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news
Park Row cycle lane wands burial ground (credit - brooksby)Are flimsy bike lane bollards actually safer for cyclists? Flexible wands lead to fewer and less serious bike crashes than rigid posts, vehicle inspection researchers claim
While flimsy plastic bike lane bollards are often decried by cyclists for failing to provide adequate protection from motor traffic, a recent study from Germany has found that flexible posts can lead to fewer and less serious crashes for cyclists than their more rigid counterparts.
According to DEKRA, a Berlin-based company specialising in vehicle inspection and automotive testing and crash research, rigid bollards and posts installed on cycle lanes for protection and segregation purposes can instead pose a high crash risk, and can have serious consequences if struck by people on bikes, even at relatively low speeds.
As part of DEKRA’s ‘Traffic Environments for People’ road safety report for 2024, Markus Egelhaaf, a crash researcher for the German organisation, noted that bollards and other traffic-calming measures have an important function on roads, delineating space between motor and cycle traffic, but can also “present obstacles that cause accidents or worsen the consequences of accidents”.
In order to assess the risks posed to cyclists by different types of bollards, DEKRA conducted two identical collision tests at its Crash Test Centre in Neumünster.
During the test, two three-wheeled e-cargo bikes, both with dummies in the saddle, were transported at around 15 to 16mph, one against a flexible wand and the other against a rigid one.
“In the test against the rigid post, there was a strong deceleration that threw the dummy from the saddle towards the handlebars,” Egelhaaf said in his analysis of the test.
“The bollard buckled and then acted as a ramp. The rear of the bike was lifted up, throwing the dummy off and causing the bike to tip over.
“In a real-life situation, the person riding the bike would have suffered serious injuries.”
> Pensioner left with broken wrist and black eye after tripping over cycle lane separator
Meanwhile, in the test with the more flexible bollard, the bike simply rolled over it before the post reverted back to position. The researchers also noted that there was no significant slowing down of the cargo bike and that the dummy remained in the saddle, which – if conducted using a real cyclist – would have meant that they retained control of the bike.
“Another advantage of flexible bollards is that, in the event of a collision with a motor vehicle, both the damage to the infrastructure and to the impacting vehicle are kept to a minimum,” Egelhaaf added.
The results of the crash tests, DEKRA say, highlight the advantages of flexible wands when used to segregate bike lanes from motor traffic, and to prevent drivers from entering, parking on, and blocking cycling infrastructure.
Noting a similar study from 2017 which found that replacing steel rigid posts with plastic ones significantly reduced the risk of injury to motorcyclists, Egelhaaf said: “But even at the comparatively low speeds of pedestrians and cyclists, rigid objects can act as a dangerous obstacle. This is something we see time and again in accidents.
“Due to the increasing speed of bicycles and greater width of cargo bikes, we have to expect that such accidents will happen more often.”
The researcher concluded that, to ensure safety, it is important that bollards can be easily seen in all light and weather conditions by using appropriate colouring and implementing a suitable minimum height, before recommending that the use of flexible bollards should be considered whenever possible.
While automotive test researchers in Germany appear in favour of introducing plastic wands on every bike lane, earlier this year cyclists in Bristol pointed out that one of the city’s infamously unprotected cycle lanes has been rendered “pointless” by drivers constantly knocking over the flimsy bollards used to ‘segregate’ the infrastructure from traffic – in order to park their vehicles at the roadside.
The cycle lane on Park Row in Bristol has been regularly featured over the years on road.cc, with one cyclist telling us in December 2022 that the route looked like "the aftermath of a Harry Potter battle” with “broken wands everywhere”, as the plastic segregation was easily knocked off the road by motorists parking in the cycle lane.
However, since then, Bristol City Council has launched a project to make Park Row and three other streets “safer and more pleasant” for active travel journeys by committing to installing “more resilient” bollards.
The council hopes the works will address complaints from cyclists about the ineffectiveness of plastic floppy wands in offering adequate protection and preventing drivers parking in the infrastructure – but we’re not sure if they’ll be able to curry favour with German car crash testers.
After obtaining a PhD, lecturing, and hosting a history podcast at Queen’s University Belfast, Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.
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37 comments
I think the best solution would be to automatically charge every driver who hits a cyclist on the road with attempted murder, and plain murder in case of death. Let the driver be responsible for the legal costs to avoid lengthy incarceration; let the driver's insurance reflect the costs of irresponsible behavior.
