New Orleans’ planned new Bourbon Street barriers only crash-rated to 10 mph
New Orleans’ planned new Bourbon Street barriers only crash-rated to 10 mph
Summary
New Orleans is installing new 10-mph-rated bollards on Bourbon Street to replace failing barriers ahead of the Feb. 9 Super Bowl, despite knowing they can't stop moderate-to-high-speed vehicle attacks like the deadly New Year’s Day incident that killed 14.
The city prioritized ease of use over crash safety due to maintenance issues with older barriers.
Critics argue the new system leaves vulnerabilities, as the engineering report showed vehicles could still exceed the bollards’ speed rating.
Officials face scrutiny over balancing security and daily operations in the crowded tourist zone.
Vehicles ‘could’ exceed the speed rating? Man, even my fat ass at a brisk walk could topple these things over.
Frankly I’m shocked they didn’t have proper working barriers. They should’ve just put up some concrete blocks while the existing stuff was being renovated.
This type of attack is very, very common in Europe and the Middl-East, so this isn’t exactly an unprecedented method. But also: you’d want to have barriers anyway to guard against drunk drivers or drivers not paying attention. They should be high priority.
Unlike some pedestrian-only zones, such as in New York City’s Times Square, Bourbon Street is open to regular vehicle traffic for much of the day, requiring city officials to block parts of it off from surrounding streets each evening.
Once again, driver convenience takes precedence over people's lives. You want the shops and the tourism, then commit and make it pedestrian-only.
I feel like they could install the automatic ones that retract fully into the ground and they trigger at set times or has someone come around to activate them and put them away in the morning. Seen those ones stop cars in their tracks.
It's not to improve security it's to boost sense of security.
OK, they might add a '10 mph' traffic sign too.
Security theater raises its ugly head once again.
I feel like there are a lot of misunderstandings here and it makes sense as to why.
New Orleans (my former home) is complicated. It’s not as straightforward as bollards vs no bollards or vehicles vs pedestrians, etc.
NOLA has obviously been through a lot over the past 20 years - Katrina, Rita, and recently Ida in 2021 were all hard hitting storms.
The influx of visitors for Mardi Gras in 2020 is what made Covid especially devastating for the city.
It’s a poor city that relies on tourism to stay alive. The overall education system in Louisiana is abysmal and the politics are extremely dysfunctional. The rest of the state (conservative) despises NOLA (liberal), but they realize their livelihoods depend on its debauchery so they “allow” it (a whole other story).
So the city needs tourism to stay alive. The tourists mostly stick to the French Quarter - Bourbon Street is the famous one, right? There are a lot of businesses on Bourbon - mostly bars/clubs, tourist shops, restaurants, some hotels, etc.
Those places need to be able to receive regular deliveries, but there are also residences on Bourbon and in the FQ as a whole.
Could some system be put up to accommodate the delivery drivers, the employees, the residents, the tourists who park at hotels, taxis/Uber/Lyft and the safety of pedestrians? Let’s assume sure, why not.
Where does the money come from? The city itself is poor. The state hates the city so why do they need to direct money to the place of sin and majority poor Black residents? Louisiana infrastructure overall is shit, anyway. Federal? Okay, but that would mean the city talking to the state talking to the federal government and that’s fucked up in so many ways. And Trump is about to be inaugurated, so good luck with that.
My point is/TLDR - projects like this aren’t something that NOLA can do on its own. The state won’t help it and I don’t expect the Trump admin to, either.
It’s a difficult and complex situation and most Louisiana politicians have no incentive to do anything about it until it somehow begins to impact them directly. They’ll just get on TV during press conferences and point fingers at the failure of the liberal NOLA politicians while ignoring their own failure to act over the years.
It’s a fucking shitshow and it’s sad.
Deliveries can be made by cargo bicycles, as they do in Europe.
The only reason a reinforced concrete barrier should be moved is to permit entry is for ambulances and fire trucks.
No supermarket can exist from deliveries by cargo bikes. That's why cargo bikes supplying shops is a rare exception, even in Europe.
And if you have a viable idea how to move substatial concrete barriers that could prevent such an attack fast enough for emergency vehicles, please post.
Wouldn't be the first time New Orleans has ignored engineering reports
If you’re referring to the levees that failed during Katrina, that was the fault of the Army Corps of Engineers.
They were redone and performed as intended during category 4 Hurricane Ida - the hurricane that hit the city in 2021. It was the first big test.
I highly recommend the book “The Storm: What Went Wrong and Why During Hurricane Katrina: The Inside Story from One Louisiana Scientist” by Ivor van Heerden.
The author was a cofounder of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center and lost his job after speaking out about the levee failures.
It’s not tinfoil hat stuff - I’m a degreed engineer and he goes into great detail about things like different soil compositions and what types of beams need to be used to work effectively.
It’s still not a difficult read though, and he also goes into social issues such as the poor Black community in New Orleans and corruption in Louisiana politics.
