Josh Thompson     about     blog     projects

Bollards: Why & What

tag(s): • •
Reading time: 16 mins

Article Table of Contents

author’s note: it’s always fun to see your own stuff on the Hacker News front page! This very post sparked >450 comments worth of conversation! I didn’t even know this got posted until days later!

another note: it’s difficult and annoying to view videos embedded from different platforms like tiktok, youtube, so mostly I’ve tried to re-host things on Wistia, so it’s less annoying to try to exit this page and go view that video, then return, etc. It’s still sometimes nice to view the video in the context of the other platform, though, as well.

What are bollards #

The what and the why in a single image:

bollard

The what and why in a single video:

The above video is a tweet from @worldbollard, here’s a still from the video. Click to view the original video:

bollard saving people

It’s very possible that the person just barely visible at the end of the video would have been struck had the bollard not been there, and it’s obvious how those bollards create a ‘shadow’ or ‘eddy’ of safety, from the passing vehicles. Here’s another look:

A bollard is:

any sort of physical barricade strong enough, shaped in such a way, that if a vehicle tries to overlap with the bollard in location, intentional or not, the vehicle cannot cross. Sometimes they’re built into the physical environment, sometimes not. They can be movable or not. Large and intrusive, or not.

smol_bollard

source: @worldbollard twitter account

In the words of a local city engineer’1, as he was explaining why a bollard placed near where pedestrians congregate to cross a large roadway would be inappropriate:

Barriers (bollards, guardrail, etc.) are considered for installation if the result of a vehicle striking the barrier will be less severe than hitting the unshielded object.

Less severe for who? Like, it totally makes sense to evaluate severity of a vehicle striking a barrier vs there not being a barrier. That’s the whole point of the bollard existing, to protect people/things from vehicles.

A placement like this makes intuitive sense, when run through the lense of protecting a space from cars. Here’s outside of a school, solving the problem of people sometimes parking their cars where they shouldn’t be:

pencil_bollard

These bollards are also cute. If one could install ten times as many bollards as they otherwise have around them, and make one or two of them cute like a pencil bollard, I think everyone might be pleased.

source: @worldbollard twitter account

You’ll never unsee this:

👉 Take another look at where american municipalities put the guardrail. Quoting the author:

You see guardrail everywhere. It protects drivers from hitting hard objects by bouncing cars back into their proper place. But public works and transportation departments routinely install guardrails on the “wrong” side of a sidewalk.

Guardrails bring good fortune to motorists, but not for the unlucky people using the sidewalks.

Imagine pushing a stroller or walking the dog when an out-of-control vehicle, careening towards an object is saved by the guardrails, but you’re the innocent casualty. This engineering malfeasance is directly related to “clear zones”. The Federal Highway Administration says:

By creating Clear Zones, roadway agencies can increase the likelihood that a roadway departure results in a safe recovery rather than a crash, and mitigate the severity of crashes that do occur. - Federal Highway Administration guidance on ‘clear zones’

Once you’re aware of how engineers misuse the clear zone and put pedestrians at risk, you’ll see it everywhere. Intelligent, credentialed professionals do this all the time all across the country. Not only are they getting away with wildly dangerous behavior, it doesn’t even phase them.

🤯

I generally dislike every mile I have to drive on American roads in a car. I don’t perceive the roads to be nearly as safe as some others, but they seem nearly professionally dissociated from the experience.[^driving-is-fine]

Please, please stop evaluating local transportation administrations as competent. I’ve hung out with these people, gone on walks with them, driven around with them, listened to them get excited about a new pedestrian affordence they’ve installed, and the lack of awareness and close-mindedness (which is obviously necessary to sustain a shitty system creaking into it’s 100th year of existence) is stunning. Someone wrote a book titled Killed By A Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System about this. It’s not defecting from any group to evaluate this as the case.2

To interact with local transportation administrations requires that you 1) self-abandon, and 2) maintain performative allegiance to a pseudo-scientific view of the world.

The main feature of a bollard is used, by city engineers as a reason they cannot be placed anywhere near roads.

