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.

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.

Or to put it in another way: https://i.redd.it/auq600rozlsc1.png – pretty sure that road has very low cyclists and very low cycle accidents.

Of course not every road should have cycle lanes and bollards, but in general there's a huge lack of attention to the safety of anything that's a non-car.

A common retort is that bridges aren't built where most people swim across the river. It's a chicken and egg problem, and you are absolutely correct in what you address.

To use a popular HN quote: build it and they will come.

What it costs you to do the job isn’t the reality of it, sadly.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

> I think that it's in fact quite immature to act like we must always optimize for lives saved, no matter the cost and no matter how small the gain.

This is plainly incorrect, as Sweden and the Netherlands demonstrate.

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.

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.

Meanwhile there's often absolute zero empathy to people who are not going to have enhancements available to survive getting hit by a car.

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.

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.

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.

Setting aside entirely the absurdity of lining every street and road with bollards from a cost perspective, just the disruption alone of such a massive, decade-long public works project would no doubt enrage all street users alike. This would be the most unpopular policy move ever. Anyone arguing that it should be done anyway seems to deeply dislike the idea of democracy.

Now, the idea that convenience stores and such ought to be strongly encouraged to do bollards is another idea entirely and probably a good one.

Also, people should learn to f**king back in. It’s not that hard since backup cameras were invented. That would also eliminate ¾ of these idiots crashing into stores.

* if bollards are installed, more pedestrians may start to use the road (because pedestrians now perceive the road as safer)

* if bollards are installed, the average car speed may decrease (because motorists consciously or subconsciously weigh in the potential consequences of hitting the bollards. This has been shown to work with tree lines. Not sure about bollards, as they are less visually prominent).

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.

Yes, maybe someone will walk in to a bollard once every 10 years and die. It's noting compared to the tens or hundreds of thousands of people dying every years from cars (direct accidents, air pollution, microplastic pollution), never mind the environmental impact, city design impact, and many people "merely" injured rathter than killed. There is no equivalence here on any level.

And the "obvious" solution is to ban pedestrians? I don't even...

If you want a grey area, we're already in one. How do you want to navigate it? How do you want to work out where the level should be? And why do you feel that is better than the current status quo?

We can always say "do more", but without deciding what we're optimising too before building the designs it just ends up with a series of knee-jerks every time there is an accident until cars or pedestrians are banned. We need to set a tolerance for accidents, and there needs to be an argument for why it isn't the current level of tolerance that we are displaying.

No one claimed that it's not; they just said "let's have a wee bit more protection, which rarely exists today, because thousands of people are dying needlessly every year". That's it. You're argueing on your own against things that were never said.

I have no interest in continuing this because I no longer believe you're engaging in good faith but are merely trying to pull some "gotcha" zinger or whatever. Talking to has all the appearances of being utterly pointless because you seem unable or unwilling to read what's being said.

We add a wee bit more protection. Maybe it cuts the rate by 80%. Why do you think it is acceptable to stop adding protection? We've already added protections like that, the rate has already been cut 80%, and people are still saying it should drop.

You're applying a knee jerk algorithm - asking for increases in the controls every time you see something you don't like. That path ends with complete isolation of cars and pedestrians, ie, pedestrians and cars can't occupy anything that would reasonably be seen as the same space. Otherwise you'll keep seeing things you don't like and there will always be more that can be done.

There isn't any reason the rate has to be positive. We can ban pedestrians from being anywhere near cars. If you're not happy with this positive rate, what rate do you want and why? Or even how do you want it determined?

No, the obvious engineering solution is to ban cars, the worst means of transporting humans ever conceived, and design for pedestrians only. If we want motorized vehicles sharing space anywhere near pedestrians, they should be operated only by highly trained professionals (e.g. taxi drivers with retest licensing requirements, commercial truck drivers, bus drivers, etc), or, by vehicles on rails (subways, trolleys, trains).

If we added mandatory formal methods use (mathematically proving the code's invariants) during development, and gave full criminal liability to the managers in charge of the project when someone is injured/killed, then it probably would, but we clearly aren't there yet.

