This article is a bit difficult to read, as it seems to be written with a heavy dose of sarcasm/irony.
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.
i'm not entirely sure what the author intended, but what i took from the article is that there should be a general consensus that some sort of physical separation between cars and pedestrians is necessary to protect pedestrians from cars, and failing to build that protection means you're failing to protect pedestrians.
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 people or organizations making decisions to not protect pedestrians should be held liable for choosing to endanger pedestrians.
Seems a bit extreme. If the incidence of pedestrian accidents is relatively low, it's perfectly reasonable to prioritize aesthetics and cost considerations.
There's a catch-22 here because if a footpath is unsafe people won't walk there. So there will no incidents not because it's safe or because people don't want to walk there, but because it's unsafe.
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.
I sit on the board of my country's bicycle association, and work on getting more safe cycle roads. On these public hearings for new infra, someone always tries to counter building anything cycling related with "but there are no cyclists here today, build more car lanes instead".
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.
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.
I do not believe you. Provide concrete examples of what steps were taken and where.
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."
"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 am a staunch supporter of bicycle infrastructure and a daily bicycle commuter, but I remain unconvinced by percentage-growth figures like this. In many large cities (especially LA, where I live), bicycles represent a vanishing minority of road traffic; an extra 155% of almost nothing is still almost nothing.
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.
Right, so the whole "just add bike lanes" thing is said to get the general idea across, it's not an A to Z solution.
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.
Part of the reason maybe that many of these cycle lanes are not fit for purpose. There are places in the UK where cycling became popular for the simple reason that the layout was already bike friendly.
This craze of adding a bike lane, regardless of local conditions has, indeed, been a total failure.
One thing I see is that once a lane is added and immediately not a hit, it's deemed a failure.
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.
There is in general a lack of understanding that bad cycling infrastructure can be significantly worse then no cycling infrastructure as it often create more dangers, here the better solution would be to design for lower speeds and shared road usage.
I'd love to see a concrete example if you have one. I've seen a fair number of people make this claim about bicycle infrastructure and without a fault there's an obvious-to-a-bicyclist reason it doesn't get used. Of the pictures of recently built UK bicycle infrastructure I've seen most of them don't look particularly good.
Yes, we've all heard [0] and probably agreed with the person Mitchell plays, but the cost of bollards is actually really low. I can buy concrete hemispherical bollards for less that $20 a piece. Let's make the total installation cost $50 per bollard. How many bollards does a 7/11 parking need?
By that logic, most of Europe (I've driven in Ireland, UK, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland) can't afford roads.
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.
These are not the kinds of bollards discussed in the article. Lots of cars going at any kind of speed could cross over a lot of these, as these are like 7" (200mm) tall. An F-150 has over 8" of ground clearance from the factory. It would drive over these without even noticing it.
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.
1) There are multiple sizes there, some are up to 1.5 feet tall
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.
1) Up to 1.5' is still pretty short for a normal bollard in the US. As mentioned they're usually at least 30-32" (sometimes even 40") not 18".
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 it's a reasonable cost-benefit tradeoff, then they should have no problem with being held liable for it. If they are only willing to make the decision when they are able to push the cost onto someone else, that indicates it's not the right decision.
That is a utilitarian argument, but did you really think it through?
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.
No, we shouldn't. But the cost of installing bollards and the "harm to society" are two distinct costs. There are about 2.37 pedestrian deaths per billion vehicle miles traveled in America. Even if we assign a generous cost of 5M$ per life lost, that only amounts to a 0.01$ per mile driven, which is probably not enough to cover the cost of installing bollards all over the place.
How about 10 bollards per sold car, you can probably get away with $ 1k per bollard (including installation), most cars cost a multiple of 10k. Let‘s see how far that gets you. You can of course modify the bollard tax by car weight or by price.
Protecting people from cars could be done by enforcing existing laws regarding unsafe driving habits and increasing the penalties to a point where the worst drivers are simply priced out of the equation.
Accidents happen, even to safe drivers. But you could make the roads virtually fatality-free by lowering speed limits and shared roads to 30km/h (20mph) and enforcing that speed limit.
you've conveniently cropped out only a little bit of what i said there to make it look like i said something else.
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.
Agreed. 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.
The important thing to remember is that dollars are always lives, but there are finite resources available. If we can save more lives spending the same money on medical research or emissions reductions or housing construction[1] then we should do that instead.
[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.
This presumes efficient spending of effort and capital across government, which, especially in the USA, a State comprised of up to nearly a hundred governments depending on where you're standing (federal, with federal agencies; state, with state agencies, county, with county agencies, city, with city agencies, school district, with school district agencies; etc), is not a good presumption.
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.
It doesn't presume anything, it's just relative value. The local government by definition can't enact a national program, but it could certainly use the money for e.g. local tax credits for solar panels or electric vehicles or heat pumps. It could provide incentives for local housing construction or a hundred other things. They could even return the money to citizens, who would do something with it, often something good. And if any of those things provide more value than the bollards then that's what they should do instead.
This is still assuming too much efficiency. The transportation department gets a budget and spends it. Should we remove their budget until cancer is cured?
The transportation department doesn't choose their own budget, the legislators do. Many of the things the transportation department does are life-critical -- emergency services need usable roads. And if you don't have transportation infrastructure then you don't have commerce or a tax base or money to spend on anything else.
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.
Clearly then, the legislators should restrict road usage to emergency vehicles only, and in order to allow other people to get to work, set up a cheap bussing system. This would be the most cost effective way to save the most amount of lives, letting you write off transport and focus on funding cancer research.
