:
If you were as good at your job as you claim to be, I wouldn't need to spend my precious time trying to fix your shit. When the websites and services _I_ maintain go down, I don't expect _you_ to show up at a public meeting to 'give input' on what needs to be done. I fucking fix the thing that's broken, and until then, everyone's justifiably annoyed that the service is non-performant.
I expect minimum levels of safety and adequacy from the mobility network I use, for myself, my child, those I love, and indeed people I've never met.
I don't manage to hide my contempt for the professionals actively involved in permitting the death of tens of thousands of people _every year_.
But obviously, _obviously_, you don't have to read it.
The other possibility is that the sidewalk may have been added afterwards. Turn the right lane into a sidewalk or bike lane and the old vehicle barriers will indeed appear out of place. There are far stranger thing out there on the roads. Strange doesn't mean evil.
A third possibility is that the sidewalk may be designed for vehicle use. This is most common in "traffic calming" devices such as those tiny roundabouts. The sidewalk is kept low so that the occasional long truck (ie fire trucks) can still negotiate a corner by driving partially onto the sidewalk. If we want obstacles to slow cars down, we must still think about emergency vehicles. Even the most dedicated anti-car advocate doesn't dare complain about ambulances driving through pedestrian zones.
Every, and I mean every, neighborhood is laid out on the premise that firetrucks can get to every location. The size of buildings, even the width of city blocks, is often tied to the capacities of the local fire departments to push water using pumper trucks. Want multi-story residential areas? The roads better be able to handle ladder trucks too.
Amusingly enough around here the widest streets are the oldest; because they were wide enough to turn a wagon and a team of horses. Some of the newest streets are quite narrow - a truck can go down them easily enough but turning around would involve a driveway.
There is another option: redesign the emergency vehicles. I grew up in a city (Salt Lake City) whose streets were designed to be extra-wide to accommodate the turning radius of a horse-drawn wagon; similar considerations are made for fire engines in many cities. By contrast, in Tokyo, they simply designed a smaller fire engine, which offers the benefit making streets more pedestrian-friendly in typical non-emergency situations.
Safety is often about statistics rather than being 100% perfect. I used to work in a sawmill where occasionally logs would fly off the machines and crash through walkways. The solution was requiring workers using the walkways to never loiter there so the odds of having a person there at the time a log hit it were reduced.
By the way, it's funny you said "inside" and the article said "outside". Thinking as a pedestrian, I considered "inside" means next to the bushes like how you used it. But if you're thinking in terms of the road/cars, that would be the outside.
Also the #1 safety factor when in avalanche country. When a threat is deadly, inevitable and unstoppable, speed becomes your best safety device. You don't loiter when crossing a gully on skis, nor do you stop to admire the view when driving though certain mountain valleys.
2. (nobody uses it, recognizing the lack of safety)
3. Argue against making it safer because nobody uses it
> Because not only was it entirely preventable, it was also statistically inevitable. Not putting bollards where they need to be is like not only not wearing a seatbelt when driving, but arguing that seatbelts should not be available in cars because usually they’re not needed
This is 100% correct. A woman in Portland here was killed when a street racer plowed into a bus stop. The racer lived and the woman died. The racer got 36 months. Totally preventable.
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/crime/portland-street-racer...
Here in Switzerland even foreigners have their cheeks so tight on the roads even sharpened hair wouldn't cross, they behave like angels and traffic is generally well behaved. And when they don't, punishment is heavy and it doesn't matter how many millions you have on your account or whom you know.
Have this, and peace comes. Don't have it, fast a-hole drivers doing whatever they want is not your biggest problem anyway.
In Houston, bollards and raised pedestrian paths were removed recently (after being installed last year) because drivers kept hitting them.
It's not a tech issue.
Suppose you have the same intersection but put bollards on the sidewalk. This is a bad design because drivers hit the bollards and damage their cars.
You want a design where cars go through the intersection without hitting anything.
Why would you not want an intersection that is safe for everyone, period?
> If drivers aren’t capable of negotiating streets with them, then they shouldn’t be driving, or they should be driving a smaller vehicle.
The size of the vehicle isn't what causes most collisions. Moreover, there are certain roads that have a disproportionate number of collisions. That implies there is something wrong with the road. Roads should be designed for actual reality rather then ideal hypothetical drivers and conditions.
> The idea that we should be building our streets to make driving easier is exactly how we’ve ended up with so many people being killed by cars every year in the US.
That is not how we've ended up there. It was quite the opposite. We made driving a necessity by moving people to the suburbs, without making roads safe enough that everybody could do it, and then demanded it of them regardless.
It isn't the monkey's fault that the only housing he can afford is 30 miles from his job and he has to take a road full of obstructions to get there. The monkey's behavior is predictable, and we know that what happened last year will happen next year unless we do something different. "Damage the monkey's car" is not a solution, it's just the fast track to angry monkeys.