Everywhere a pedestrian might be? Probably not. But, we can do a MUCH better job building sidewalks and roads to increase safety. Lower speeds (not just posted limits, but road design). Raised sidewalks that are continuous, not the disjointed mess we have in much of the US.

At bus stops, schools, and any shopping area where cars are parked directly adjacent to eh store front? Yeah, bollards should be installed.

Just looking out my front door (suburban DC)… the road is posted 35mm but you can “safely” go 50+ because the lanes are wide and relatively straight. But, there are uncontrolled/no-signal entrances to neighborhoods every 1/4 mile or so, so speeds really should be <30mph (IMO). There are very few signaled pedestrians crossings, so if you need to cross, it’s a game of frogged, or walk a mile out of your way to the nearest full intersection. The bike lanes on the road are just painted on, no protection for cars. And on and on. None of this requires more space - just DOT employees who can think beyond getting around in a car.

We could easily slow the road by narrowing the lane. We could easily add signalled ped crossings. We could easily make the sidewalks continuous (same grade through intersections instead of road level - the benefit is cars enter “pedestrian space” when crossing instead of the other way around). We could add floppy bollards (not sure what they’re called) to give more separation between cars and bicycles (won’t stop a really bad driver, but will at least stop cars from using the bike lane as yet another car lane).

I just picked a random location in Bristol: https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4365588,-2.5893081,3a,75y,28... – lots of Bristol streets are like that, and lots of streets in other cities are like that.

In some places what you're saying does apply, but by and large, it's not like American road design.

The road itself is one way for car traffic, but two way for bikes. This likely allows a non-main road cut though for bike traffic.

The pavement (sidewalk) outside the front of the school is double the width and has bollards along it to stop cars parking on the pavement. This slow massively narrows the road to you’ll likely be driving about 20-30mph regardless of the speed limit.

The junction behind the initial street view has a tiny traffic island with a bollard to protect bikes coming the “wrong way” out of the one way road from cars turning into it. Without that cars turning right into it would always cut that corner.

Given the space constraints it’s actually a pretty well designed street.

In some ways these small narrow roads are better by the way, even for non-cars. Everyone understands the need to share the road. Big roads seem to create a "this is for cars only and everything else doesn't belong here and shouldn't be here" type of mindset.

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.

Or actually, it's perhaps not ironic, it's perhaps because of the limitations of the existing built environment in the UK, which prevented doing what has been done in many parts of the USA -- optimize for car speed over pedestrian safety.

the road diet is pretty common in the US where roads are extremely wide and plagued by speeding, and where the local political will allows realigning priorities towards safety. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_diet

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.

One day, as I was walking to the local grocery store while choking in said gases, I heard a guy say this to his kid: “Quick, let’s get into the car because the air’s horrible”. Can you appreciate how surreal and fucked up this is, that people can just pull up somewhere in their rolling couches, pump stinky toxic shit into the air, and then they, the people who do that, get to be protected from it while pedestrians and cyclists have to breathe it all in?

So yes, over choking in fumes that will probably give you cancer, I absolutely would choose horse manure that might be a biohazard if you rub your face in it but is otherwise completely harmless. Luckily though, this is all a false dichotomy thanks to the invention of the so-called bicycle.

I don't think you appreciate the scale we're talking about. If you replaced all cars with horses now, we'd be quite literally drowning in horse manure. Nothing resembling modernity is possible with horses being the primary mode of transportation. Or bicycles, for that matter.

> Luckily though, this is all a false dichotomy thanks to the invention of the so-called bicycle.

Let me know when bicycles can deliver food to cities or move heavy construction equipment.

> Can you appreciate how surreal and fucked up this is, that people can just pull up somewhere in their rolling couches, pump stinky toxic shit into the air, and then they, the people who do that, get to be protected from it while pedestrians and cyclists have to breathe it all in?

Not nice, but it's just an usual case of people reinforcing the problem by trying to shield themselves from it. Tragedy of the commons.

Amsterdam has somehow managed to solve it (with bikes, not horses). I think the biggest blocker is people unwilling to give up their unhealthy lifestyles. But there must be a way out of that. Amsterdam used to be a car-centric city too.