Because it isn't actually the most cost effective. Mass transit only works in areas of high population density. Otherwise you get empty buses or extremely long waits between service intervals. It's also, in general, slower because you have to wait for the bus and then be delayed as it picks up other passengers or takes an indirect route to your destination, which reduces the efficiency of ~everyone. There are also many others who need roads other than emergency vehicles: Delivery vehicles, tradesmen with their equipment, the proverbial soccer mom who has to transport the soccer team and all their gear to the game, etc.
And once you're already paying the cost to build and maintain the roads, you might as well use them for general purposes.
> Because it isn't actually the most cost effective.
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.
> we could very easily have a high availability public transit system, even in suburban hell.
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.
Your argument only holds where prices reflect the real (internal + external) cost. Otherwise you are bound to market failure (which has already happened to the transportation market).
The values are entirely on paper. It's a comparison you make when deciding how to allocate funding.
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.
It is a bit more complicated since car drivers don’t pay for most of the externalities of driving. If you take individual car traffic as a given, I agree.
Externalities are a separate thing. They have a cost, but internalizing them also has a cost in overhead and enforcement etc. For large externalities that's worth it, for small and diffuse ones it often isn't because the cure is worse than the disease. It does you no good to spend $100 to prevent $50 in harm.
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.
Yeah the fuel price sucks. In germany car traffic is highly subsidised. It doesn’t even pay for the infra it needs. Probably the situation in the uk is not that different.
I'm not sure if you're from the Netherlands, but I can assure you it's more nuanced that this. Mixing only works when cars are not dominant, so you need low car volumes and low speed in these areas. Residential areas in cities are an example of this: no through traffic, max 30kmh limit.
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.
As an example: More and more "cars are guests" roads are being added. These are usually cycling dominant routes and while completely removing cars might be preferable it's not always possible. Due to the roads being designed as widened cycling paths (and look like it) which barely fit a car you can have cars there but you'd think twice driving there, which makes the drivers more cautious and lowers the car traffic volume a lot. Note: the throughput of a cycling path far exceeds that of a normal road per surface area used (about ab order of magnitude vs cars).
I’m aware the Netherlands don’t implement Vision Zero, I just put them in as another example of a country that aims to reduce pedestrian deaths from cars :)
I would argue the point of the article isn’t “we need more bollards everywhere “, it’s “our regard for pedestrian safety is absurdly low, even cheap tools to increase pedestrian safety (like bollards) are uncommon / controversial"
Vision Zero rules are that you either need physical separation or a speed limit of 30 km/h. 30 km/h is approximately the threshold where the vast majority of vehicle-pedestrian collisions aren't fatal.
They've chosen to lower the speed limit rather than add bollards.
> The people or organizations making decisions to not protect pedestrians
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 think it would make a lot of sense to charge insurance companies for the installation of a bollard whenever there's an instance of a driver mounting a sidewalk.
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.
This seems like a will-have-bad-consequences line of thought. If pedestrian/car interactions are unacceptable then the obvious engineering solution is to ban pedestrians and design for cars only.
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.
> It is statistically inevitable that someone will kill themselves on the bollards.
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...
You've made an effective argument in favour of banning cars. Is that what you meant to advocate? I'd accept that too. But I don't think that is a mainstream position by any stretch, or what the article is arguing for (if we're banning cars, we don't need as many bollards).
Can you only think in black/white extremes? "Let's have not ALL of the infrastructure 100% centred around cars and build public infrastructure for everyone, including cars, although maybe a bit less than we have today" is an option.
Well, ok. But that gets us back to the starting point (ie, present state) where some level of collateral damage is acceptable. Which happens to be the current state that is being built to presently and the original article seems to be arguing against.
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.
> that gets us back to the starting point (ie, present state) where some level of collateral damage is acceptable.
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.
> let's have a wee bit more protection, which rarely exists today, because thousands of people are dying needlessly every year
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?
I don't think it's especially helpful to use this kind of "let's look at an infinite timeline/every possible outcome" type of reasoning. What if a region's local economy crashes and there are no more cars or pedestrians? Those bollards sure seem like a waste of money now! What if? What if?
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.
> I don't think it's especially helpful to use this kind of "let's look at an infinite timeline/every possible outcome" type of reasoning. What if a region's local economy crashes and there are no more cars or pedestrians? Those bollards sure seem like a waste of money now! What if? What if?
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.
Everybody is a pedestrian from their door to their parking space. Banning pedestrians is impossible, life without cars on the other hand has worked for millennia.
> obvious engineering solution is to ban pedestrians and design for cars only.
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).
Given how the automated ones are being developed in a “move fast and break thing” fashion by engineers under strong management pressure to deliver ASAP, I'm not sure the alternative is too much of an improvement.
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.
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.
The trouble is that we’re rarely “building sidewalks and roads” in a large empty space. Either there is already a road there, or there’s other immovable constraints like buildings and landmarks. If you’ve got some large empty space, then sure you can build a safe road and sidewalk. But the reality is that’s rarely possible, especially in urban areas that were originally planned in the horse and buggy era. The roads in the UK are narrow, and there’s limited parking space, so people park half on the sidewalk and make the road even narrower.
I’m not really sure why a large empty space is needed to build a safer road/sidewalk?
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).
A lot of roads in British and European cities are not like that at all; it's not uncommon that they're narrow enough that they're one-way streets because it's wide enough for only one car.
Even that example shows some thought has been put into non-car users.
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.
As other have noted, it's 20mph, which is pretty common in cities in the UK. In that example even the more major road with two way traffic and a seperated bike lane is 20mph.
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.
Yeah, default residential is 25mph in the US, which IMO is too fast for areas where kids might be running about. The only time I've seen lower is private neighborhood streets.