So the city chooses not to pay the cost of protecting pedestrians, in favor of letting individual pedestrians bear the risk, and cost, of being injured themselves. If ever there were a better example of externalizing costs ….
Physical features are much harder to ignore.
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. Until then, we have bollards.
Edit: The statement "speed limits are about right" does not mean "current travel speeds are about right." If you read the rest of the comment, it means that current travel speeds are about 5-10 mph too fast for most roads, but you don't actually need to change any signs if you start making speed limits a credible fact about the actual speed limit of the road.
Also, I have exactly as much data as everyone else is bringing to this discussion, including you and the GP comment, who have brought no relevant data either. This is just my opinion.
And yes, I can absolutely say speed limits are too high, even if people are exceeding them. People drive the speed they feel safe, not the speed we want. So, we should design the roads to ensure people drive the speeds we want.
IE, a wide open 4-lane road is going to see speeds above 40mph, even if it’s posted at 20mph. Because it looks/feels safe from within a car. Yet, we keep building wide open 4-lane roads and wondering why everybody speeds and people keep getting run over.
My experience with the design of many roads suggests that people generally take them far too fast regardless: they cut corners, don't stay fully in their lane, and do lots of other things that indicate they are driving far too fast.
However, if you want to know how I got my opinion, I would suggest that you look at NYC, which has almost eliminated pedestrian fatalities by heavily enforcing its 25 MPH speed limit and similar traffic laws. Conversely, most drivers I see in suburban areas drive at least 5 MPH over the speed limit.
The obviously-too-low speed limits cause all speed limits to be called into question. Thus, Americans drive about 10 mph over the limit on suburban roads, where lots of fatalities occur, and the opinion that speed limits are too low is very common. Also, significant data exists that shows that the vast majority of fatalities involve a driver that is speeding.
In North America, roads are usually built in the complete opposite way, with long straight roads and wide lanes, so the design speed is actually quite high -- even if that wasn't the intent. People go fast, because it feels safe to go that speed, but isn't, because there are pedestrians and turns. We then "fix" that shit road design by having low speed limits.
This video is all I think of when this discussion comes up now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bglWCuCMSWc
But the local residents don't want that, because they want the traffic from the road to come into the little town and patronize local businesses. So they put the businesses along the main road and put pedestrians where the traffic is, and then complain about the speed limit on the road whose purpose was supposed to be high speed travel.
Because the town wants to be as close to the highway as possible, which in practice means the town gets built on either side of it and the highway ends up going straight through the town.
If you moved the highway outside of the town then the town would just move over there because the businesses next to the highway get more business.
Nobody actually moves next to the highway - it's mostly workplaces that are next to the highway so that employees can easily get to it. Businesses that have regular people visit as customers, however, are where those customers are, which is where they live and walk around.
Are we talking about the same article? The article says she was at a bus stop.
> Ashlee McGill was waiting at a bus stop at Southeast Stark Street and 133rd Avenue
Except all those bollards that have nothing to do with pedestrians. Many are there to prevent cars deliberately accessing protected areas with absolutely zero thought about stopping a crashing vehicle. The most common use of bollards is to stop vehicles from parking where they shouldn't. Some bollards are even soft so that they can be driven over without damage to either party.
That's not a bollard. I'm assuming you're thinking of flex posts, or how some of us call them, car ticklers.
I think that "soft bollards" are made to look like bollards because most people assume that a bollard is a rigid structure and as such treat them in that manner. It's basically just an elaborate traffic cone. A sign is to a "soft bollard" as a "soft bollard" is to a bollard.
How do you feel about all the bollards that are designed to stop a crashing vehicles from injuring or killing pedestrians?
The job of government should be to evaluate and require safety equipment where it makes sense - to protect the innocent and reduce issues. And part of that is recognizing when people are using something regularly “against the law” and fixing the underlying issue, not just make it “more illegal” (for example, people using a railroad bridge to cross a river).
We have bell bollard t-shirts: https://www.zazzle.co.uk/be_more_bollard_t_shirt-23500842774...
And we like to take photos pretending to be bell bollards: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23bellbollard
If anyone else wants to get in on this action, you're more than welcome. :D
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/road-users/pedestr...
According to this webpage in 2021 there were 7522 pedestrian deaths on public roads.
The first statistic to standout was only 23.6% or about 1775 actually occur at an intersection.
The next statistic I found interesting was that only 18.63% of fatalities occur during the daytime. This strongly suggests the issue is visibility and not drivers cutting corners or plowing into corners.
Alcohol was involved in 43% of accidents and 24% of that the pedestrian was the only one drunk.
From my very short look at statistics, I believe bollards would have almost no effect on pedestrian safety. It's pretty easy to realize that it is people that are in the street already and aren't being seen. There isn't an epidemic of cars on sidewalks.