> Let me know when bicycles can deliver food to cities

They’re already doing that in Hungary, I thought this was commonplace everywhere.

I do admit that cars have many valid use cases, but everyday personal transportation is rarely one of them. They are massively overused. Most of the problems cars solve were caused by cars to begin with, and most of the problems caused by cars are exacerbated by cars instead of being solved by them. It’s a negative spiral.

As long as cars have existed they have have been intruders into human spaces.

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.

100% effective at reducing people driving over the edge or corners of property.

Stones can be also a form of bollard.

You could also turn bollards into art installation, which goes back to first line ;)

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.

- 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.

one could, for example, make light poles actually intended to wreck cars that trespass into pedestrian spaces. Target's bollards look decent IMO.

So I'd argue that to avoid competing objectives/priorities one should not combine bollards and light poles, otherwise one goal or the other will get compromised, quite possibly in opposite way than they should for given location.

Essentially, making them separate is a physical infrastructure form of making incorrect states non-representable.

- 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.

> You are putting a finite dollar value on your own life each time you get out of the bed, or cross the street.

Can you explain how? I'm extremely confident I've never put a dollar value on my or anyone else's life. To me, human life is immeasurably valuable.

Say you decide to grab a coffee from a coffee shop. You need to cross a busy street for that. If the coffee costs $5, and the chance of you getting killed by crossing the street is 1 in 100 000, then by getting that coffee you demonstrate you value your life at less than $500 000 --- value of life * probability of death < cost of coffee.

It's a shame that so many US cities are focused on installing pseudo-bollards and flexible strips of plastic, rather than putting down permanent protections for cyclists and pedestrians. One recent example of this is NYC's Gowanus[1]: they're redeveloping the area for residential use, including bike lanes and daylighting down 4th avenue (historically a high-volume, industrial avenue). But these bike lanes and daylight zones are protected only by plastic bollards, which even a sedan can comfortably park over.

[1]: https://www.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/plans-studi...

I don't object to the idea that EMS or other emergency responders might need roadside access. From my experience, many European cities do this admirably by having retractable bollards embedded in the street, or by redesigning streets to have a bollard-free section (e.g. by the fire hydrant, where it's already illegal to park or idle).

(There's also the irony of not placing bollards into a street crossing because emergency services might need it, when bollards might prevent the need for many emergency responses.)

[1]: https://www.reliance-foundry.com/bollard/flexible-bendable

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.

I doubt that? If a bollard stops a car which would have caused an emergency that is often reason enough for an emergency response in itself. It doesn’t change the number of emergency calls, just changes the form of the emergency.

Also the whole argument you are making is silly. A bollard on a street crossing can prevent some kind of emergencies (the kind a runaway vehicle would cause). It absolutely does nothing to prevent other kind of emergencies (like fires caused by faulty wires, or hearth attacks) but might lenghten the response time for those. There would be maybe some form of irony if emergency responses were only required because of runaway cars, but that is far from the case.

A somewhat common automotive accident in NYC is one where a driver falls asleep or unconscious at the wheel, causing (or nearly causing) a mass casualty event on a sidewalk. These kinds of tragedies can happen at low speeds, since the car rolls forwards silently over the curb and hits pedestrians or cyclists from behind. Bollards would stop this, just like they would stop cyclists from being backed into by trucks in bike lanes, and pedestrians from being sideswept on non-daylit corners, etc.

Of course, these are contrived examples. But the larger phenomenon holds: a single driver injured after collision with a bollard requires fewer emergency resources than a driver plus pedestrians injured after collision with a building.

I'll point out again: other cities have solutions for this that clearly work without impeding emergency response. Compare London's emergency response times[1] to NYC's[2].

[1]: https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-do...

[2]: https://www.nyc.gov/site/911reporting/reports/end-to-end-res...

https://shur-tite.com/WebData/images/ca74404b-a476-4826-8e47...

They're somewhere in between a line and a fixed bollard. They are more effective at encouraging drivers to voluntarily stay in their lane than a line is, but they still don't do anything to prevent vehicles from crossing in emergency situations, accidents, or people who don't care about the paint on their car. It would be cost prohibitive to replace this usage with retractable bollards because these often extend for long distances.

