This isn’t a pre-war have to tear out roads to make them bigger issue. There’s a bus lane between the restrictions, which I’m guessing is big enough to fit a bus through. If they put in a bus lane, my guess is that they have busses that use the road. If they have busses that use the road, that means that the road is large enough for busses. (I’m hoping that the bus lane is also used for fire trucks, ambulances, and other emergency services. Although the video shows a police officer wrecking their car while navigating the restrictor at slow speeds, so…)
The funny thing is that this monstrosity was created supposedly for pedestrian safety but it is just an absolute monstrosity that makes for really, really poor walkability. Not only are pedestrians in danger of being hit by flying car wreckage when a car hits the bollards from being over too far, they are likely to hit their head on that ugly sign, too! They have a nice, wide sidewalk, with an overgrown hedge, box, and sign post seriously infringing on it. It just really, really isn’t pedestrian friendly.
So, how would you fix it?
From the pedestrian side, I’d get the owners of the house to see if they would be willing to replace that hedge with a fence. I’d also try to relocate that box in front of the wall.
Instead of doing the curb cut, I’d keep a curb corner at full height, and install an accessable ramp at on the outboard side of the sidewalk. I might even create a bit of a tree lawn between the sidewalk and road to try to keep pedestrians to the outside.
Since space is of the essence here, I’d get rid of the bollards completely, and build about 4-5 linear feet of a 3’ high concrete wall with a Jersey rail profile (full height curb at existing curb location, 12" of slope back 6 inches on top of that, then an almost vertical, very sloped segment on top of that to the 3’ height. It could probably only need to be about 6" thick at the top or so, about 12 inches away from the curb face. You could also integrate a sign post into the design, so it was in the wall instead of behind it. The idea is to funnel tires back down onto the road if it gets up on the wall. It should also provide a bit more protection to pedestrians by deflecting most vehicles back into the roadway instead of onto the sidewalk. I’d put some decorative doodads on top of the wall so divers could see it over the hood, but keep it at 3’ so it didn’t look very oppressive.
From a driver’s perspective, I’d keep everything back from that curb corner, so if you hit it with your tire you would definitely feel it and be able to back off and correct as long as you were going slow enough. As it is, if you are driving slow, you wouldn’t notice if you hit that curb. Some of those people were already accelerating when they hit that first bollard because they thought they were good. The slopes on the concrete barriers would tend to funnel your tire back down into the roadway with minimal damage.
If there were more space, I’d suggest putting a planter there for beautification. It’s nice to put plants in a design to make it less concrete. That requires upkeep, though, and space is really at a premium here.
I’d probably keep the curb on the driver’s side, but I’d put some pretty bollards that were about 4-5’ tall, and that the main vertical side of the bollard nearest the driver was about level with the back of the concrete part of the curb, about 4-6" away from the face of the curb. (I’d also put some chain between the bollards, paint it all black with some yellow reflectors, and put a nice planter with either some seasonal flowers if the community supported that, or some nice shrubbery. Seriously, this is an eyesore and a half, no need to make it ugly and destructive!)
