166 replies
20h22m
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.
Seems a bit extreme. If the incidence of pedestrian accidents is relatively low, it's perfectly reasonable to prioritize aesthetics and cost considerations.
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.
Sweden operate Vision Zero with exactly this goal and the Netherlands also have a great record here, showing it’s possible if you actually try.
Yet, most of its sidewalks do not have bollards.
I’m not arguing for or against bollards, I’m specifically addressing the following claim:
This is plainly incorrect, as Sweden and the Netherlands demonstrate.
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.
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"
The Dutch have gone in the other direction in some places:
- deliberately mix pedestrians, bicycles and vehicles
- remove all traffic signs, traffic lights and markings at intersections
https://bigthink.com/the-present/want-less-car-accidents-get...
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 :)
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.
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.
Not directly, but:
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.
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.
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?
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqYyxvM85zU
I'd love to see a source for those $20 bollards.
https://monolit-gbi.ru/zhelezobeton/ogranichiteli-dvizheniya...
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 $20 anyways for these things which as mentioned aren't even going to be very useful at stopping any cars.
Finally, shipping from Russia to the US is probably pretty expensive and difficult these days.
1) There are multiple sizes there, some are up to 1.5 feet tall
2) F-150 being considered a reasonable car is a whole another problem
3) They aren't there to protect against speeding cars, but to delineate parking lots and other similar places where a car might suddenly hit you
4) For the same reason they aren't usually fixed to the ground, they function as 100kg paperweights absorbing the car's momentum
5) Finally, I don't suggest importing them, but I don't have American concrete plant websites handy and I don't expect the economy of casting concrete hemispheres to be that different across countries.
Many areas in Americas cannot even afford sidewalks...
If you can't afford sidewalks, you can't afford roads.
By that logic, most of Europe (I've driven in Ireland, UK, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland) can't afford roads.
There aren't sidewalks everywhere.
You haven’t included consultation fees, planning fees, backroom bidding markups, unions, pensions etc.
What it costs you to do the job isn’t the reality of it, sadly.
Aside from the cost of physically digging a hole, moving the spoil, pouring concrete, placing temporary barriers around the works and so on.
That is a utilitarian argument, but did you really think it through?
If you drive a car, you increase the risk of cyclists and pedestrians to get hurt or killed. Hurting or killing pedestrians also harms the society in several ways. Tax the car sales appropriately to the risk imposed on individuals and the society and you have enough money for bollards.
It depends on cost. If the tax required to place bollards everywhere possible amounted to 1M$ per car, would that be a reasonable tax?
If the harm to society is 1M$ per car, should we be driving them at all?
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.
So $10K extra per car? Assuming we're talking the US here where the average price of a new car is under $50K, that's more than a 20% bollard tax.
If you can't afford to protect people from cars, then you can't afford cars.
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.
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.
It might be true, but it might not be.
Many places in UK have put a lot of effort into providing cycle lanes, prioritising cyclists over cars and pedestrians to do so. It has not worked. They built it and no one came. Its pretty clear that the solution here is more and cheaper public transport. I think fixed price tickets giving you unlimited usage, better bus services to rail stations, etc. are the right approach.
I hate driving, but there are some places that it is impractical to go to without a car, and times when public transport is not available. These should be minimised.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
I think most people (including TFA author) just don't realize what bollards actually cost to install. They're not simple little poles that can be plopped on top of concrete, they have to actually be built into the foundation. Ironically the @WorldBollard association account TFA links to illustrates it best: https://twitter.com/WorldBollard/status/1384527600639434755 and https://twitter.com/WorldBollard/status/1635595240508735490
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.
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.
The article includes a construction picture that shows the foundation portion, down at the bottom.
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.
The cost of bollards is pretty low.
Very low compared to not bollards.
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.
https://www.transportation.gov/office-policy/transportation-...
For 2022, the US Department of Transportation benchmarks that at $12.5 million and that's the number used to decide if something is cost-effective.
If one is proposing that society spends more on road-safety, that's more or less saying that $12.5 million should be higher. So what should it be? Are we ok with spending $20 million? $50 million? $100 million? Because that's the question we're implicitly answering when we decide if a proposal such as bollards are cost-effective.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No one claimed that it's not; they just said "let's have a wee bit more protection, which rarely exists today, because thousands of people are dying needlessly every year". That's it. You're argueing on your own against things that were never said.
I have no interest in continuing this because I no longer believe you're engaging in good faith but are merely trying to pull some "gotcha" zinger or whatever. Talking to has all the appearances of being utterly pointless because you seem unable or unwilling to read what's being said.
We add a wee bit more protection. Maybe it cuts the rate by 80%. Why do you think it is acceptable to stop adding protection? We've already added protections like that, the rate has already been cut 80%, and people are still saying it should drop.
You're applying a knee jerk algorithm - asking for increases in the controls every time you see something you don't like. That path ends with complete isolation of cars and pedestrians, ie, pedestrians and cars can't occupy anything that would reasonably be seen as the same space. Otherwise you'll keep seeing things you don't like and there will always be more that can be done.
There isn't any reason the rate has to be positive. We can ban pedestrians from being anywhere near cars. If you're not happy with this positive rate, what rate do you want and why? Or even how do you want it determined?
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.
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).
I hope we can soon restrict human-operated cars.
