I’m pretty sure that at the end of the day, it comes down to cost.
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.
It’s not just about cost: if you read about the topic you will find many arguments that bollards shouldn’t be placed because they endanger motorists — even though they would make pedestrians safer. The article is challenging the implicit prioritization of motorist safety over pedestrian safety that underlies such a judgment.
This is also challengeable: while it is true that in a crash, a bollard will heighten the risks for a motorist,
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
And that's fair, to an extent, but the author seems to have a vendetta or total lack of empathy towards motorists.
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.
I didn't get the sense the author is wishing for motorists to die; he's taken the (in my view quite reasonable) stance that the person operating the dangerous machine has a greater responsibility and that pedestrians who are not endangering anyone else shouldn't shoulder the risk for what they do.
I agree that pedestrians shouldn't shoulder risk, within reason.
But by my interpretation of the article the author derides city planners for perceived incompetence/prioritization of motorist safety, without considering any nuance.
I do desired them for their _objective_ incompetence. Among serious traffic people, globally, american traffic planners are regarded as children in a corner eating play dough.
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.
Thanks, the extra context is helpful, though if anything it contradicts the assertion that American traffic planners are personally incompetent and the cause of the unsafe conditions for pedestrians (given that they're set up to fail)
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.
Well what is the “solution” to ethnic cleansing if not for the perpetrators to desist (or perhaps be made to desist) from doing it? What a bizarre analogy.
What nuance do you wish him to acknowledge? It seems to me like he's foundationally attacking the entire way the discipline is practiced, which is hard to do in a way that sounds polite, but that doesn't necessarily mean he's wrong.
author here. Thanks for the gracious words. Yes, I'm foundationally attacking the entire way the discipline is practiced, I'm not _trying_ to do it politely, _and_ the critiques are possibly fairly leveled. :)
Cars are already incorporating features to ensure survival of people inside them in case of hitting a bollard - not explicitly for bollards, but because big trees are the more extreme version of bollards that give even less care to cars.
Meanwhile there's often absolute zero empathy to people who are not going to have enhancements available to survive getting hit by a car.
author of the post here, this is exactly right. There's zero 'structural empathy' towards non-car-drivers. It's always been that way in America, though, as soon as municipal planners figured out they could use federal highway money to run highways through ethnic neighborhoods full of 'those people', and could destroy those neighborhoods. The danger was the point.
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."
I too prioritize pedestrian safety over bad drivers that can't seem to stay on the roadway. Are you suggesting it is just that drivers have the right to make risky choices and inflict the damage on others instead of themselves?
I see you share the author's naivety/lack of empathy.
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.
On highways? No. On high-traffic sidewalks? Yes! It it were up to me, every corner downtown would be guarded by bollards.
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.
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.
Well who's being reductionist now? I don't see why if you say "pedestrian safety should be prioritized over motorist safety" that it necessarily follows that public utility cost savings (or whatever the point of this example was) should also be prioritized over motorist safety.
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.
> That's why the US is full of corrugated steel barriers TFA maligns by association.
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've been following the world bollard account for ages, love them with my whole soul.
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?
Transport routinely install expensive guard rails to save drivers. Their opposition to bollards is not cost -- it is because they are a Dangerous Fixed Object that endangers drivers that leave the roadway.
One of the things about evaluating the cost-effectiveness of a safety feature is that there's implicitly a monetary value assigned to human life, when you know the probability of something saving a life and the amount of money that thing costs.
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.
The implicit premise in this argument is that safety is an add-on that you buy or install like an antivirus package. If we designed to encourage less dangerous forms of transportation from the start, there may be cost savings that aren’t surfaced in the “add-on safety” cost calculation.
> The author writes as if people who work in this space are not smart.
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_.
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.'
No. It is not about cost at all. Traffic engineers will routinely spend money installing guard rails to save drivers. It's actually much crazier, but you will find it hard to believe.
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.
exaaaaaactly. this, all the way. (i wrote the bollard post.)
> 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_".
>I’m pretty sure everyone realizes bollards saves lives [...] Will constituents support it?
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.
This is such a shallow take though. If 10,000 cars pass a certain stretch in a day, and 40 pedestrians, and 2 cars veer off the road per month there, chances are zero pedestrians are hurt most years. If you had enough big beefy bollards likely half those cars would have a fatality. You do the math. I don’t think it would be appropriate to do the bollards if it killed 12 people per year just because some people think pedestrians are more righteous.
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.
A couple extra factors to consider when doing the math for the 10'000 cars and 40 pedestrians example:
* 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).
> more pedestrians may start to use the road (because pedestrians now perceive the road as safer)
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.
I think guardrails should also be in this discussion (and indeed the article does address this). Many places have guardrails installed behind the sidewalk instead of in front of the sidewalk. Like if we are going to have guardrails anyway they may as well protect the pedestrian spaces.
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.
Half the cars… that hit the bollards. In my example I said suppose 2 cars per month veer off the road in that stretch.
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.
The other part of this decision not to protect human-powered mobility (pedestrian, bicycle, wheelchair, etc.) is that we allow or encourage automotive traffic as a constant, and _then_ we choose not to protect people. It’s a two step process where we make an active choice to create danger and then a second choice not to mitigate the danger.
it would be also equally cheap to just narrow the roads, plant street trees, etc. that slow down cars without necessarily having bollards everywhere
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.
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.