> Like, they would love nothing more than for some master race of pickup truck bros to upload their brains into anthropomorphic cars, discard their primitive flesh, and then run over all the remaining meatbags that refused to join in.
:party:
But I like the headers, as I interpreted it as "bollards" and "not-bollards", kinda humoristic and fun.
It seems like a remarkably simple technology that saves lives.
Take a look at the southwest corner of this intersection: https://www.google.com/maps/@25.0409405,121.5642396,3a,75y,2... or the northeast corner of same. Cars and scooters come flying out of that tunnel from the south at 40, 50km/h. If they happen to merge wrong and bump into a scooter, you've got a missile flying directly at a corner that often has nearly 50 people standing on it, with not even a curb to redirect it.
I would say at minimum 50% of intersections in Taipei have no protection whatsoever for waiting pedestrians.
I love Taipei and we have good public transit, but being a pedestrian here is often a fucking nightmare. Lord FORBID you try walking in the south by the way. Gaoxiong drivers are drunk 80% of the time and don't give a fuck.
If you're in Taiwan and care about this, check out the vision 0 people https://www.visionzero.tw/ https://www.facebook.com/VisionZeroTW?refsrc=deprecated&_rdr There's a "ride of silence" ride coming up for murdered bicycle riders if you'd like an event.
I LOVE the cone strategy in this article. I've been thinking of direct actions I can take to improve pedestrian safety and this looks like a great thing to do. Since I'm white and an immigrant I get a lot of leeway in Taiwan which I can leverage to do all sorts of things like this, since the cops are really hesitant to mess with people like me. A powerful privilege I can use for good.
Not Just Bikes on speed limits.
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7475584,-122.44409,3a,75y,89...
The City or the owners should put some bollards and be done with this once and for all. In the past 15 years they had some many cars crashing into their houses.
I’m always surprised when armchair observers casually call for criminal prosecution of engineers from other fields.
There are obviously some cases where criminal neglect should be pursued, but the frequency with which people demand criminal charges against someone, anyone whenever something happens is getting out of control. I also don’t think these people have considered what would happen when the tables are turned on themselves, such as being involved in something like a security breach or any number of other scenarios where any of us could get caught up in a situation with damages to someone.
There are countries where engineers are routinely held liable when anything goes wrong, and the outcome is not good. You get one of two situations:
1. Smart people avoid the job like the plague, knowing that they could end up on the end of a witch hunt trial when anything goes wrong. When the government strives to make an example out of someone, it barely matters if you did your job well or not. Someone must pay, and it might be you. So smart people avoid the job, leaving the role to unqualified people who will take the pay in exchange for the risk.
2. Nothing gets done or approved without incredible amounts of overspending to be extra-extra-extra careful. If you’re possibly criminally liable for damages in a situation and there isn’t much downside for you not approving it, the natural action is to avoid approving anything. Either that or you overengineer it to such an extreme that it’s incredibly expensive and maybe impractical to build, but hey, at least nobody can say you didn’t try.
When you look at licensed engineering professions, they tend to be more about ensuring that designs meet agreed upon standards. If the engineer involved was following the standards and actually reviewed the design, it’s unlikely there would be any basis for criminal charges. If we abandon that standard and instead hold engineers to impossibly high standards of evaluating every design for worst case outcomes, then you get the nightmare situation above.
But I guess this is the internet and articles like this are more about populist outrage than practical governance.
This still leads to bad results because then if ordinary practice leads to bad outcomes or inefficiency, everyone continues on with it because there is no liability for the status quo and potential liability for doing anything different.
The thing that usually works is to put liability on companies that cause injuries through negligence, because then the company has the incentive to prevent injuries in the best way it can come up with, without specifying any particular method of doing it. This isn't perfect because then you still have courts deciding what "negligence" means and large companies rigidly conforming to whatever the lawyers say, but at least then they're operating in a competitive environment where the ones that waste resources being unnecessarily rigid make less money and the ones that fail to prevent the harm get sued.
The problem is this doesn't work for governments because they're not subject to competition. Then they either immunize themselves from getting sued or waste a ridiculous amount of resources over-engineering a way to prevent the harm or fail to prevent it and get sued but it's the taxpayer who pays, and in all cases the harm falls on the public.
They’re about $2k per 12 feet and are widely used to protect construction workers on roads.
They’re also kind of ugly, to be fair.
While I agree that pedestrian lives would be saved, the net cost to human life likely remains unchanged.
> To interact with local transportation administrations requires that you 1) self-abandon, and 2) maintain performative allegience to a pseudo-scientific view of the world.