Folks would do anything to avoid running into say, some furniture that has fallen from the back of a truck onto the road. And cyclists do not ride with the intention of suicide. There is no excuse for driving into someone using the road- it's just careless, irresponsible behaviour on the fault of the driver.
I concur that rigid bollards can be a danger having broken a couple of ribs earlier this year in a shared cycle lane with central bollards telling everyone which side cycles and pedestrians should use. Having given my bell a brisk ring to warn pedestrians ahead they skipped over to the cycle side causing me to need to swerve to the opposite side clipping a bollard with my handlebars flipping me off the bike and landing with my D lock in my backpack embedded in my rib cage. If it had been a floppy one I may not have lost control leading to any injury that kept me off my bike for some months.
This research is totally, completely, entirely bollards.
Maybe. I think we need to ask the Bollard Appreciation Society for an opinion.
This premise and article is pretty confusing. They reduce damage *crashes by the cyclist cycling into the bollard*. What isn't addressed at all, is reducing damage by motorists driving into cyclists/ pedestrians. Which is surely, the most dangerous factor in the equation. Reducing damage to infrastructure/ the car is pretty laughable by comparison to deaths and serious injuries.
Ah, but: in UK, if a motorist drives into you (or simply parks in a cycle lane, forcing you out into the path of another motorist) then the council aren't to blame *.
Council changes something and then some new problem occurs, that's reason for court cases.
I bet for UK authorities (who do anything at all, or more than paint, for cyclists, that is...) the threat of claims for car damage claims loom large. Yes, councils can be quite sensitive to "accident" claims too - but also sometimes not **.
In UK probably the vast majority (of a very small number) of incidents will be pedestrians tripping on these - because people in the UK are walking far more than cycling.
* In fact, if I read the reports correctly generally no-one is to blame. Except possibly the silly cyclist for falling off - or cycling in the first place.
** Witness Edinburgh Council handing over millions in compensation rather than address the "situation on the ground" with their dangerous tram crossing designs. (Which local groups tried to warn them of ahead of installation...) To be fair probably even the small tweaks they've applied cost something approaching what they've paid out. No doubt someone does the sums and plans the strategy...
Real world example below. This was a bike lane protected by short grey concrete Toby bollards. Everyone thought they were rubbish, but drivers coming a cropper when attempting to park in the cycle lane seemed to motivate replacement with kerbs. The lane, especially at either end, is still substandard for cycling 9 years later.
https://road.cc/content/news/169709-bristol-bike-lane-bollards-be-replac...
Still not quite sure why we haven't done more of the "US cycle path bodge" - using large concrete (removable) blocks (jersey barrier) to form a genuinely protected cycle lane instead.
I can guess why but don't know eg. because motorists seriously damage their cars crashing into them. And once knocked out of alignment they could block pedestrians or road users (solution - just lift 'em back into place, but presumably "cost" and "but that will delay drivers..."). Possibly also emergency access concerns - though that would apply to crash barriers too and these are still used?
Oh and "but but side streets / access to my property" (even where there is no driveway / dropped kerb and thus it would be illegal...)
Can leave big enough gaps in between sections for eg. double-buggy access.
Pro - quick, pretty cheap I imagine, very flexible (reversible), should be visible enough for drivers / cyclists / not trip hazard etc. Genuinely keeps out motor vehicles! Much harder to vandalise (sadly not impossible...)
There is a long-standing *pedestrian* example local to me here protecting people at a junction - i think vehicles do hit it.
It's grotty and probably only not replaced as this whole area is neglected.
A private estate near me has recently closed off vehicle access to one of its entry roads using water-filled plastic blocks, they are about 2 m long by 60 cm high by 30 cm wide so I assume must hold about 700 kg of water, making them pretty much immovable. I saw them being installed, they are light enough to be carried by a single worker and then simply filled up from a tanker or similar, I don't know why these aren't used more. Definitely easier and quicker to install (and to remove if a scheme isn't working or requires modification) than bollards, which require drilling in the road, and with far better protection.
Are those blocks the ones that have a metal cage covering them? The main disadvantage that I can think of is that they look ugly. Planters filled with soil (and plants) are probably the best solution though they do need heavy equipment to put them in place.