Yeah, overall Bristol isn't too bad – I've lived in worse places. However, many footpaths are very narrow – sometimes not even enough for two people to walk side-by-side – and there just isn't any more space unless you half the parking. That would actually be good eventually IMHO, but is a far larger change than the previous poster was suggesting.
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.
I agree. Two lanes of parked cars is in some ways a "waste of space", but in areas with houses built before cars it's not actually too bad. Naturally keeps the speed of cars passing through pretty low so biking in the road isn't too dangerous.
It's funny how used we get to our surroundings. That street isn't narrow at all, it fits two rows of parked cars alongside it. If only it was possible to reclaim that dead space...
Yeah, I was definitely thinking of typical American-style neighborhood street design. My family is Scottish, and I visit every few years, so I'm familiar with hour smaller towns are often laid out (similar to what your link depicts).
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.
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!
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.
> I'm guessing streets like the one you share are narrow enough that cars don't usually try going 50mph?
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.
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.
Ironically, the UK already does quite a bit better than the USA in pedestrian safety, despite having much more history of existing built environment.
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.
While vehicles partially on the sidewalk are a nuisance, they do provide a barrier between pedestrians and vehicles, and do have a traffic calming effect by narrowing the travel lane.
That's why you have road markings (e.g. double / broken-single yellow line) to prohibit parking in front of curb cuts. Since curb cuts are frequently-spaced, it's not too hard to find a gap.
In my experience people don't care about those markings at all. They'll park anywhere the car can physically fit into that won't unreasonably block other car traffic (and sometimes even then ...).
Not true in Taiwan, nearly every sidewalk is overflowing with cars and scooters illegally parked. I started closing mirrors and opening windshield wipers on cars that do this to try to get the zeitgeist moving and someone threatened to kill me for it recently.
I'm willing to pay taxes for roads, I'm increasingly not cool with paying taxes for parking.
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.
Let's not forget cycling infrastructure and public transit as well. We should prioritize the means of transportation that are most beneficial to society and most equitable first, then if there is room we can make some allowances for energy inefficient traffic-congesting air/noise polluting motor vehicles.
If your roadway is designed so that the average driver only feels comfortable going about 30 km/h / 20 mph, you don't really need to have separate cycle lanes because bikes can match car speed.
Correct, and same with e-scooters over where I live, which is how I know that most cyclists ride at about 20 km/h or less - by reading the speedometer while matching speed with a cyclist in front of me.
the post is talking about the US, where the roads are absolutely massive and dangerous because they are built to Interstate standards and then posted for 40MPH and have left turns everywhere.
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
More bollards on intersection corners (which is the specific intervention the article author is saying they want first and foremost) wouldn't interfere with that though, they're usually double yellow lined already.
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.
> 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.)
As someone who has smelled both horse shit and car exhaust on many occasions, I’d choose horse shit any day. It just smells like old wet hay (because that’s what it essentially is).
As someone who also smelled both, but is a natural city dweller, and despite not liking cars all that much - I'd chose car exhaust any day. I mean, a nondescript warm gas that doesn't smell like anything - unless you're inhaling it straight from the tailpipe, or your country is 50 years behind on automotive health standards - versus literally horse shit that just sits there (ugh) and stinks up the whole street in a 50+ meter radius, not to mention being a low-key biohazard (like all shit)? You'd seriously choose the latter?
Where I’m from, exhaust gas creates a phenomenon called smog that can make the air toxic. In environments that were supposed to be designed for humans to live in.
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.
We have smog too here, in Poland. Or so people say. I must be immune, because I never feel like I've experienced it.
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.
> Nothing resembling modernity is possible with horses being the primary mode of transportation. Or bicycles, for that matter.
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.
I honestly don't know what point you're trying to make.
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.
Perhaps I didn’t and your kind and helpful comment enlightened me. Historically many people still walked on the street even with trams/trolleys/cable cars/carriages/horses on them too.
Automobiles fundamentally changed how our society conceived of the street.
A pedestrian safety feature doesn't need to be ugly. Consider trees, or big rocks, or unusually sturdy art installations, or nice wrought iron poles with decorative flourishes.
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.
How about guerilla gardening, except complete with setting up stone planters, the ones that probably weigh far north of 100 kg? I wonder what would happen if someone were to set up such a planter in the spot where a bollard ought to exist?
I'm in Vegas right now, and while I've been here a bunch of times just realizing how protected pedestrians are on the Strip...every sidewalk is basically lined with thick concrete blocks with no spacing and bollards everywhere.
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.
I would argue that the status quo is already expensive and ugly. Shouldn't any aesthetic claim be relative to the beauty of the parking lot itself, or of the carnage left by a vehicle after striking a pedestrian?
My understanding is that the author is arguing that:
- 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.
Anyone know if we can reasonably estimate X for "A bollard installed here will save X/100000 lives per year on average" for various spots one might want to install bollards, and what the CI would be of such an estimate?
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?
> 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.
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.
For various reasons light poles tend to be made to be easily bent/broken (in fact, it's also safety related).
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.
The big problem in the US is that the same reasoning that is used to design roads where speed is expected (cars are going fast, a static pole means the car ends up wrapped around like a pretzel around the static pole, make the pole break away so the driver can survive) is applied to cities where speed isn't expected and there are people not protected by a metal cage walking around.
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.
> 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 :).
agree, but it's not really sarcasm/irony. it's more derision/snobbery. this isn't about whether one agrees or disagrees with the author's "more bollards better" platform, but the entire framing is off-putting.
author here. Didn't find out until just a few minutes ago that this recent, random, draft post ended up on the HN front page. Huzzah.