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.
How soon? A well proven prediction seems to be "50 years from now" still... At least for Level 5.
Now you’re thinking in portals
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.
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.
Can’t speak for the author, but IMO…
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.
I just picked a random location in Bristol: https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4365588,-2.5893081,3a,75y,28... – lots of Bristol streets are like that, and lots of streets in other cities are like that.
In some places what you're saying does apply, but by and large, it's not like American road design.
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.
Those signs indicate 20km/h! I've never seen a speed limit sign in the united states under 25mph.
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.
[0] https://maps.app.goo.gl/9Tw4fkxviXbN2Fxy9
20mph does get signed in some areas for traffic calming. NYC is dropping from 25 to 20 soon.
UK uses imperial for road markings; it's 20 miles per hour, or ~33km/h.
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.
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.
Here's the street I was talking about... https://www.google.com/maps/@38.9397759,-77.353558,3a,75y,12...
Houses don't directly front this road, but there are intersections with housing clusters every 1/4 mile or so, with cars and pedestrians crossing at uncontrolled intersections. Additionally, the bike lanes end before the school complex, then start again, then end before the shopping strip. Presumably to leave space for more turning lanes. But, really kills the purpose of the bike lanes since they don't go to the two places you'd want to visit!
And another... https://www.google.com/maps/@38.928914,-77.3522244,3a,75y,15...
Sidewalk on one side, so anybody living on the south has to cross a wide road. Unmarked parking on both sides. Bike lanes come and go (usually turning in "sharrows"). If I were king, I'd remove the "free" curb-side parking and put in proper protected bike lanes.
No, generally it works reasonably well. Everyone understands it's a small narrow street and that you need to share. Well, most people anyway. But small footpaths are definitely a downside, and unfortunately also without an easy fix in many cases.
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.
flex posts
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.
Vehicles partially on a sidewalk probably shouldn't be surprised if they are found with broken headlights, taillights and scratched paint.
In the places where this practice is common, it is also accepted.
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.
“Accepted” is a generality. There are individuals with beliefs counter to the norm in every city.
And they're excellent barriers for preventing people in wheelchairs or using walkers to get through at all.
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.
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.
30 km/h is like 10 km/h too fast for a cyclist to comfortably match, unless we restrict mobility only to people for whom cycling is a lifestyle.
Yeah standard E-Bikes (without a registration/license plate) are limited to 25km/h here, even with the electronic assist the car is going faster.
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.
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.
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
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.
An excellent example of why capitalistic measurements of "value" are a death-cult method of making decisions.
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.
Can you explain how? I'm extremely confident I've never put a dollar value on my or anyone else's life. To me, human life is immeasurably valuable.
You do it implicitly.
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.
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
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.
Life is in many ways always convertible.
The death cult aspect of it is assigning value of life based on capitalist net worth.
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.
What really made cities ugly is when we demolished half of each to make space for cars. A bollard is a weird place to start caring about aesthetics.
You know it was just piles and piles of horse shit everywhere before cars, right?
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.
Let me know when bicycles can deliver food to cities or move heavy construction equipment.
Not nice, but it's just an usual case of people reinforcing the problem by trying to shield themselves from it. Tragedy of the commons.
Amsterdam has somehow managed to solve it (with bikes, not horses). I think the biggest blocker is people unwilling to give up their unhealthy lifestyles. But there must be a way out of that. Amsterdam used to be a car-centric city too.
They’re already doing that in Hungary, I thought this was commonplace everywhere.
I do admit that cars have many valid use cases, but everyday personal transportation is rarely one of them. They are massively overused. Most of the problems cars solve were caused by cars to begin with, and most of the problems caused by cars are exacerbated by cars instead of being solved by them. It’s a negative spiral.
OP's talking about delivering food in wholesale boxes to grocery stores, not pizza deliveries to apartment blocks.
That makes more sense, thanks for clarifying.
it was very voluminous.
in New York alone there were three million pounds of horse feces being produced every day in 1894. https://danszczesny.substack.com/p/the-great-horse-manure-cr...
Not everywhere! Horses were banned in Rome (and many other places) for exactly this reason.
Electric trolleys were a thing as well. And the extent to which horse manure was a problem depended on population size.
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.
The last ones are, in fact, bollards.
Stones can be also a form of bollard.
You could also turn bollards into art installation, which goes back to first line ;)
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?
There's a great, possibly not well explored, area of "how the fuck do we move that planter stealthily".
I suggest hi-vis vests, helmets, and appearing like you're in the right place just doing your job.
I'm a big fan of huge rocks. Very effective. There are a lot of them. Highly entertaining on YouTube.
100% effective at reducing people driving over the edge or corners of property.
That would be great! I'm imagining a hypothetical future where the city partners with local artists to produce bollards in disguise, each one unique and one of a kind piece of art.
bollards don't have to be Brutalist utilitarian objects.
one could, for example, make light poles actually intended to wreck cars that trespass into pedestrian spaces. Target's bollards look decent IMO.
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.
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 :).
Your question is phrased with humans as in intruders on space that exists for cars.
As long as cars have existed they have have been intruders into human spaces.
No it's not phrased that way at all.
You seem to be reading into it something I simply didn't say.
Around sidewalks.
It’s not a deep and personal criticism. I think it’s just a sign of how far our society is gone.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?