How secure are our motorways?

Millions of pounds are spent annually on designing and building them but how secure are our highways?

Investing in equipment for road safety make our roads safer and more durable. Their installation in high-risk locations close to colleges and hospitals, as well as residential areas, reduces the risk of drivers colliding with other road users and damaging properties.

What is traffic management equipment for road safety?

Road safety equipment can refer to a number of separate movable items in a highway emergency position to enhance safety. In situations where a car loses control and breaks the road boundaries at elevated velocity, they give security to other pedestrians and users on the roads. A traffic safety system may be a temporary installation or a continuous barrier, depending on the usage. A contracting company working on a site may erect temporary installation of fixed, long-term installations. Depending on the length or scale of the project appropriate installation is used to provide the highest levels of safety/efficiencies. Plastic cones, coloured cones, removable plastic bollard posts, plastic road signs as well as chapter 8 barrier systems. These are rapidly removed after repairs have been completed.

For traffic calming purposes in pedestrian areas, the use of ‘sleeping policemen’ or as they’re also known speed ramps are widely accepted as being quick and effective controls of traffic flow.

Why is road safety equipment needed?

Road safety equipment is needed to safeguard cyclists, pedestrians and other highway users in the event of an incident.

The use of bright coloured, easily identified equipment highlights to road users that they need to be aware of their surroundings, without these in place incidents would be much higher with a much greater risk of danger to pedestrian and road users.

How useful is the equipment used for road safety?

In the event of a road incident, pedestrians and bicycles are often the primary at-risk group. This is particularly accurate along the highway that runs through pedestrian regions of high density. These include shopping centres, residential areas and tourist regions where individuals tend to stroll in a relaxed way with disregard for vehicle traffic. Fixed highway obstacles installation is essential in decreasing traffic crashes. Furthermore, owing to the following variables, set highway obstacles are efficient:

• Reliability: Fixed highway bollards are intended for elevated impact resistance. As such, they can resist a truck's ramming when built and prevent it before passing, holding the pedestrians and other street users safely beyond them.

• Affordable: Once mounted, highway bollards need no type of servicing except perhaps the addition of the occasional reflective paintwork application. They essentially cost nothing to the contractors to retain.

• Calming traffic: It is well recognized that bollards guide traffic to a specific path. When erected, in the case of a traffic snarl-up, vehicles do not cross over them to put other road users at risk. As such, even without the involvement of police policemen, they function as a official containment of traffic into the assigned routes.

What alternatives are accessible? 

Depending on the utilisation and place, there are different types of traffic bollards to be chosen from. They fall into the following wide groups:

• Fixed equipment: These are all designed for high-speed, heavy-duty sites. They are built in the vicinity of colleges, shopping malls, parking lots and other high-traffic areas. They are the most trusted accident prevention systems but come at a higher cost.

• Temporary obstacles: these are used for an event such as street displays, parades and diversions of traffic. Once the temporary nature of their use is full, they are installed for a short time and withdrawn. The UK regulations require traffic management barriers to be Chapter 8 compliant. But with the market being so wide event barriers are available without the reflective requirements.