> 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.
If we want a more cynical take, the economic value of the human lives saved by installing those bollards does not outweigh the cost of installing all those bollards.
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.
That's a nice sentiment and all, but in reality, value of life will always be convertible to dollars if you talk about it and anything else in the same sentence. You are putting a finite dollar value on your own life each time you get out of the bed, or cross the street.
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.
I don't think that works for me. I don't make that calculation at all, and you're comparing apples and oranges anyway. The cost of coffee has nothing to do with my risk assessment of a situation.
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.
In this context, dollar value is the only one that matters, because it's common comparison base of everything. The only way to compare apples to apples is in dollars.
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.
> dollar value is the only one that matters, because it's common comparison base of everything.
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.
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?
> Doesn't this only work if there's consensus on these dollar values?
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.
I don't think like this and no one really thinks like this. It is a shallow analysis that can only really be done after the fact and is, at best, a curiosity
this doesn't make any sense. If tomorrow, I decide to cross the same street to buy a $50,000 watch, now suddenly I am valuing my life 1000x? And what about the next day, when I go to cross the same street for a $5 cup of coffee again?
Well, if you randomly stroll through a busy street for no reason whatsoever, despite the real if small possibility this could kill you, then what else should I conclude?
Of course you have. When you work for money you trade your time (i.e. a small bit of your life) for dollars. Money itself is ultimately an abstraction for human labour.
Hm. I don't know. That's describing time, which you describe as a slice of my life, aka opportunity cost, but that only works if I define my life by opportunity slices to make money.
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.
The parent comment and child comments are also great examples of how dumb libertarian-type thinking is. I’m sure these people think they sound smart and I’m sure some people read those comments and think “wow they sound smart, they use the word ‘value’ a lot.”
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.
the reason the article is difficult to read is because it is written by an insufferable elitist hipster who evades every opportunity to share his learning experience with the audience and instead treats them like drooling toddlers with expressions like "Some bollards are not placed deep into the ground or very strong, and might deform under a vehicle impact. Some bollards are quite firmly placed." other gems in this article include:
- 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.
I was a little confounded by the author's point about guardrails often being on the outside of sidewalks. It was only when I copy/pasted the URL for the article that they were quoting that I realised that they both had it arse-about-face and actually meant that guardrails are often on the _inside_ of the sidewalk. The outside of a sidewalk (path in this part of the world) would be the bit that borders the road, surely.
That might be a regional or a US/UK linguistic thing. "Outside of the sidewalk" meaning the edge away from the road is pretty common phrasing in the US.
Bollards are fantastic technology: cheap to manufacture, easy to install, and life-saving (both in terms of crashes and also forcing drivers off of curbs, crosswalks, &c.).
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.
Flexible markers (which aren’t even attempting to be bollards, to be clear) are usually a step up from a simple painted line and often recommended by fire departments and other emergency personnel as they can ignore them with their equipment.
They're often sold as "flexible bollards"[1], so I think it's fair to evaluate them by that title.
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.)
Back many years ago, we were driving down a two lane highway in a good old Air Force blue Dodge van. Loaded with maybe 8 airmen. Down the center of the road on the yellow line were flexible bollards every couple feet. The area was under construction and the lanes were narrow, and the bollards were to keep drivers alert and in their lane, I guess.
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.
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.
It can be for either. These ones for example are unlikely to stop a truck going at high speed, but will stop someone who doesn't want a repair bill from parking.
Those greatly reduce bad parking, but they also do provide some security from lower-speed collisions; yes it's possible for a truck to hit it fast enough to go through it, but it'll do quite a number to a low speed vehicle, and even if it doesn't completely stop it, greatly reduce the velocity if it does hit someone.
> when bollards might prevent the need for many emergency responses
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.
> 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.
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].
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.
> Flexible markers (which aren’t even attempting to be bollards, to be clear) are usually a step up from a simple painted line
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...
If only cars weren't gigantic, oversized killing buckets...
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)
This clip shows how ridiculously large vehicles have become. Not only is the mass higher than ever but the front ends have become stupidly large which results in pedestrians being mowed down rather than rolling over the top. It's a symptom of american culture being highly individualistic and selfish.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6tMSEW_EBs
It’s hardly stupid and it’s not in the spirit of HN to go on such diatribes. Cars today are vastly, vastly safer than even 30 years ago, never mind 80, and crumple zones are a huge part of that.
Cars got safer thanks to design differences unrelated to size.
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.
Basically the law assumes that a vehicle that's heavy enough MUST be something people use for business purposes - nobody would daily drive a 6000 pound vehicle every day. And those cars get special treatment tax-wise and relaxed emission standards. They are for work after all.
Car manufacturers had a lightbulb moment and started making regular cars FUCKING HUGE, thus slipping into the magical weight bracket.
I agree about the tone, but that RAM 1500 doesn't have a lot of empty space under the hood because it is necessary for a crumple zone. It's the design of the frame rails and passenger safety cage that determines the crumple zone, the empty space has no effect on this. That empty space is there because of packaging requirements for various drivetrain options and because of styling.
Are we looking at the same chart? Other than the recent peak due to loons during COVID, it shows a reduction of almost 50% in per-incident deaths between 1990 and 2010.
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)
You understand that only the small blue bars represent pedestrian deaths, the figures are not per capita, and the US population grew by over a third in the covered time span, right?
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.
So I make a comment about how selfish the culture has become because a bigger vehicle is less safe for people _outside_ that car... And your retort is to tell us about how safe the big vehicles are for people _inside_ the car. The irony is your selfishness is exactly what I'm referring to. Thanks for the laugh you're not the brightest.
