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.
yeah sorta amazes me they allow cars at all.
It doesn’t amaze me that they let in street cleaners though, if you’ve ever seen that place in the morning.
In Marti gras, the “street cleaners” were front-end loaders.
It was disgusting how much trash everyone generated.
It amazes me that they have street cleaners at all. That city is nasty as hell.
They have street cleaning down to an art. It’s amazing to watch. Does the French Quarter often smell like a mixture of piss and vomit? Yes, because drunk tourists are consistently doing these things on the streets/sidewalks.
Not to mention all of the leftover trash from the various parades…imagine if there was no regular street cleaning.
It’s truly a spectacle to behold.
Ok. Here’s a crazy idea. We just…stop with the street cleaning and trash collection. First, pass a law that everything must be sold in biodegradable containers. Then, just let things lay wherever they are dropped! Over time, like archaeological sediment, all the trash dumped in the French Quarter will slowly compact, decompose, and turn into soil, thus raising the elevation of the ground. As the French Quarter is already one of the highest elevations in the city, this increased sediment will flow downhill, gradually raising the elevation of the entire city. Eventually, they won’t even need the dyke system anymore, as the whole city will be raised well above sea level! The city will be like one of those ancient Mississippian mound building cultures. Except this mound will mostly be composed of piss, vomit, and plastic beads.
I think the best part of this little thought experiment is that the solution is basically “fill new Orleans in with Garbage”
I wonder if you would be able to smell the different layers unique flavors as eras favor a certain alcohol cocktail over another. Could have a really famous scientist in 1,000 years that could tell you within a 20 year time period what layer some sediment came from by just taking a whiff.
I think microplastics and biohazards would come into play at some point, but sure, why not. Choose your own adventure.
They also don’t have alleys there so all the bar trash is just tossed in the front. It’s really a gross ass place.
I used to live there and yes, Bourbon St. is gross, but I was trying to say that it is cleaned regularly and very well. But it will also continue to be regularly trashed, so the cycle will continue indefinitely.
seeing people walk their kids to church passing by the strip club with photos on the entrance and guys literally hosing out the bar. What a sight.
Makes sense for deliveries and freight, but as someone else said, they really should invest in those retractable post barriers.
I think they had those, but they broke because they stopped paying the maintenance company.
What do you have to pay? You just need a couple concrete posts in a hole with a padlock on them.
It was probably one of those fancy electric ones with remote access. Cities will pay millions for something like that instead of the low tech solution of just having a guy with a key there that’ll set you back a few tens of thousands a year.
Or just give a key to the fire department and the municipal waste department.
Even with the high tech electric option, you probably still want at least one armed guard sitting watch at the intersection between pedestrians and people operating pedestrian-murder-machines
Anything that a person (or two) can unlock, lift up and move out of the way isn’t even close to structurally sound enough to stop a large vehicle with speed, mass and determination on its side.
They should install permanent barriers that can stop the largest of trucks. Then simply close the whole area off to vehicle traffic. Within the district, the only vehicles allowed are bicycles, cargo bikes, and small golf carts. You bring in deliveries by bicycle or other small electric vehicle. People living there can park their vehicles a few block away in lots located outside the pedestrian-only zone. Trash can hauled by cart a few blocks and then transferred to regular trucks.
We have zero problem organizing logistics like these for every shopping mall in the country. Yet somehow it become impossible the moment the shopping mall no longer has a roof on it.
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.
Bikes can only really do final mile deliveries. They still use trucks/trains for bulk deliveries in Europe. You local grocery store isn’t getting stocked by bikes.
Thats exactly what we’re talking about with NO. Making Burbon St car-free.
You can still have a street a mile away have a lot for truck parking, unloading onto bikes for final last mile delivery to car-free sections
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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.
Right but installing larger bollards is not very expensive.
It’s not just about the size, it’s also about their weight and maneuverability due to the use cases I outlined above and that the article also goes into.
There are retractable bollards as well. More expensive but this is exactly why the exist.
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.
Yes
Needs auto-turrets and face recognition scanners everywhere.
face recognition scanners everywhere
Peter Thiel beat you to it!
Palantir has secretly been using New Orleans to test its predictive policing technology (2018)
I assumed that was part of the plan. I wanna see a ED-209 unit on every corner of every block in a perfect grid formation. Terrorists gonna learn what time it is today.
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.
I don’t understand why they don’t just make the whole street permanently pedestrian-only. This isn’t that hard. You move things by cart along the street itself. Need to make a delivery? You drive it to within a couple blocks, then use a cart. Same for taking trash out.
This isn’t some radical new kind of logistics. Every shopping mall in America works like this. Shop owners don’t complain that they can’t drive a delivery truck right up to their store front in the mall. Customers manage to park and walk around just fine. Trash gets cleaned up.
This is the solution to this problem. But the people of the city or state are just too motoronormative to comprehend it.
No city has infinite resources. They need to balance cost against probability.
Do you have a steel front door with 90 locks on it? Unlikely because you’re “prioritizing cost over your families safety” right?
The calculus may change now if this is seen as more likely to happen again.
Concrete posts are stupid cheap to install.
Skip that and install a tank.