There's a T-intersection near my house which is more of a 30°/150° split, and I'm glad they finally upgraded to those not-quite-barriers: It has reduced the number of people who were ignoring the stop-sign and driving straight through as if it were just a curve in the road, which could easily cause head-on collisions. (The gore-point is also paved, not a raised curb.)

Even so, some of the sticks have been lost to attrition now, and I kinda wish they'd get replaced with much heavier ones guaranteed to leave big dents and scratches...

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.

That said, two cars hitting each other's large crumple zones is probably safer than a car hitting a bollard or something else unforgiving.

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.

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.

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.

Also, bumpers on pickups are actually pretty low. Any normal bollard or concrete planter is going to be pretty effective. No pickup is going to drive over something like that.

The scenario I was discussing is when there isn’t a bollard but some other barrier specifically designed to stop a vehicle.

A higher center of gravity and larger wheels will certainly help get over many obstacles that would otherwise stop a smart car.

If you had to bet which car was more likely to be deflected by a curb strike and which would not, I have a hard time believing you would put your money on a truck vs a small car.

Not disagreeing with your overall point, but vehicle size and weight still contribute an awful lot to the >40000 vehicle fatalities in the US each year.

About half of all pedestrian deaths are caused by drunk driving, so that's another relatively low hanging fruit we could aim for if we really had the political will to do so.

But other comment suggesting to lower it to 20mph (or 10??) is egregious. It's standard for a pendulum to swing from an extreme to an extreme I guess.

Twenty is plenty and I don't see why that can't apply to rural roads too. For too long we have had motorists be able to terrorise any other lifeform off the road in the countryside.

If you have dedicated car only infrastructure then that is one thing, but everywhere else, twenty is plenty. This might seem absurd given the lack of cyclists on the road, but it will foster growth of lightweight EVs rather than monster tanks.

As a cyclist I want to see all the speed bumps, traffic lights, bollards and much else banished. Bring back trees, hedges and greenery. Whenever I see footage of places in China I see fantastic landscaping and wonder why we have to have broken glass, graffiti and rubble.

I am with NotJustBikes all the way.

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.

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.

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.

There's some amount of malicious joy as errant cars are punished by contact with bollards, as well as the gratitude for safety of pedestrians this purchases.

It might be worth a scroll through:

https://twitter.com/WorldBollard

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.

[1] https://climaterwc.com/2023/05/11/31863/

But bollards on bike paths can be deadly to cyclist. My area used to place them at path-street crossings, to keep cars from turning onto the bike path, but after a few cyclists clipped them and died, the bollards were removed. The incidence of cars turning onto the bike path is low enough they weren’t worth the risk to non-cars.

The primary bike path that I use for commuting is the Hudson River Bike Path in Lower Manhattan, and there are bollards there at every intersection as a reaction to this terrorist attack: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/sayfullo-saipov-be-sent....

I sometimes find the bollards annoying, but I can't disagree with the city for placing them after that...

The amount of stupid cycling infrastructure I see is pretty mind-blowing. It’s very obvious traffic engineers have zero interest in actually building multi-model infrastructure, instead just doing a box-checking exercise to get those federal road dollars.

That doesn't make sense to me. The entire reason the bollard exists is to stop cars from turning into the bike path.

It has nothing to do with non-thinking engineers. It has nothing to do with saving money.

It's because if there's space for a car to fit between them, then the bollards will not fulfill their one and only purpose.

EDIT: Note that I'm not saying that it's a good design. But I am saying it didn't come about for the reasons you're saying.

https://westevan.org/bollards/cannonbollards3.htm

> The one on the right is a real cannon outside the main gate into the original Chatham Dockyard. It is one of a pair (see the gateway photograph in the gallery below). It had been one of the Royal Navy's biggest smooth-bore muzzle-loading (SBML) guns but when it was no longer fit to be used on a warship it was buried breech-down to protect the brickwork of the gatehouse from damage by carts and other vehicles. The muzzle of this one has been sealed off with a cross-shaped piece of iron.

You can also see them as mooring bollards in harbours around the world.