Exactly. Excellent video and far more serious than this article.
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.
> 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
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.
A human isn't going to have much effect on the mass of a smart car, but something like a planter, another car, a curb, a tree, the front of a 7-elevn etc. is going to stand a much better chance of stopping a smart car than it is a 4,900 + lb. F-150 that carries its weight up high.
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.
> but something like a planter, another car, a curb, a tree, the front of a 7-elevn etc. is going to stand a much better chance of stopping a smart car than it is a 4,900 + lb. F-150 that carries its weight up high.
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.
I don't think I'd feel too safe no matter what. There are good odds that the smaller car is moving faster than the big clumsy pickup, and so the car is likely to have at least as much, and maybe more kinetic energy.
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.
Why are there good odds that a smaller car is traveling faster? Pickup trucks and SUVs don’t noticeably lag behind traffic or travel slowly in my experience.
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.
Even if we assume smartcar--pedestrian collisions are just as dangerous for pedestrians as pickup--pedestrian collisions, a smartcar--smartcar collision is going to be a lot less dangerous for the occupants than a smartcar--pickup or pickup--pickup collision at equal speeds.
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.
Statistically, the majority of pedestrian deaths each year occur on high speed roads, with cars doing 45-55 mph. The v^2 part of the equation is going to dominate. We should get average speed down in areas where pedestrians are, and take steps to ensure that pedestrians are nowhere near the places we allow cars to go highway speed.
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.
I used to be against speed limit like this, but when I realize it's MPH instead of KPH and starts converting, I realize that the speed is quite extreme from what I'm used to. My motorcycle-addled road already feels quite dangerous if the riders goes to 60 kph (<40 mph) and no car reach 50 mph. Now I understand some seemingly draconian suggestion that people here says to curb this behavior. People say that Asian roads are dangerous but our average speed is much lower to compensate.
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.
20mph on a residential street is perfectly reasonable. Urban roads on the other hand are usually more like 30-35mph where I live, which is also perfectly fine.
I guess this is using American convention where people are expected to go 1.2x or 1.3x the speed limit. Although funnily residential roads I know doesn't need speed limit for this, solely because of road quality.
No, it's in Europe and you're not "expected" to go over the limit at all.
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.
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)
Smart cars aren't that impressive mileage-wise. A regular Smart car gets ~40mpg Smart Fourtwo's get about 36mpg. A Kia Niro Hybrid gets >50mpg. A CR-V hybrid gets ~40mpg. Both while being much more car than any Smart car.
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.
Of course speed limits don't matter without speed enforcement (either cultural or legal; I noticed the heavy propaganda campaign behind the 30kph limits shown in the video). Areas with heavy pedestrian traffic have 25mph (40kph) speed limits where I live, but people regularly go 30-35 (48-56kph) on them, even when there are traffic calming devices and timed lights.
I think this is a mix of cultural/legal. In Switzerland (people tend to behave in a community-sane manner) and Czechia (strick enforcing) people seem to be sticking to the limits. In Poland it was usually 10-20kmph above the limit because "I drive safe", however recently a new law was passed that on the one hand unified limits (we had 50kmph during the day and 60kmph in the night for the within city general limits) and they increased fines for breaking the law and AFAIR number of accidents dropped quite a lot...
The role of size of modern gigantic SUVs is vastly overstated. Speed is much more of an issue. But it doubtful that citizens (or planners) would be willing to accept the residential & city speed limits required to meaningfully affect change.
"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"
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.
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.
I had cause to walk through Bristol centre the other evening (going to see Orbital play) and was shocked at how bad the cycle lanes are there. There's a big pedestrianised area with cycle lanes going through it, but the lanes just have a slightly different paving and the occasional bicycle symbol. As a pedestrian (I'd usually be a cyclist), it was tough to figure out where the bike lanes were and unless you deliberately looked for them, you wouldn't know. That's definitely one area where different colours are required. Not even paint.
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.
I think when people say this, they are mistaking requirements of banks and/or their state government for 'US' laws.
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.
It is not, selling a car requires title transfer, buying a shotgun in most (i'm hedging a little here, it might be all) states requires passing an age gate (again 18 where i live which is the federal minimum (21 for semi auto)), maybe higher in other states).
While I understand you have a beef with US gun policy and the like, unsubstantiated and incorrect claims like this are just wasteful and counter-productive.
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 can sell you my shotgun as easily as I can sell you my bicycle (I'm in Texas). Selling you my car is a more difficult because I have to file paperwork with the local tax office.
I was recently introduced to the World Bollard Association Twitter channel, which is extremely compelling to scroll through, albeit not entirely wholesome.
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.
Just a minor counter- point… bollards are great for keeping cars out of places they don’t belong.
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.
I am curious how the bollards were deadly to the cyclists (I'm not saying I disagree, I just don't understand the mechanism). Maybe they were just going a lot faster than I'm thinking of?
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...
They were cente-trail (what would be the physical centerline, though there was no lane marking) about 5” in/back from the road surface. A car could get up onto the sidewalk that’s parallel to the road before striking the bollard. So, a cyclist would have to pass the bollards before stopping to check for traffic. I assume they clipped the bollard, lost control, and either ran into the road or something like that. This was 20 years ago now, so I don’t remember details.
The bollards were right in the middle of the cycle path?!? Yeah that's some shitty placement that's gonna endanger the cyclist by shoving them out into traffic.
Yeah, I guess that’s the non-thinking, car-driving traffic engineers solution to “if we put two bollards on the sides of the trail, there’s enough space for a car to go between them, so we’ll save some money while we make things SAFER.”
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.
