Dumb

...or religion/astrology/new age drippy hippiness.

I think that a 76 year old woman (American) driving a PT Cruiser says it all really. The clue is baaaa-baaaaaa

Stuart

Just implementation details, they have a system for overriding the red light timing anyway, so all they do is hit the red button and let the traffic lights go green as they are arriving, so that the bollards are always down for them.

Yes, I can see how things might be done *badly* and go wrong.

: When they started charging you to drive up the road to Durham : cathedral, they used rising bollards instead of a barrier. It had been in : operation for about a week when some taxi driver tried to get through : without paying and the bollard rose through the floor of his taxi!

They have those in Oxford. Shortly after they started, a woman claimed that the bollard had risen under har car as she was properly driving through, and not trying to sneak through after someone with a pass. Oh no. She was claiming compensation from the council. They pointed out that all the bollards were monitored by video and that they had a tape of the event. She suddenly went all quiet.

Ian

That kind of thing happenned in Aylesbury, several people had the bollards rise through their floors and they tried to sue the council, before being fined for driving in a Pedestrian Zone.

Clearly the bollards would be put on the same override setup that the current red lights use :)

I always liked the idea of a steel wall that rapidly raises when the lights go red, coupled with a pit under with a retractable lid to dispose of any wrecks!

Or there would be cars impaled on said bollards if they'd parked too far forward, or were foreward waiting and decided to stay put once the lights changed. Many crossings our way have very little room between the stop line and the road cutting across.

They'd be driving on the wrong side of the road anyway if there were traffic queuing at the lights.

And of course with such a setup there is bound to be idiots pulling round them - the same idiots that play chicken with trains by doing same at level crossings. Particle beam cannons, that's the answer, evaporate the beggars.

They would need to go down damn quick if not to get in the way.

Don't mess about with bollards - just use industrial strength lasers directed vertically...