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).

In intersections, pedestrian islands are protected by bollards. In Singapore for example many of the busiest roads even have pedestrian bridges.

It’s a major contrast with my experience of California, where any non-automobile transportation method is an extremely hostile experience. Pedestrians and bicyclists are truly second class citizens on the roads unfortunately.

I'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.

Post some initial confusion about whether the road is on the inside or the outside of the sidewalk, this wasn’t very hard to follow.

> Because not only was it entirely preventable, it was also statistically inevitable. Not putting bollards where they need to be is like not only not wearing a seatbelt when driving, but arguing that seatbelts should not be available in cars because usually they’re not needed

This is 100% correct. A woman in Portland here was killed when a street racer plowed into a bus stop. The racer lived and the woman died. The racer got 36 months. Totally preventable.

https://www.kgw.com/article/news/crime/portland-street-racer...

In North America, roads are usually built in the complete opposite way, with long straight roads and wide lanes, so the design speed is actually quite high -- even if that wasn't the intent. People go fast, because it feels safe to go that speed, but isn't, because there are pedestrians and turns. We then "fix" that shit road design by having low speed limits.

This video is all I think of when this discussion comes up now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bglWCuCMSWc

But the local residents don't want that, because they want the traffic from the road to come into the little town and patronize local businesses. So they put the businesses along the main road and put pedestrians where the traffic is, and then complain about the speed limit on the road whose purpose was supposed to be high speed travel.

Suppose you have the same intersection but put bollards on the sidewalk. This is a bad design because drivers hit the bollards and damage their cars.

You want a design where cars go through the intersection without hitting anything.

Why would you not want an intersection that is safe for everyone, period?

> If drivers aren’t capable of negotiating streets with them, then they shouldn’t be driving, or they should be driving a smaller vehicle.

The size of the vehicle isn't what causes most collisions. Moreover, there are certain roads that have a disproportionate number of collisions. That implies there is something wrong with the road. Roads should be designed for actual reality rather then ideal hypothetical drivers and conditions.

> The idea that we should be building our streets to make driving easier is exactly how we’ve ended up with so many people being killed by cars every year in the US.

That is not how we've ended up there. It was quite the opposite. We made driving a necessity by moving people to the suburbs, without making roads safe enough that everybody could do it, and then demanded it of them regardless.

It isn't the monkey's fault that the only housing he can afford is 30 miles from his job and he has to take a road full of obstructions to get there. The monkey's behavior is predictable, and we know that what happened last year will happen next year unless we do something different. "Damage the monkey's car" is not a solution, it's just the fast track to angry monkeys.

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. Until then, we have bollards.

Physical features are much harder to ignore.

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.

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.

Also, I have exactly as much data as everyone else is bringing to this discussion, including you and the GP comment, who have brought no relevant data either. This is just my opinion.

And yes, I can absolutely say speed limits are too high, even if people are exceeding them. People drive the speed they feel safe, not the speed we want. So, we should design the roads to ensure people drive the speeds we want.

IE, a wide open 4-lane road is going to see speeds above 40mph, even if it’s posted at 20mph. Because it looks/feels safe from within a car. Yet, we keep building wide open 4-lane roads and wondering why everybody speeds and people keep getting run over.

My experience with the design of many roads suggests that people generally take them far too fast regardless: they cut corners, don't stay fully in their lane, and do lots of other things that indicate they are driving far too fast.

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

A) The cost doesn't justify the benefits

and

B) There's too many humans anyway

The comment I responded to said B, not A.

That's what I mean by "pro death". Viewing it as a positive that we reduce the amount of humans by... random deaths from traffic?

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…

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.

https://www.maibach.com/en/soft-bollard.html

How do you feel about all the bollards that are designed to stop a crashing vehicles from injuring or killing pedestrians?

That's not a bollard. I'm assuming you're thinking of flex posts, or how some of us call them, car ticklers.

I think that "soft bollards" are made to look like bollards because most people assume that a bollard is a rigid structure and as such treat them in that manner. It's basically just an elaborate traffic cone. A sign is to a "soft bollard" as a "soft bollard" is to a bollard.