Please take the time to read this very informative and comprehensive review of the ins and outs of protecting crowded spaces and preventing terrorist or accidental vehicle incursions targeting pedestrians. John Surico writing for Bloomberg CitiLab did a deep dive report on the Bourbon Street attack in New Orleans on New Year's 2025 and from that focus expanded to concerns around protection, policing, and lasting and effective change.
The Bourbon Street truck attack in New Orleans has focused fresh attention on an old problem: making pedestrian zones safe from vehicular mayhem.
The first few weeks of 2025 have been busy for Rob Reiter, a security consultant who specializes in protecting people from hostile vehicle attacks. It’s a brand of urban mayhem that ranges from storefront crashes to acts of terror like the one that occurred in New Orleans early on New Year’s Day, where a man plowed a rented pickup truck through crowds of revelers on Bourbon Street, killing 14 people and injuring at least 35.
Since then, Reiter has found himself doing a lot of interviews about what went wrong in New Orleans. This frustrates him. “Nobody calls me on the third of July saying, ‘What should we be doing tomorrow to keep the parade safe?’” he told me. “People call me on the fifth of July and say, ‘What should they have done to have prevented this?’”
After the Bourbon Street attack — which unfolded just weeks before New Orleans mega-events like Super Bowl LIX and Mardi Gras — scores of answers emerged. Blame quickly fell on the city’s failure to deploy street barriers and moveable steel posts, or bollards, that could have prevented the driver from accessing the packed street; in fact, both had been installed after the 2016 truck attack at a Bastille Day parade in Nice, France, that killed 86 people, but several bollards were out for repair after being jammed with Mardi Gras beads.
Others accused city officials of failing to heed a report issued by a security firm five years ago, which detailed the rowdy corridor’s security vulnerabilities, or lessons from the 2017 incident in which an intoxicated pickup driver crashed into a Mardi Gras parade, injuring 32 people. Would flooding the area with more police officers have helped? Or should we be talking more about vehicle size and the fact that today’s SUVs and trucks — like the three-ton Ford F-150 Lightning used in the attack — are becoming larger, faster and more deadly as they electrify?
Stepped-up security measures are in place on Feb. 5 ahead of Super Bowl LIX between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs in New Orleans.Photo: Aaron M. Sprecher/Getty Images North America
Ensuring safety in urban places where vehicles and human bodies mingle in close quarters is an immensely delicate balancing act. Protective bollards and street barriers that restrict vehicle access are often resisted by area business owners and drivers — and they can make life unpleasant for pedestrians, too. Some infrastructure that physically separates people from traffic — like Hong Kong’s sidewalk guardrails or the UK pedestrian pens known as staggered crossings — can leave walkers feeling herded like cattle.
The stakes have grown in recent years, as individuals with a range of personal and political grievances have exploited the ease and accessibility of private vehicles to launch deadly ramming attacks from behind the wheel in cities around the globe. A much larger number of incidents involve drivers careening onto sidewalks and bike lanes or crashing cars and trucks into commercial buildings, whether bent on thievery or impaired by drugs, alcohol or road rage. According to Reiter, storefront crashes occur at a rate of 60 per day in the US, or about every 15 minutes, and kill up to 500 people annually.
Most of these routine rampages don’t make headlines, and those that do tend to rapidly fade from the public consciousness, along with commitments to safety reforms; preventive measures tend to be reactive, not proactive. But in some cities, the question of how to protect public spaces from cars and trucks has produced more enduring reforms, both of infrastructure and policy. So what’s working best? And can we do better than bollards?
Safety by Design
When I first reached out to Reiter over email with a version of that question, he replied with a link to an article and a note that read “Not this.” It was about recent changes made to Austin’s popular 6th Street, where city officials expanded sidewalks with plastic delineators and rubber bumps for the crowds it attracts but left westbound traffic open to cars on weekends. Reiter, who has advised the city before, thinks this setup left too much space for comfort.
“They added a sidewalk and did not increase the level of safety to do so,” he said. “They basically crammed the same amount of traffic traveling at the same speed into one fewer lane, and put people in a space only separated by plastic. That’s a lot of stuff, but it’s not safer — and it’s certainly not more secure.”