Not the ones with the metal cage on top, something like this picture. I don't disagree on the aesthetic front but as they are so easy to install I'm thinking they could be used more frequently for trials and then replaced with planters or other more pleasing dividers once a scheme had been proved successful.
That's good - and (for better and worse...) somewhat "moveable" so as you say handy for trials. That ought to make these speedy to do although IIRC delays there are about law / "notice and consultation" but principally about political girding of loins for the fight...
Unfortunately the plastic ones may not be quite heavy enough - have seen that some of these got moved (this was in a trial / Covid scheme in Musselburgh). Concrete can be around twice the density of water and more durable. Could be similarly painted (or equipped with suitable reflectives / hi-vis)?
Another objection to this particular example (and to the US examples I've seen) would be the lack of gaps. These ones link together - presumably for strength / so as not to "catch" passing vehicles. But given sturdier concrete blocks you could just leave suitable (smaller than car-sized) gaps every n metres?
I agree with "ugly" but ... it's the UK, damn it! Not really more ugly than an asphalt sea with moving and/or parked cars *. The point of this stuff is cheap, quick and - yes - ugly! Bargain basement, emergency motorgeddon-disaster-recovery level. "Fixing things as quick and cheap as we can" - we need coverage to build networks of active travel routes, as quick as possible (and before the robotaxis arrive and quite possibly take over).
But not too cheap e.g. crap cycle infra like paint and wand lanes. That's actually too expensive, because it doesn't do anything.
We also need money to spend on cycle parking, much better public transport etc. One could imagine an argument that going for "almost Dutch standard" infra from where we are, with the little money can be got right now in the UK - would actually be an error, compared to some guerilla concrete-block-laying. Considering how Seville did it ... (cheap and crappy to start, plus deliberately only covering the city centre - but they made a network of separate paths and dealt with junctions, and I think did traffic reduction).
If people really wanted "nicer places" and were prepared to pay for it - and more importantly, sacrifice a little of their own driving convenience (not currently...) the solution is simple e.g. pay a quick trip to places like this, or this, or this, or this, and copy how they have made things nice again.
* I'm aware most people in the UK have been raised to consider a narrow footpath and tatty flowerbed next to a motorway suitably beautiful.
"hanging in there by a thread"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_Q17HG8lBo
Excellent, didn't know that one! "...who think that England's only a place to park their car".
Here's a short section locally making a "walking path" rather than cycle path - where it seems a bridge was put in but we didn't bother putting footway on both sides (I don't actually know the history here).
I have read of an example in the US with a similar sloped end block - which some fool then drove up and tipped their vehicle. IIRC the scheme was then removed for being "dangerous"!
It's like a new version of the incompetence paradox - drivers crashing into protective infra don't cause us to say "Gosh! We really need more of that" but instead "it has to go, it's a hazard to (crap) drivers".
(I have some sympathies with "humans are just poor drivers and we should make it safe for all", being a fan of Sustainable Safety principles. But right now, we more urgently need to provide those poor drivers with alternatives to wean us off our driving dependency.)
Plus, it takes just one bright spark with a drill to turn water-filled barriers back to the easily moved state.
Well with wand protection they don't even need tools, as various idiots rapidly discovered during the pandemic in London, the wands can just be unscrewed from their holders - for several months Sunday morning rides were extended by a considerable time due to the number of breaks spent screwing them back in.
What this Berlin-based company specialising in vehicle inspection and automotive testing really wants is an excuse for reducing the chance of damage to respectable shiny vehicles at the expense of annoying cyclists by substituting said soft cyclists for nasty hard bollards. Motorists frequently and deliberately stay further away from other vehicles and potentially damaging bits of road furniture than from cyclists, and this video has just appeared on the website this morning to illustrate the point
https://upride.cc/incident/sc19usu_brosterbuilders_closepass/
B*****d Broster, father or son, stays in the left lane and speeds past me with his door mirror only inches away, while giving the oncoming new trendy white Post Office van plenty of room- certain in the knowledge that the police couldn't care less
Well ... Germany, so home of a lot of car manufacturing! "Normal but marginalised" is sometimes used to describe cycling there.
Not something the UK should aspire to ideally. Even though this may still seem "better" than the UK in some places, and even though we probably simply "can't get there from here" for the best (NL) - or perhaps even 2nd best (better parts of Scandinavia).