> the non-thinking, car-driving traffic engineers solution to “if we put two bollards on the sides of the trail, there’s enough space for a car to go between them, so we’ll save some money while we make things SAFER.”
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.
Sure, they managed to keep cars off the path, but killed/maimed cyclists in the process. IE, they didn't think the design all the way through, they only thought about the cars, not other users of the system.
It sounds like GP is assuming that a car is wider than the bike lane, so putting bollards on each side of the bike lane would stop cars, without blocking bikes from using the centre of the lane?
Right in the middle of a cycle path is extremely obvious though. You basically have to not be paying attention for an extended period of time if you want to run into them.
It's entirely possible someone is cycling and has reduced vision (sunset, evening time, sun in your eyes, etc.) or isn't 100% focused for a few seconds (while thinking about something else). Putting any physical obstacle in the middle of a path is a very odd and dangerous choice.
Not if there are others in front of you obscuring your view. Or maybe you need to avoid someone else and you hit it. Tons of reasons you can hit them other than "not paying attention".
Why are you so close to the person in front of you in the first place? You should be far enough back that you can come to a stop to avoid exactly that issue. Also, why would you need to avoid anything? It’s (from the description) right at the end of the path.
Because it's busy? Because you're cycling in a group of ten people? The person in front of you avoids the bollard, which suddenly comes in to view and you have 3 seconds to see it and react (without crashing into anything or anyone else). Usually this is okay. Sometimes it's not. This sort of thing happens to pedestrians too.
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.
> 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.
I knew a guy that was driving a small motorbike, when a car forced him to the right. He fell on a bollard like the ones shaped as pencils in the article linked, broken badly his chest and dying soon after. According to witnesses, the hit was at slow speeds, so it could happen to a bike.
Yeah there's a few "light" bollards on bike paths around here, mainly to keep cars off of them, and while they're plenty visible and won't stop a car at speed, they are unforgiving if you were to clip them with your bike.
Japan uses railings along major urban streets. They're sometimes bollards with horizontal rails between them. Sometimes decorative fences made from standard components. And sometimes just a standard rolled steel guardrail, even in cities.
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.
How does that happen? Are they tailgating maintenance vehicles or emergency vehicles who are authorized to access those areas, and then the bollards go up again after they've passed?
"tailgating" at a red light or in a parking lot might mean "following the car in front of you closely at low speed", and as such the driver might not realize there is an automatic bollard there. this pleases people because schadenfreude
All of the automatic bollards I've seen are very clearly signed, and frequently have lights indicating their presence. It is very rare that they are not very obvious.
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).
> 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.
Between our house and the road turn 30ft away was a thick reinforced concrete pole, a bollard of a kind, severely leaning from being regularly hit by tanks - the road was used by tanks driving from/to loading point, and the tanks in the convoy would regularly miss the turn due to the dust raised by the tanks in front of them.
LA started installing plastic bollards on main boulevards like Venice, Olympic.
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.
Wilshire in Santa Monica also installed these bollards, and I feel less safe as a pedestrian, cyclist, _and_ when driving because of them. We know the solution -- build protected bike lanes, tax cars by weight, and close of some streets to encourage walking through neighborhoods.
Very good point . Another road in Fremont , ca installed plastic bollards but the traffic was 50-65 mph. Also the bollards prevented street cleaning from clearing debris so cyclists were forced to ride with traffic
Bollards are good at preventing the inconsiderate from parking on the sidewalk. For fewer people to be killed by cars, however, you want transportation infrastructure which does not rely on having fast metal boxes in close proximity to pedestrians (or cyclists, wheelchair users, etc).
In some places I’ve been, the sidewalk and road are separated by mature trees, with bushes between the trees. It enforces safety, adds distance between cars and pedestrians, and adds ample shade.
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.
Above all I want to see automatic bollards which pop up along the full length of both sides of a pedestrian crossing when the light is green for pedestrians.
The article touches upon how news stories shift the way problems are thought about, often in a way where problems stemming from cars are played down. This one is a go-to for me in showing how that works and what to do about it, it's Cam Cycle breaking down a news story about a collision: https://www.camcycle.org.uk/magazine/newsletter110/article8/
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.
I only have the energy to refute 2 points in the article breakdown:
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.
> maybe because that information isn't available yet?
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.
Are we talking about the same article? The one titled “Cyclist injured in collision with van amid rush hour traffic in Cambridge”? The very same article where the sentence they complain about is “he was struck by a van”?
What information they can be missing that they can write “he was struck by a van” but not “the van struck him”?
So you think “ he was struck by a van” is safe from lawsuit while “The van struck the cyclist” would not be? Who would be suing in your opinion? the unidentified van?
> 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.
The purpose of the article is persuasive but the HN title is ambiguous and reads much more expository. I’m a New Yorker who walks, bikes, and drives, in roughly that order and it was clear to me that the author is pro-bollard.
I was under the influence of _deep_ rage at American traffic planners and municipal 'engineers' who commit themselves, deeply, to dehumanizing decisions, and then spend meaningful effort preventing OTHERS from tending to the spaces that they use.
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.
That barrier looks bad, but i think the designer is doing two things by putting it inside of the sidewalk. It looks to be doing double duty as a normal fence, something to keep pedestrians and such from falling into the gully. If it were a wooden fence nobody would notice it. But they went with a metal barrier normally used for cars that now looks out of place.
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.
I cannot imagine being okay with an ambulance rocketing down a sidewalk that is explicitly designed as a "pedestrian zone." The solution to emergency vehicles being unable to navigate streets in a timely manner is to redesign the streets, not to normalize the practice of endangering pedestrians. Additionally, if it is necessary to design a mixed pedestrian/vehicle zone, there are absolutely ways to go about that, with specific and different buildout and signage. Any city planner whose solution is "Oh, well, the emergency vehicles can just use the sidewalks to turn or pass other vehicles, and they'll be careful so it's okay" is committing malfeasance and should be held legally responsible for the deaths and injuries arising from said decision.