Decorative bollards line a walkway in the City of London, the UK capital's financial district, in 2023.Photo: Richard Baker/In Pictures via Getty Images
What Reiter is looking for is collision points. Stretches like Las Vegas’ Fremont Street, where a pedestrian-only boulevard is punctuated by heavily trafficked roadways, worry him. If city officials know a certain place will be crammed with people on foot at a certain time, he says, they should move to sequester vehicles entirely.
Look, for example, at New York City’s approach to New Year’s Eve celebrations. Spurred by a spate of terrorist attacks in Europe, in 2016 the city began deploying a very low-tech barricade system for the annual event in Times Square: dozens of garbage and dump trucks laden with sand, parked bumper-to-bumper to block any intrusions. “You had a million people there, and you could not bring a vehicle within two blocks,” Reiter said. “There was a defended perimeter on all sides.”
But such a display of impregnability is only feasible for special events. Cities also need to think about the day-to-day experience, says architect Jonathan Marvel, whose design firm, Marvel, has worked on streetscape projects involving security in Lower Manhattan.
“One of the key components in conducting a joyful ballet in public spaces is to maintain a positive perimeter rather than a defensive one,” Marvel said in an email. “Sculptural barriers” or tree-lined buffers at the edge of gathering areas, for example, can “playfully enhance rather than militarize critical zones of high pedestrian value,” while diverting vehicle traffic well in advance of pedestrian zones can “allow the dance to continue without harming people’s experience.”
These angular concrete bollards in front of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City aim for some visual appeal.Photo: Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images
That dance is a give-and-take. An ongoing saga in planning circles is the tension between emergency services and proposed street redesigns. Adding a protected bike lane can improve safety for both cyclists and drivers, but in some cities first responders have objected to their installation, saying that they can obstruct large pieces of firefighting equipment. Similarly, traffic calming features like narrower lanes and speed bumps have been blamed for delaying emergency vehicles. In New York City, transportation and sanitation officials led a prolonged chorus of complaints about curbside dining structures or parklets, which, they insist, can block snow plows and street sweepers.
As questions swirl about responsibility, communication and decision making in New Orleans, policy decisions regarding security on Bourbon Street and other hot spots are likely to focus on improving coordination between the police, fire and public works departments, along with other city agencies. It’s emblematic of a deeper struggle at play when we talk about public space — enforcement versus design — and the specific roles each fills when crisis calls.
Until recently, planners and designers were largely left out of security conversations, says Jon Coaffee, a professor of urban geography at the University of Warwick who has studied how cities have responded to terrorism. But a shift is underway.
A sign warns of new traffic diversions through the pedestrian zone in Barcelona’s Las Ramblas, site of a deadly 2017 vehicle attack.Photo: Paco Freire/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Protective metal railings line many sidewalks in Hong Kong, much to the annoyance of pedestrians.Photo: Roy Liu/Bloomberg
“There’s still a big issue, if you look around the world, of planning not getting involved in the conversations enough,” Coaffee said. “So often what happens is you have the security pros that do their thing and then right at the end, just as construction’s starting or has already started, they’ll call in somebody that knows what they’re talking about from a planning or design perspective.”
But what, exactly, is their role? For Coaffee, it’s preventing what he calls a “fortress mentality,” with defensive measures that discourage, rather than attract, visitors. “What you lose is the vibrancy of those public, crowded places that you’re trying to protect, which are essentially the whole lifeblood of what cities are,” he said. Designers and security personnel should work together to create protections that are, simultaneously, effective, useful and generally just nice to look at.
In Paris, for example, the Eiffel Tower is now surrounded by undulating landscapes that make it near-impossible for a car to drive directly down it, as they were once able. (Bulletproof transparent glass walls were also installed.) Copenhagen’s Christiansborg Palace and Square is lined with 85 stone spheres, which double as photo ops. The ongoing renovation of Las Ramblas, the pedestrianized thoroughfare in Barcelona that was targeted by a 2017 van attack, adds concrete planters and retractable bollards as well as new traffic restrictions. And Emirates Stadium, in North London, has an Arsenal sign out front; it’s Instagrammable public art for fans, but it’s also a protective barrier.
“What’s important here is the aesthetics. What does this look like?” asked Coaffee. “Again, it’s a better way of doing things.”