It definitely looks like researching a solution then trying to find a problem.
Inert dummies don't react dynamically to a situation like a human can.
I imagine if they looked at the instances of encroachment or harm caused by motor vehicles vs instances of people on cargo bikes harming themselves by not reacting in any way at all to un/avoidable and random road conditions encountered pretty regularly by cyclists the ratio would not favour squidgy (cheap for authorities) bollards.
<Add joke about your average driver here>
I expect the same results would be replicated in the UK, but mostly because the plastic 'bollards' are all crushed stumps now..
As a massive fan of the World Bollard Association, I'm horrified at this heresy
https://bsky.app/profile/worldbollardassoc.bsky.social
What this research is lacking is any evidence as to how often cyclists hit any sort of bollard - I've never seen it happen. Unless it's actually a serious issue this looks like finding a problem that doesn't exist in order to create an excuse for using the cheapest option. In any case, if bollards are a problem that's a good indicator that proper fully-kerb-separated infrastructure should be built, not an argument for flimsier bollards.
What this research is lacking is any evidence as to how often cyclists hit any sort of bollard - I've never seen it happen
Correct- what they're really interested in is revealed by ktache in the first comment
Quite agree overall. Pedantically the particular article is about "research" though so not suprising this is on a rather limited topic / focus. It is at least cited as part of a much broader report (link in article). Now, that's from Germany so it's probably quite a way behind "Gold Standard" - likely not quite Scandinavian level and certainly not the understanding they have in the Netherlands.
Now if some UK LA or other organisation waves this about we should certainly say they should be aiming for the top of the 4th class (behind NL, Scandinavia and Germany) and doing a little bit more to protect cyclists and keep out cars, and be a little bit less concerned about e.g. drivers suing them because they drove into a bollard and scratched their motor. (Maybe amusing - article complaining about cars in the cycle path from ... 1906, in NL)
As for "how often cyclists hit any sort of bollard - I've never seen it happen" - me either but (with baited press...) there were several reports of injuries from the covid-era "block and wand" protectors installed around Edinburgh e.g. news article here. Then there was this one (actually this was a "protected pedestrian space" but looks the same as the cycle-protector blocks - plus no signage...)
So - yeah, in fairness there do seem to be a smattering of injuries. Arguable about how much this has to do with particular designs, or poor layouts etc. And I would imagine it's still a bit "better than before" - only a bit though because these are far from perfect at keeping out the vehicles and like so many UK designs they do nothing about side-streets and junctions...
As you rightly say - there is a right "way to do it" and it's not wands - nor indeed UK cycle lanes!
Meanwhile - here's an Edinburgh "cyclist himself" concerned about the these things being a hindrance - but apparently that's because ... er ... cars crash into them!
"Due to the increasing speed of bicycles..., we have to expect that such accidents will happen more often.”
I've not got any faster. Are they confusing bicycles with motorbikes?
So the choice appears to be safer, flexible wands which don't do anything to stop motorists driving over them to park, or more rigid, less safe wands which do keep the lane clear of parked cars? Not a great choice...
Well, if we're at "cycle lane" level there aren't many "great" choices to be had. That's since we're still right at the beginning of an understanding that cycling might be "transport", never mind that it might be something to seriously provide for (e.g. with networks of routes, cycle parking at destinations etc.)
We're not really sure who these are for I think. Leaving those completely opposed to one side there's general recognition that those entitled "cyclists" who already exist are lukewarm about these (often rightly...) And some of the more enlightened also recognise that paint and wands will not lead to thousands of cycling journeys being made by people of all ages.
And the idea of changing the built environment to ensure less motor traffic is almost unsayable!
However - doing something is a good choice (as long as good enough - there are definitely minimum standards.)
Meanwhile in NL ... I'm not aware of these being used (except perhaps temporarily, for diversions for construction / works?).
But that's because where we might grudgingly have a cycle lane they would probably have a separate cycle path. They do have cycle lanes, but fewer of these and often in different places (e.g. ones with a lot less motor traffic / lower speed limits).
They do have bollards though [1] [2] [3] eg. for limiting access to "side streets". Although they also recognise these are a compromise - they do keep the motor vehicles out but present a certain danger to people who may cycle or walk into them.
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