> The solution to emergency vehicles being unable to navigate streets in a timely manner is to redesign the streets
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.
Who said anything about speed? A vehicle like a fire truck can simply be too long/wide to get around a corner even at a walking pace. So they use the sidewalks. Emergency vehicles in pedestrian areas is a very common. So any barrier system needs to accommodate them.
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.
It’s possible to reduce the size of the fire trucks, too. Not every ladder truck needs to be a full double-steered classic hook and ladder; modern extension trucks can be relatively compact.
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.
Or the footpath is so little used that extra safety provided by the clear zone is greater than the extra safety to pedestrians from having the barrier next to the road.
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.
>> 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.
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.
Do you really think low-foot-traffic footpaths are that way because people recognize it's not safe? What are they doing instead? Walking around the block?
> The lanugage in the article is full of ‘this was an unavoidable tragedy’, though i think it’s obvious a local city engineer ought to be held criminally liable for their neglect.
> 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.
In the case in the article, it sounds like the killed person was walking down the middle of a totally ordinary sidewalk, not a bus stop or intersection or storefront or anything. Are you proposing we place bollards on the edges of every sidewalk in existence?
Lowering the speed limit where there are sidewalks next to cars driving seems to work well in Europe. But that also requires policing of those speed limits so they are not considered mere suggestions by drivers.
Europe has a lot more roads with a lower design speed. Curves, narrow lanes, on-street parking, trees/poles/etc close to the road. These things cause people to drive slower, because it doesn't feel safe to go fast.
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.
The problem we keep having is that you have a highway that goes through a town, and it should be a highway. Its purpose is to connect the larger cities on either end of the highway at high speed. And it's perfectly simple to do that, you just make it a limited access road and then the town has other roads with lower speeds for local people.
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.
Why should something that goes through a town be a highway? Highways should be between and around towns. A town itself is for living in, and anyone coming into town should do so in a way that respects that (i.e. not at high speed). That also makes it far more attractive to actually stop and patronise local businesses.
> Why should something that goes through a town be a highway?
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.
I'm not sure if that's true. In my country, most towns don't have a highway that run through them, and there are no calls to change that. People like easy access to the highways, but that means easily getting out of town to get to the highway.
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.
You've getting to the root of the problem in the US: The zoning doesn't allow businesses where a lot of people live because it's zoned exclusively for single-family homes. The "town" is mainly businesses, and they want to be near the highway.
Just put enough speed cameras, they are much cheaper than any human police guys in long run, can watch 24/7 things like red lights, stops, seat belts, using of phones while driving etc. They can be even connected together for those a-holes who slow down in front of them just go enter again lightspeed right after, its not rocket science in 2024 and all required tech is there for decade and a half.
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.
Suppose you have a misaligned intersection, so a car that drives straight through ends up on the sidewalk. This is a bad design because pedestrians get hit by cars.
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.
No. You want an intersection that is safe for everyone outside of cars, and bollards help do that. 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 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. Car centric design is a failed experiment of the last 75 years.
> You want an intersection that is safe for everyone outside of cars
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.
> In Houston, bollards and raised pedestrian paths were removed recently (after being installed last year) because drivers kept hitting them.
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 ….
I wonder if there is a wrongful death basis to sue a city into having safe streets. I know in the US disability groups have successfully sued cities due to a lack of curb ramps.
These are only useful for otherwise-law-abiding people who go a little too fast. The trend in big cities in the US is to joyride/race with your license plates removed, obscured, or fake, and that's assuming the car isn't stolen (Kia/Hyundai.)
I think there would be constitutional challenges in the US, but in Canada, the police are allowed/required to seize your vehicle roadside for certain offenses (unfair if you are found not to have committed and offense, but I've never heard of that happening).
Cameras only catch criminals after the fact. Bollards directly save lives. In the example here, even if the law is a potential deterrent, killing a person was only punished with three years in prison. Bollards work even if the courts don’t.
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. Until then, we have bollards.
Or even better: put speed bumps, narrow lanes, add chokepoints, lots of design features that physically force drivers to slow down instead of speed cameras that don't impede anything for someone wanting to speed.
And raising speed limits where appropriate. US speed limits right now are often set at about the right level on urban and suburban roads, but far too low on highways and other roads intended for long-distance travel. This effectively causes people to speed at dangerous levels in the suburbs and cities - it does not slow everyone down everywhere.
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.
I'm very curious where your data comes from to back up this statement. "The current level of pedestrian fatalities from motor vehicle collisions is the right level" just seems wrong to me.
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.
Do you have any data to contradict this? The statement you are asking for data about is an opinion, and asking for data to back up an opinion is at best a logical fallacy.
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.
Of course not. “Speeds are correct on non-highways” doesn’t match the level of pedestrian fatalities in the US. He might be 100% correct about the highway speed, though I doubt it, since most highways (interstate/limited access) seem to be 65 or 70, except in urban areas.
It's a good thing that the pedestrian fatalities you are trying to cite very often happen due to someone speeding (that is a fact that you can corroborate with police data if you would like). If people don't obey a speed limit, you can't cite a consequence of their driving speed to say that the limit is too high.
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.
You’re the one who made the contention that suburban/non-highway speeds are just fine, despite high levels of pedestrian/non-car injury/death, not me.
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.
I never said speeds are just fine. I said speed limits are fine, but being flagrantly violated. And yes, I agree that road design plays into this.
