We can’t see what they are hitting. Why does this even exist?
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If this is intended to stop overwide vehicles - and it also stops lots of cars that would fit had they been centered - then it’s a poorly designed trap. People drive cars, and there needs to be a margin of error allowed that recognizes that fact. The title of this article is bad, because it lays blame in the wrong place.
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Can’t they just lower the road?
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There’s one of these on a bridge near me… scares the crap out of me.
I quite happily add another 10 minutes to my journey to avoid it.
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During the news report video talking to the councilman, did it capture a vehicle purposely crossing over and going in the oncoming lane to avoid the restricted lane?
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You’re making a category error. An analogy: Lots of cities install benches that have all sorts of obnoxious bumps or discontinuities that make it uncomfortable to lie on them. From the perspective of a homeless person trying to get some kip, that looks like bad human factors engineering. But the design choice is deliberate, because the goal is to stop people using them that way.
Same is true here. The bollards are deliberately designed to be really hard for cars to navigate them because the intent is to protect pedestrians, and to discourage cars from using that road.
Now we can argue about whether this is the right thing to do in each case, but don’t blame it on bad engineering. For the record, I’m against the first and favour of the second, for pretty much the same reason - helping and protecting the most vulnerable should be an urgent priority in all urban design.
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Engineering that “discourages use” through personal injury and property damage is bad engineering.
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By that argument, all weapons are bad engineering.
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Yup. There is a shot of a van using the bus lane that bypasses the restricters seen over the shoulder of the council member during the interview. The green bus lane appears to be bidirectional, you can see arrows pointing both directions in the green lane, so I think it’s a violation to use the bus lane, but not because its the “wrong side of the road”.
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Drivers avoid the bollards by using the bus lane in the middle, which I assume buses can use in either direction. There is another restricted-width lane on the other side.
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It is a design fault. I have seen these elsewhere and they work much better as the design has
a) a clearly narrowed section of road with the kerb sticking out into the road several feet before the actual width restrictor (if you hit the kerb, time to ask if you’ll pass the restrictor)
b) the actual vertical pole width restrictor is a few inches inside the kerb and is three or four times the diameter of these shown here. And there is only one on each side.
I have no idea what the consecutive poles here are supposed to achieve and they (well it’s only the first one that matters) are so skinny as to seem not significant to a driver - and the fact there is a series of them is confusing - other road scenarios that are not width restrictions also have such poles at the kerbside. If I can find a photo I’ll add it later.
But, I am fed up with people who do not seem to know how narrow their cars are and insist that two cars cannot pass each other on a section of road they clearly can, and sit there with a 3-foot gap between their nearside and the kerb or parked car, waiting for someone else (me) to do something to remedy their fuckwittery. On occasion I have been reduced to opening the window and remarking that “if you don’t know how wide it is or where it will fit, get a smaller one”.
ETA Here’s a couple of examples - I am very familiar with the first and those cones used to be very brightly painted. But everyone seems to know about it now and everyone seems to manage. The second one is also a better design than the twattery in Watford. (whose signage is also pretty inadequate.)
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I frequently slow down or stop as far over as I can in some of the narrower two way streets in my neighborhood because I don’t trust the judgement of the opposing driver not to hit me. It’s safer and my police report and insurance claim will be much clearer if they hit me while I’m going very slowly or stopped.
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For quite a long time, I found some uncertainty principle in place whilst parking where I could know how wide or how long my car was, but not both
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Most of the cars I saw were running right into the kerb. I live beside a part of the road that narrows. People have crashed into it repeatedly until there is no concrete left on the verge. Broad daylight too.
As a cyclist I can tell you that people will avoid clipping their driver side wing mirror by metres and care not one shit about hitting you on their far side. Ain’t gonna get them.
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Watch the video at comment number 5
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I do the same. I know when I am one inch from the kerb on my nearside and I just sit there inviting them to pass me. (Often channelling my Dad, who would mutter ‘you could get a double-decker bus through that gap! Get on with it!’)
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I’m okay with that. The weapon itself may be well-engineered, but employing the weapon as a deterrent is not an engineering activity.
Gawd, I hate driving. Between the idiots on the road, construction and cops I just want to crawl in a hole and pull it in after me.
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It’s fine for the bollards to be hard for cars to navigate. The systems goal is acceptable. However, a basic tenet of usability engineering is that error should be recoverable at low cost, which this isn’t. Furthermore, the fact is that cars that should pass the shibboleth don’t, sometimes even at low speed. This failure is especially acute given that there are designs that would achieve the same goal without resulting in destruction upon user error (e.g., there could be several feet of flexible plastic posts with the same clearance, in advance of the metal bollards).
This is like the 11’8" bridge except there’s no extenuating circumstances that limit the design. The designers have just decided that imperiling life, limb, and property are perfectly fine to achieve their desired goals. That’s a failure of design ethics, no matter what the system goals are.
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It would seem like it’s one or the other, not both.