Here’s a beautiful bollard doing it’s thing:

What are not bollards? #

It’s tricky to hit the right emotional tone of why bollards matter. Sometimes it seems academic and dry, sometimes its very visceral and raw.

Where there are not bollards, there are careening, speeding vehicles, and often enough death and destruction.

To park a vehicle, one needs to press the correct pedal. When people are driving unfamiliar vehicles, or rushed, or whatever, sometimes the wrong pedal gets pushed. Would you suggest that this small error should result in death of people and the elimination of businesses and buildings?

Here’s a vehicle coming to almost a complete stop, then accelerating into and through an entire building into the parking lot beyond.

Every time I ‘feel’ a vehicle pointed at me, even when I’m inside of a building, I’m aware that if the driver has a heart attack or makes a small mistake, I might be staring at them from the end of their hood, above a crushed pelvis. “Oh well, one espresso please.”

Please watch the following video:

car_in_store

I take issue with the video caption, I’d rather it be:

vehicle operator makes error when parking

Lets look at another example.

When there are not bollards, in areas where people are promised safety, even if everyone behaves correctly, there are still failures. For example…

Once, a widely respected member of a local software development community and their partner (also a widely respected member of the same community) were walking on a sidewalk in California one night a few years ago. Far from them, a speeding car struck another car of course careened through the sidewalk. Both friends were hit by the car. She was killed instantly, he was knocked unconscious, woke up days later to find out the news. The language in the article is full of ‘this was an unavoidable tragedy’, though i think it’s obvious a local city engineer ought to be held criminally liable for their neglect.

This video below shows a very similar style of ‘car accident’ that killed and injured these friends, but in this video the spaces along the road are rendered safer by the bollards.

This is why ‘jaywalking’ is a propagandist legal fiction, by the way. The concept of jaywalking blames victims of vehicular homicide for their own deaths. Very convenient for a settler-colonialist oppressor class.

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.

A bollard is something like a seatbelt for someone outside of the vehicle.

When and where there are not bollards, often enough, there are cars.

Injury on 7-Eleven property costs $91 million #

So… this is the sort of devastation done to a community that everyone would obviously want to prevent. And this exact pattern plays out many times a day.

Even the american legal system sometimes understand bollards and appreciate that sometimes a need to assign honest blame to someone, the ‘responsible corporate entity with a pocketbook’ has a responsibility to people who are using their spaces, and a perceived failure to provide a measure of structural something.

7-Eleven to pay $91 million to suburban man who lost both legs because they didn’t install bollards at that location.

That title is sensationalized, sort of. Really tragic for the involved person. It could be re-written “in which a vehicle operator pressed the gas instead of the brake, the vehicle pinned-and-maimed man passing between at that exact moment”.

It’s a normal occurrence.

If you watch some of the videos elsewhere on this page, you can understand the ‘accident mechanics’, and can appreciate how if there were bollards in a certain spot, the harmed/maimed passer-by would not have been maimed.

Notice down below how often this kind of thing happens. I hope there’s bollards at every 7/11 now’[^current-coverage] [^current-coverage]: Since I first wrote this, I’ve seen a few 7/11s, both in my neighborhood near Cheesman park in Denver, and elsewhere when I pass them by, I notice if there’s bollards, what they look like, etc. If they’re pretty, how they’re constructed, what color they’re painted, what particular ‘positive outdoor space’ they create. It’s a mix, but I’ve never seen a bell bollard.

A 57-year-old suburban man who became a double amputee after a car pinned his legs against the front of a Bensenville 7-Eleven will receive a $91 million payout from the convenience store chain

In a moment, you’ll see the kinds of vehicle-strikes-building results this refers to.

The case was the first in which attorneys had access to some 15 years of reports from 7- Eleven, which identified some 6,253 storefront crashes at 7-Eleven stores across the country, Power said. Data from a previous lawsuit against the company identified another 1,525 crashes between 1991 and 1996.

Who in the story do you think uttered the following?

It is important to note that this unfortunate accident was caused by a reckless driver who pled guilty, and this store followed all local building codes and ordinances.