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.
Just anecdotally, I’ve experienced the same. The speed of traffic on highways is regularly 5-25 mph above the limit, and this mindset does translate to other types of road.
> it sounds like the killed person was walking down the middle of a totally ordinary sidewalk, not a bus stop or intersection or storefront or anything
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
It is probably much more doable, and less hostile, to traffic calm streets so that people cannot get up to such speeds, and also to reduce the necessity of driving so that there is no car to crash in the first place.
There’s a residential road not too far from me that is legitimately 8 cars wide. The people there continuously wonder why cars are literally drag racing next to houses. That’s why.
No, building sidewalks will become prohibitively expensive. Building car-only streets with no pedestrian access at all will become comparatively even cheaper and a "great option!" for any cash strapped city planner.
> now we want to filter for "statistically inevitable"
I mean, yes? We’ve been making trade-offs to reduce statistically inevitable deaths for years with some real success stories to speak of. Getting doctors to wash their hands between patients, removing lead from gas, seatbelts, engineering safety factors, checklists in aviation, food safety standards…
Correct. Cars need to be separated from people by barriers. But that goes both ways. Deaths by pedestrians getting into places they shouldn't are very common even absent roads (ie railroad crossings). Some have called for all railroads to be fenced off. But few want to live in a world with fences around every possible dangerous area. When I went to school there was no fence. Now schools are surrounded by so many that they look like prisons. Barriers can go too far.
It's an article about bollards and how they stop vehicles from hitting pedestrians. Fences to keep people out of places where they can easily kill themselves is very important, but doesn't have anything to do with the article. A trend I see on Twitter is that someone will bring up an important issue and comments will highlight that it's very important, but what about this other thing that is somewhat related but also unrelated. Not saying that you intended to do that here, but be aware that fences provide no security against cars and that the whole point of bollards is to stop cars from killing pedestrians who are not on the road.
>> the whole point of bollards is to stop cars from killing pedestrians
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.
Wikipedia does actually bring them up as a type of bollard. They don't really fit in with the origin of bollards though, which were to moor ships to.
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.
People in general are pretty good at assigning blame - pedestrian hit by car is usually blamed on the car unless the pedestrian was doing something exceptionally stupid - pedestrian hit by train is usually blamed on the pedestrian.
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).
holy cow this is amaaaaazing, u/ellipsis753. My god. I want the t-shirt, I love the love for bell bollards, I obviously had a photo of one in the post but i didn't know there was so much love for them!!!!! I <3 this
After reading the article and the comments, I noticed there weren't statistics backing up either the article or many of the comments. In one of the comments the author of the article states their proposed solution would to put two bollards on each corner at an intersection. Considering the unkind descriptions of engineers abilities, I hoped their argument would be well thought out. You can judge for yourself.
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.
Every time I look at or have to use pedestrian infrastructure in the US I get the feeling that the local jurisdiction's road engineers think Pixar's Cars is an instruction manual. 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.
loooool this is gold. Author of the post, here, I love this.
> 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.
I don’t know if it’s just me, but it is very hard to parse the title headers that say “What are not bollards.” It’s not a standard way to construct that thought into a headline.
We desperately, desperately need these in Taiwan. My friend was nearly killed a few days ago when a car bounced up off the road and smashed into a pillar less than a meter away from him. If he had walked a tiny percentage faster, he'd have been between the car and the pillar.
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.
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.
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.
> though i think it’s obvious a local city engineer ought to be held criminally liable for their neglect
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.
> 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.
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.
Amsterdam has many city-themed bollards along the city center streets to delimit the pedestrian part. Although they’re not deeply seated into the ground and will topple if a car hits them (but I guess they’re menacing enough to keep drivers from speeding).
The car was supposed to pivot, but yeetet right through, taking it for a ride. Probably ending up causing enough damage to change the winnder of the race.
I can't bring myself to believe that bollards are the answer. Placing them everywhere would be exceptionally expensive. Emergency vehicles would get stuck in traffic more often. Car accidents involving bollards would be more dangerous to drivers and do more costly damage to cars.
While I agree that pedestrian lives would be saved, the net cost to human life likely remains unchanged.
> Please, please stop evaluating local transportation administrations as competent. I’ve hung out with these people, gone on walks with them, driven around with them, listened to them get excited about a new pedestrian affordence they’ve installed, and the lack of awareness and closemindedness (which is obviously necessary to sustain a shitty system creaking into it’s 100th year of existance) is stunning.
> 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.
> Maybe it would feel poetic if he was also a car-user, having his life destroyed by a car, but he didn’t even have a car.
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.
in NYC, I don't worry about getting hit by a car; I worry about getting hit by bicycles/bicyclists. Most NYC streets are one-way, but I have to look both ways before stepping off of a curb.
In NYC in 2022 (the most recent version of this report)
- 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.
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)
The data addresses this in part, to quote my original comment
> 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.
> 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.
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.
I have a feeling you’re both correct. Cars/trucks are absolutely more dangerous in a given interaction. But, the increased use of electric motorcycles/scooters on sidewalks is also leading to increased negative bike-pedestrian interactions.
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.
With the advent of more and more cars with smart features, it might be cheaper to simply have "virtual bollards" which are programmed into the cars computer, and the car will never drive over them.
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.
That’s a nice idea but it would require a lot of elements to work in perfect synchrony to be really safe and reliable. In the foreseeable future, probably easier just to put physical bollards in.
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.
It doesn't need to be 100% reliable. It just needs to be better than current bollards - which are perhaps only ~10% effective since many accidents happen where there is no bollard to prevent a bystander being killed.
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!
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.