There is a fundamental problem here. The problem of incompetence is not unique to transportation agencies, it's rather universal in many public and private sectors. Think about IT industry, think about US healthcare, think about the congress hearing of Pichai. There seems to be an incapability of humans societies to run systems at this scale with expected efficiency and competencies. It seems the whole modern civilization is broken at its roots. It seems that humans don't run the systems they claim to run, rather a systemic force or something greater than individual and collective humans, one that is unaffected by human motivations.
There is a tangential problem here, which is the human incapability to comprehend the technoindustrial way of life [1]. I'm not talking about that: I'm talking about the problem that is human societies' inability to run technoindustrial society in an unbroken manner. I think, probably contrary to what most people think, the society worked back then, however differently to what it worked today.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQTuDttP2Yg Excellent interview.
Sometimes they can cause injuries that wouldn't happen otherwise, though: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/kin...
In general, I'm in favor of a lot more bollard use than we currently enjoy in the US broadly (or Seattle in particular).
Jesus Christ, does this author ever have a bone to pick. Implying that anyone who ever operates a car deserves (at least a little bit) to die a horrific death.
- 116 pedestrians were killed in crashes with motor vehicles
- 15 bicyclists were killed in crashes with motor vehicles
- 3 pedestrians were killed in crashes with bicyclists
- 3 bicyclists were killed in crashes with bicyclists (unclear if that includes bicycle-pedestrian interactions or only bicycle bicycle, I suspect the former)
- 1 pedestrian was killed in a crash with a "other motorized (not a motor vehicle)"
This isn't isolated to the outskirts or something. In every borough there were > 10x the number of pedestrian fatalities from crashes with motor vehicles as crashes with bicycles.
The same general trend holds for injuries though I trust the data a bit less since I can imagine injuries going unreported.
I'd suggest that unless you have very atypical habits that put you in conflict with bicycles very often and cars very rarely, you are worrying about the wrong thing.
https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/bicycle-crash-dat...
US e-bike rules are a totally inconsistent dumpster fire. The “standard” 3 tier rating allows class 3 e-bikes to travel at unsafe for sidewalk/path speeds (28mph), while also being in contradiction to many state’s moped/motor-scooterlaws. Yes, a pedal bike can also go 28mph, but very few people can actually go that fast where an e-bike can easily do so.
While you would be correct if only considering risk of death, this doesn't tell us anything about the incidence of non-fatal pedestrian-cyclist interactions and what the outcomes are. It would be perfectly rational to care more about cyclists if it was 100x more likely than a car crash and still carried a signifigant risk of injury, even if the risk of death is extremely low.
To be clear I actually agree with you that cars are still likely the higher risk, just pointing out a limitation in your data.
> The same general trend holds for injuries
NYC encompasses a large area including Brooklyn, The Bronx and Queens, which have a wide variety of traffic situations.
I'm talking about Midtown Manhattan where the roadways are a grid of wide avenues with synchronized lights and narrow perpendicular streets with slow traffic.
I experience zero close calls with cars, and can time my crossing of the street (jaywalking) quite accurately.
I have to dodge and weave and experience close calls with silent bicycles and high speed electrics all the time.
I said what I have to worry about, and it is bicycles.
(I am completely pro bike; I RIDE BIKES IN THE CITY ALL THE TIME; but I don't scare the bejeezus out of pedestrians; and when I ride "wrong way" (because who is going to go the long way around 2 long blocks and a short to get 1 block so) I am respectful and cede right of way to oncomers)
> In every borough there were > 10x the number of pedestrian fatalities from crashes with motor vehicles as crashes with bicycles.
It doesn't break down Manhattan into pieces. Or it does, but there's a rather baffling omission of a "Between Motorized and Pedestrians" table. Still, considering that in all of Manhattan there was a single pedestrian killed by bicycle, we can be pretty sure that cars are the greater threat in every precinct.
I don't doubt that cyclists could do better, and they certainly present some risk, but I think you're greatly underestimating the risk that cars present.
Virtual bollards take up no space, are free to install, require no maintenance or repairs, etc. They also don't destroy any car that hits them.
Virtual bollards can also be passed by ambulances and emergency vehicles easily when needed, unlike real bollards which often slow emergency response.
Your comment reminds me of a funny aside in Arthur C Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise (wonderful novel, about the construction of a space elevator). A famous architect, designing the world’s longest and highest bridge, fights to avoid putting guard rails along the sides. His justification is a) cars are all computer-controlled and totally reliable in the book’s setting, so rails are unnecessary; some suspect it’s actually b) the bridge will look nicer without guard rails; or even darker, c) if a car does somehow go off-course, he’d prefer it doesn’t damage the bridge before plummeting half a mile into the sea.
They also don’t exists. That is an other important consideration when talking about them.
This is a nice idea but it's far future sci-fi at this point.
We couldn't even get Americans to stick with speedometers that didn't go above 85 MPH (1979-1981). Good luck limiting peoples speeds automatically, or ability to drive in certain areas!