Highly, highly recommend.
This is just a one off. I'm not suddenly gonna put bollards in front of my house just because a guy could drive into my living room. Yeah it's a possibility, but fairly remote. I much rather retrofit my house with bullet proof glass and walls to protect me from drive by shootings.
Should go with one of these bollards, no truck has ever got past it.
I'm still waiting for the impact. It's a few hours now. I should eat, drink, sleep, ...
My 30 year old grandma car can make it to 40 before I clear the entire intersection most of the time.
10mph is less than the indoor go-kart track barriers near me are rated for.
Security theater at its finest.
pedestrian-only zones, such as in New York City’s Times Square
Times Square isn't pedestrian-only. Parts of Broadway have been turned into pedestrian-only areas but 7th Avenue and all the cross streets are open to cars and very busy. There are bollards and concrete barriers between the cars and the pedestrians.
What the fuck are they made of, cardboard?
Someone else in another thread said their city uses garbage trucks to block traffic when there is a street party. Just parking them permanently on Bourbon street makes more sense than this.
NYC does this on some streets on NYE. They're also immediately movable for emergency vehicles.
How hard is it to put some of those plastic barriers up that are filled with water?
Security theatre
Amazing to me how internet comments just seem to ALWAYS have experts who know everything about any quirky topic and will state things as if it's so simple and obvious.
Is this really seen as a bad thing? Is bourbon street really supposed to capitulate to terror and install ultra-securtity defenses like they expect a high-speed attack every year? How many years has it been since the last similar attack? Is the secret that it never happened before and probably won't again?
sdfhjlaks;fjlk;asfjkl;sfjakl;
Basically mardi gras will tell them. if they have a normal amount of tourists then no its acceptable. If not then maybe they have to show a bit more concern around the possibility.
It's an area with extremely high pedestrian traffic and cars. Regardless of what just happened, traffic barriers are a really good idea. Accidents happen.
They put bollards in front of shopping malls and I doubt it's because they are trying to stop Blues Brothers re-enactors.
Even if people stop doing vehicular attacks (which they won't, see the Christmas market one in Germany and countless other ones globally), it's a good investment in safety to have a hard barrier between people and cars for normal 'accidents' as well.
Not to mention drunk driving.
You're intentionally misunderstanding the situation. Heavy duty bollards are expensive. They don't want to pay, because they don't give a fuck. And your observation on rarity is backwards. Copycat killers exist. It worked once, why not do it again, they will accurately think.
You're intentionally misunderstanding the situation. Heavy duty bollards are expensive.
Are we reading the same article?
The report outlined three different crash-rating standards for bollard systems. It concluded that the highest crash rating, which could withstand impacts from 15,000-pound vehicles traveling between 30 to 50 mph, was “not compatible” with the city’s needs to move the bollards every day.
“Specialized lifting equipment like a truck-mounted crane or heavy machinery would be necessary” to move such bollards daily, the report said.
They don't want to pay, because they don't give a fuck.
The funding comes from the state. The administration comes from the state. The last set the state funded in 2017 started failing within 6 months. That is why the replacement project was even happening.
It also took years for the state to fund the replacement.
There has historically been a lot of this type of tension between the state and the city. Despite the [mostly Democrat] city's tax dollars largely funding the rest of the [mostly Republican/other] state, the state loves to cause all sorts of problems for the city.
The bollards, for instance. The state administers the FQMD. The FQMD commissioned them in the first place.
But will the FQMD operate them?
“We do not employ personnel that actually do work on a functional basis. We need to partner with the city, and we need a partner with other organizations like NOPD, like the sheriff’s department, like Troop Nola, to accomplish our objectives,” she said. “And so we’ve had discussions about all of these things over the years as it relates to public safety.”
Will the FQMD ensure that happens?
According to board meeting minutes reviewed by InvestigateTV, there were concerns about the bollard system itself — but also an ongoing staffing struggle over who was locking them into place each night.
In a Jan. 2019 report from the then-chair, state police and homeland security were not positioning and locking Quarter bollards despite requests to, and the city asked if the FQMD would consider taking on that responsibility.
This was met with concerns about liability, with one commissioner saying the bollards were “not a good system.”
Copycat killers exist. It worked once, why not do it again, they will accurately think.
Again, are we reading the same article?
The city currently has no bollards at Canal and Bourbon streets, where the attacker entered, but the roadway was blocked by an SUV police cruiser parked sideways on New Year’s.
Attack suspect Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a U.S. combat veteran from Texas, exploited another vulnerability in the city’s security planning: He squeezed his seven-foot-wide pickup onto an eight-foot-wide sidewalk between a drugstore wall and the police vehicle, stomping the accelerator and plowing through the crowd at about 3:15 a.m.
The police SUV blocking the street was more than sufficient as a replacement for the bollards. But the bollards (and the SUV) only block the street, not the sidewalk. Block the sidewalk too, and you run into ADA issues.
Skip that and install a tank.
