Architects and urban planners choose to install bollards around businesses (including stores, restaurants and hotels) and municipal areas (such as parks, libraries and government buildings) for added storefront and pedestrian protection against accidents and crime.Īrchitects and urban planners will select a style of bollard that will complement the area. They guide where people should walk - and create boundaries that cars can’t cross over. Those seemingly decorative iron columns outside parks and museums, concrete balls near storefronts and steel pipes in parking lots? Those are called bollards. Because of this architects install infrastructure designed to keep pedestrians and property from getting hit by errant vehicles and runaway shopping carts.Ī variety of safety methods are used when planning the layout of a parking lot.
Though parking lots aren’t (usually) high-speed zones, they are full of pedestrians and vehicles making erratic, unpredictable movements. Not all pedestrian safety measures have to be as expensive or attention-grabbing as traffic lights and flashing red hands. Countdown signal timers on crosswalks also help pedestrians gauge whether or not they have time to make the crossing, and the beeping of audible pedestrian signals can help catch the attention of a cell phone zombie. Lights can be timed to create leading pedestrian intervals, meaning that pedestrians have a head start on cars - discouraging cars from hitting the gas to make their turns before pedestrians enter the crosswalk. A pedestrian-activated signal lets the person push a button, change the light, and then cross more safely.įor intersections with existing vehicle-controlled lights, there are additional measures that can make crossing safer for foot traffic. We’ve all seen - or been - that person running across the street to beat oncoming traffic on a two-way stop sign junction. While many intersections of two busy streets already have lights, intersections where one street has much heavier traffic than the other can use pedestrian activated signals to make the crossings safer. Have you ever seen a flashing green traffic light? That means that pedestrians, not cars, control the signal. Urban planners and engineers have a few options to make intersections safer.