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Comment by senkora | Hacker News Reader

I am curious how the bollards were deadly to the cyclists (I'm not saying I disagree, I just don't understand the mechanism). Maybe they were just going a lot faster than I'm thinking of?

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...

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E.g., https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/kin... (not a death, but you can see the similarity).

They were cente-trail (what would be the physical centerline, though there was no lane marking) about 5” in/back from the road surface. A car could get up onto the sidewalk that’s parallel to the road before striking the bollard. So, a cyclist would have to pass the bollards before stopping to check for traffic. I assume they clipped the bollard, lost control, and either ran into the road or something like that. This was 20 years ago now, so I don’t remember details.

The bollards were right in the middle of the cycle path?!? Yeah that's some shitty placement that's gonna endanger the cyclist by shoving them out into traffic.

Yeah bollards right in the middle of the cycle path are unfortunately common around here.

They’re also significantly narrower than they need to be to stop a car: https://gothamist.com/news/security-measures-on-hudson-river...

Still, I guess they’re better than the concrete jersey barriers they installed initially, and still have in some places along that route.

Yeah, I guess that’s the non-thinking, car-driving traffic engineers solution to “if we put two bollards on the sides of the trail, there’s enough space for a car to go between them, so we’ll save some money while we make things SAFER.”

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.

> the non-thinking, car-driving traffic engineers solution to “if we put two bollards on the sides of the trail, there’s enough space for a car to go between them, so we’ll save some money while we make things SAFER.”

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.

It sounds like GP is assuming that a car is wider than the bike lane, so putting bollards on each side of the bike lane would stop cars, without blocking bikes from using the centre of the lane?

If so, then "there’s enough space for a car to go between them" is a funny way to say it.

I'm imaging the thought process was something like...

- Let's put bollards on the bike path to prevent car entry

- Ok, lets put them on the sides, out of the way.

- Oh no, that won't work, the trail is 10' wide, so cars can fit through

- Ok, lets put one in the middle, that'll keep cars out.

- Thought process ends here, no thought given to other users of the infrastructure.

Sure, they managed to keep cars off the path, but killed/maimed cyclists in the process. IE, they didn't think the design all the way through, they only thought about the cars, not other users of the system.

Right in the middle of a cycle path is extremely obvious though. You basically have to not be paying attention for an extended period of time if you want to run into them.

It's entirely possible someone is cycling and has reduced vision (sunset, evening time, sun in your eyes, etc.) or isn't 100% focused for a few seconds (while thinking about something else). Putting any physical obstacle in the middle of a path is a very odd and dangerous choice.

It only takes about 2 seconds. Ask me how I know.

Two seconds is an eternity depending on your speed. If you can’t see two seconds of travel ahead, you better not stop paying attention for that time.

It's true, as exemplified by a scratched bike.

Still, it happens, and the designer of the infrastructure must be aware of that.

To take the devil's advocate role, people will keep traveling long after they exhausted their ability to pay attention, and/or keep reasonable distance from the next one in the front.

> people will keep traveling long after they exhausted their ability to pay attention, and/or keep reasonable distance from the next one in the front

While this is true, we haven’t stopped selling knives because a few people use them irresponsibly. By the same token, we shouldn’t discount infrastructure because a few people drive when they shouldn’t.

Not if there are others in front of you obscuring your view. Or maybe you need to avoid someone else and you hit it. Tons of reasons you can hit them other than "not paying attention".

Why are you so close to the person in front of you in the first place? You should be far enough back that you can come to a stop to avoid exactly that issue. Also, why would you need to avoid anything? It’s (from the description) right at the end of the path.

Because it's busy? Because you're cycling in a group of ten people? The person in front of you avoids the bollard, which suddenly comes in to view and you have 3 seconds to see it and react (without crashing into anything or anyone else). Usually this is okay. Sometimes it's not. This sort of thing happens to pedestrians too.

You'd think so, but reality shows it's a dangerous design for whatever reason. We need to engineer roads and paths for actual humans, who are flawed.

I knew a guy that was driving a small motorbike, when a car forced him to the right. He fell on a bollard like the ones shaped as pencils in the article linked, broken badly his chest and dying soon after. According to witnesses, the hit was at slow speeds, so it could happen to a bike.

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