1975 mm including side mirrors.
Easy enough to remember; I’d have to look up width without mirrors.
My problem is rather that on some days my garage door is somehow narrower than usual.
Side note: the US does not use the imperial system.
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Those will be the days when you are looking at it.
You can’t observe and measure accurately at the same time, or so I’m told.
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I have the opposite problem. I have Buenos Aires drivers who ridiculously overestimate the width of their cars- to the point where they’re all up in my bike lane splatching me dead, with enough room to to the right of them in their car lane to fit almost a whole other car. Just because there was a dumpster or something. They simply cannot judge even close to how much room they have to the passenger side (when the bike lane is on the left).
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Really? Because my family has three cars, and all of them are cars the size of small cars.
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No no no. There’s no need for that. What they really need is a sign that says “if your car is wider than this it will hit these bollards”.
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But it has to be projected onto a water curtain that covers the lane so drivers have no choice but to read it.
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Seems you’re all missing the point. Your car is narrower than the width restriction. If you watch your driver’s side wing mirror and make sure it’s less than an inch from the right hand bollard you’ll be fine.
The only thing to worry about is your speed. These width restrictions are mainly to make you slow the fuck down. Going five miles an hour you can judge more finely where your car is, and if you get it wrong you’ll suffer a minor scrape at worst. Faster than that, own stupid fault applies.
Going fast enough to launch your car in the air is just begging for a Darwin award.
Were the vehicles at 0:23 and 0:31 going too fast? Those are both thousands of pounds of damage. [edit: also 0:43]
Driving a vehicle through a width restriction, even at low speed, is a particular sort of precision-driving skill that most of us never have to do at this level. The way this is set up, you only need to fail once to be massively in the hole. It almost doesn’t matter how slow you go if you haven’t honed the skill. Meanwhile check out the white van at 0:10, which goes through the restriction at speed.
Conclusion: the bollards don’t reliably slow people down, but they do reliably contribute massive damage to the vehicles of people unfamiliar with a particular precision-driving skill they have no reason to be familiar with.
(Not to mention the various design defects that others have mentioned, like the curb cut where there ought to be a funneling curb – turning the curb from a vehicle-directing and -protecting device into a car-destroying bollard ramp.)
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Come live in the south-east of UK. They’re everywhere.
Also, again, once you know that you only have to pay attention to your wing mirror you will always be fine.
ETA: only know this bit, really.
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Ah, so everyone in the UK just ponies up a $2500-a-pop initiation fee figuring out how to navigate these the first few times?
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Near enough. Even knowing how to do it, which takes seconds in a driving lesson, I caught my off-side on something which caused a 5mm groove all down the side of the car. Going too fast and not paying attention. All four panels ruined. My partner, whose car it was, was very nice about it and wouldn’t tell me how much it cost her.
I guess it’s good for the GDP at least.
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With the current shitshow we have to have something.
I wonder what the toll is on the other side of the road? As some have noted the only real difference is the sloped kerbstone at the approach to the first bollard.
Also impressed by how solid those bollards are, must have deep foundations.
https://www.bollardsinmovies.com
Won’t onebox, but there is some solid gold in there.
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It will fit some pretty sizable us vehicles if they are centered in the lane too. It is just about the size of an f150 minus the mirrors at 2.03 meters. The width isn’t the problem. It seems like the barrier design could be improved to reduce the ramp effect and some other comparable changes.
To the extent that you don’t hit stationary objects and can identify lane position, yes absolutely. The measurement signs should serve as a reminder, but just the curbs and bollards alone should do the job.
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No. Absolutely not. 99.9% of width restrictions are well-designed and very rarely hit, and if they are hit, a minor scrape is incurred by someone who wasn’t paying attention - not serious damage like this.
The design of this one is so far beyond the norm it beggars belief - so far beyond the norm that the sort of highly exceptional damage we see is, well, highly exceptional. And I’d be willing to bet that most of those drivers who incurred damage had successfully navigated other width restrictions (of the same width) perfectly well.
Note also the comment by @anon33176345, above, about how the other side of the road (where there appears not to be a dropped kerb in front of the bollards) does not have any examples shown.
(A bit off topic @anon33176345 … around here we have some historic boundary markers that were installed in 1860 - lots of them. I am told that the reason so many of them still survive is because they are like icebergs, with perhaps as much as 10-12 feet below the ground compared to the maybe 4 feet above it. This may be apocryphal, I have seen other claims that it is only 2.5 feet below ground.)
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IT’S NOT THE DRIVES AT FAULT! Read on.
I checked the dimensions of my compact SUV. Without mirrors I would have 2.5 inches on each side. Add the mirrors and tuck them in (as for shopping centre car parks) and my mirrors will not fit between those bollards.
If anyone cares, look up Mazda CX-30. It’s not exactly a large car. Small four seater SUV.
No, the only error the drivers make is assuming that no sensible local authority would create a pinch point that most cars could not get through.
If your car won’t fit, it won’t fit. That still remains the drivers’ fault. Tearing out pre-auto neighborhoods because obscenely large cars have become fashionable in recent years isn’t a reasonable accommodation, nor is closing the street to modes of transportation that fit. Also it seems your measurement of your car are off upthread someone posted an image with the size 2.1 meters., or about 78 inches. A CX30 is 70.7 inches without mirrors and the mirror height would be above the bollards.
But yeah, if your car won’t fit down a path, and you are told it won’t fit down the path, then you run into things within the warned size of the path it is your fault. The barrier needs to be redesigned, but the drivers are absolutely at fault.
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