Pedestrians pass over the revamped London Bridge in 2024.Photo: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg
Westminster Bridge’s security improvement include a dense thicket of new “heritage-style” bollards (right).Photo: Jose Sarmento Matos/Bloomberg
London’s major bridges have also been hardened following a pair of 2017 terrorist incidents. After an attacker in an SUV mowed down pedestrians along the length of the Westminster Bridge in March of that year, killing four people and injuring over 50, the city installed “heritage-style” bollards — a design upgrade from plastic flex posts that looks the part of the city’s Victorian architecture — along curbs and newly added bike lanes. Protective barriers also line the pedestrian pathway along London Bridge, site of a June 2017 vehicle attack. A spokesperson for Transport for London said that “hostile vehicle mitigation” was installed across all six of the major London crossings it maintains in the wake of the two incidents.
Beyond Bollards
When the National Association of City Transportation Officials approached the issue of protecting public spaces after the surge in vehicle attacks in 2017, they warned against the adverse impacts of “restricted access and over-bollardization of city space.” Part of their problem statement, provided by a NACTO spokesperson, read: “Cities’ transportation, planning, and public safety agencies need standards and best practices on protecting vulnerable areas and events while preserving the integrity and quality of public spaces.” The group later connected agencies around this message: Work together to make the space work for everyone.
A similar theme is voiced by security consultant and former police officer Dimitrios Mastoras. On the job in Arlington, Virginia, he kept seeing how streets packed with bars and clubs generated repeated calls for disorderly conduct and violence. Nothing seemed to change that. “We were really hurting for answers,” said Mastoras, who later became the first “nightlife liaison” in Arlington. “And we just threw more and more resources at it.”
With his partner and consulting firm cofounder, Molly Mastoras, he came up with a security strategy built around counseling psychology tactics, where stakeholders’ strengths are pooled together to solve challenges. Its premise boils down to this: Security isn’t a singular responsibility; everybody — from bartenders and bouncers to government agencies and restaurant owners — has to pitch in to improve public safety.
The Mastoras’ consulting firm, SafeNight, offers training programs for nightlife workers in sexual assault intervention and first-aid tactics, for example. Security is much more than just beefing up physical barriers, Mastoras argues; it involves breaking down silos and building up social infrastructure, too.
Outside of Northern Virginia, the company has created nightlife management models for Dallas and Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. But the cost and commitment demanded by the approach can be an issue for cities. “This requires an immense amount of work,” Mastoras said. “This requires investment. It’s not an easy fix, like increasing police patrols. If you’re looking for long-term sustainable outcomes, you have to do a lot of things and you have to do them well.”
Movable vehicle barriers are positioned on Bourbon Street after the street was re-opened on January 2, 2025 in New Orleans.Photo: Michael DeMocker/Getty Images North America
The price tag of enhanced security is a common stumbling block, especially since the benefits of implementation might not be immediately clear. The French Quarter safety plan that New Orleans launched in 2017, with the moveable bollards, was budgeted at $40 million; the ongoing replacement of those barriers is estimated to cost up to $1.5 million, and that’s just one street. Those heritage-style bollards on London’s bridges cost £35 million. Reiter cited a grant program in the Biden administration’s bipartisan infrastructure law that can help municipalities pay for protective measures; its future, however, is unclear amid President Donald Trump’s campaign to undo his predecessor’s policies.
The long-term benefits of security improvements can’t necessarily be counted in just lives saved. Just as a community that’s more hospitable to older adults or children is more hospitable to everyone else, too, making spaces better protected from vehicle attacks can also just make them better, period.
“Safe streets are the lifeblood of our cities,” said Marvel. “Intermingling vehicles, pedestrians and multi-modalists — cyclists, skateboarders and scooters — represents a balancing act of space, speed and respect.”
That notion often crosses my mind when I cycle on the Hudson River Greenway, a protected bike path that adjoins Manhattan’s West Side Highway. In 2017, a driver in a rented truck swerved onto this path and accelerated to more than 30 miles per hour, killing eight people and injuring 14. Until the Bourbon Street attack on New Year’s morning 2025, it was the worst vehicle ramming incident in the US.
Since then, the city and state have worked to install steel bollards and concrete boulders to narrow the entrance to the cycle path; now the cyclists, joggers, dog walkers, picnickers and park workers who use the route are physically separated from drivers. The high volume of vehicular traffic on the West Side Highway is just inches away, but it feels far away.
The payoff for these security improvements can be seen clearly in the Hudson River Greenway’s ridership: Today, with more than 7,000 regular riders every day, it’s the busiest bike path in America.
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