That was the legal representation of 7/11, but you can also hear the local city manager or city engineer saying ‘it was not my fault either!’. (“followed all local building codes and ordinances”)

Lots of people like to suggest flexposts as a ‘useful’ or ‘improved’ effort over nothing. I emphatically disagree, as a flexposts promises something it cannot deliver:

I would accept flexposts only if ~they were frequent, and~ one out of every ten was a visually-indistinguishable, placed-at-random, real steel bollard, or at least something that would cause some real issue if impacted. a bell bollard made out of concrete, a tree, a fence post.

Carl was a frequent customer of the Bensenville store, and most days would walk a few blocks from an apartment he shared with his three sons to buy his morning coffee…

[the morning of this tragic-yet-statistically-inevitable systemic failure] Carl’s ride was running late, and a man pulling into a parking space in front of the store stepped on his car’s accelerator instead of the brake. The car lurched over the curb, across a sidewalk and pinned Carl against the storefront, causing injuries that would require the amputation of both his legs above the knees. Another driver had crashed into the front of the same store 16 months earlier, Power said.

What does not bollards look like #

In the context of ‘bollards as protecting store-fronts from cars’, sort of akin to a physical insurance policy, here’s what moving vehicles, through stores, can look like.

I wonder what losses the involved parties were able to recoup. Presumably insurance would make partial financial repairs, but it would all be at great opportunity cost, hassle, sadness, anger.

Even a rock, obtained functionally for free, could have fully prevented this. Again, no one’s fault, but it hurts to see damage accrue.

👉 driver presses wrong peddle when parking outside store

I dislike the caption. ‘[^forgets] [^forgets]: possibly playing into subtle supremacy saying “woman forgets…” Why not person? Or very physically ill driver? or “driver in unfamiliar rental car”? or “driver thinking they were pressing the break unintentionally pressed the gas and…” or “while thinking they were in reverse, the driver pressed the gas and…”

I’m not into punishment energy. For real for real. I need to finish writing https://josh.works/punishment, to explain. for now, “the concept of retributive violence is a gussied up version of nobility and chivalry ethics. Which was a strange group of people’s attempts to justify their own domination of others.

There’s more to be said about punishment regimes. There’s entire modes of thoughts/ways of being/concepts of the world that operate entirely without punishment, in a way that would feel sorta unrecognizable to someone who’s grown up around the american criminal justice system, and believed some of what is said about it.

currently not written but I’m close on a draft of something.

It should say:

vehicle operator makes error when parking

car_in_store

This sort of incident would be perfectly prevented by bollards like this:

tiny_bollards

source: @worldbollard

As a reminder, flex posts are not bollards, they’re… lies, drafting on the idea of bollards:

“But what I think of as bollards are not pretty” #

Great, lets grow our imaginations:

beach ball bollards

pencil bollards

walnut bollards

sheep bollards

tree bollards

I live in the Cheesman park area in Denver, there’s already plenty of bollards and bollard-passing objects (trees, light poles, boulders) and I’d love for there to be many more, following similar-enough patterns of what is already placed, with some reasonable, obvious iteration.

Bollards are like icebergs. 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.

under_the_bollard

source: @worldbollard

  1. This was the city engineer of a local municipality, and I’ve had direct, 1:1 conversations with the city engineer in {another municipality in which I lived/owned property} after parents in a local neighborhood demanded a meeting about the dangerous road that their kids were walking to school alongside. The engineer said ‘due to traffic count data, the road does not qualify for any state-funded improvements’, which is obviously a 🖕🏻 to the kids he was failing. There are many cheap was to slow traffic without speed bumps, police, cameras, signs, and half million dollar increments of spending, but people committed to bad plans will use their poor imagination as a reason for why something must not be done. He gave me permission to run my own road experiments, though, which I did, and it worked great. example 1, example 2, example 3. ↩

  2. ↩

💬 Comments

Post comment
Loading...

Want to stay up to date on these projects? Enter your email below, and you'll get an approximately-monthly newsletter from me.

If you don't see the subscribe form above, click here.

Readers have rated these messages from me as variations of 'interesting-enough', 'thought-provoking', and 'worthwhile'. It's also easy to unsubscribe from.