Walk more, drive less to stop vehicle attacks

Stephen King’s 2014 thriller “Mr. Mercedes” opens with a prophetic scene of horror. In an unnamed Midwestern city, a Mercedes sedan accelerates toward people gathered for a job fair outside a downtown auditorium. The psychopathic driver plows into the crowd with a “two-tonne piece of German engineering,” then speeds away, leaving 15 injured and eight dead. In two recent incidents, real-life events caught up with the novelist’s noirish vision. In Charlottesville, Virginia, a 20-year-old Ohio man with reported ties to white nationalists is accused of driving a Dodge Challenger into a crowd of anti-racist protesters on a pedestrian mall, leading to a crash that injured 19 and killed a 32-year-old woman. Then, in a horrific attack in Barcelona, Spain, for which Daesh claimed responsibility, the driver of a Fiat van raced down a popular pedestrian promenade, Las Ramblas, killing 14 people.

But those two attacks were only the latest to demonstrate the automobile’s potential as an instrument of mass murder as imagined by King. Trucks and vans have been driven into crowds on the waterfront promenade in Nice, France, and bridges over the Thames in London, in Berlin’s Christmas market and Stockholm’s shopping district, and outside a North London mosque.

Hate-filled extremists are not the only ones sending vehicles hurtling into crowds. In January, a mentally disturbed man behind the wheel of a stolen car was charged with the murders of six people on a mall in Melbourne, Australia. In May, prosecutors say, a man who was high on PCP careened onto a busy sidewalk in Times Square in New York, injuring 20 people and killing an 18-year-old tourist.

In the last three years, at least 14 vehicle-ramming attacks, as they are known, have claimed 129 lives in the West. (To these deaths must be added the day-to-day hecatomb of pedestrians and cyclists felled by motor vehicles: more than 28,600 people in the United States between 2010 and 2015.)

The appeal of such attacks to terrorists is obvious: Unlike guns and bombs, the weapon of choice is easy to come by without attracting law-enforcement suspicion. And with a car or truck, these killers can achieve large body counts in the heart of any metropolis. All that’s needed to produce mayhem is unimpeded access to urban crowds — which is why so many of these attacks have occurred in part-pedestrianised areas.

Crowded pedestrian zones like Las Ramblas, the Thames waterfront and Charlottesville’s downtown mall are not going away. Nor should they. In a century that is seeing a renewed love affair with the city, these public spaces — which are central to our hopes for progress and prosperity — are growing ever more vital. But it shouldn’t take a security consultant to explain the obvious: The very thing that makes these revitalised city centres so attractive to visit and to live and work in is what also makes them attractive targets for terrorists, and even the plain deranged.

The most obvious solution would be to ban vehicles from these zones. And many cities in Europe are taking this approach, extending the areas from which vehicles are prohibited. Copenhagen was a pioneer: The vast downtown pedestrian zone known as the Stroget has been steadily expanded since cars were first banned there in 1962. (Trucks are given access before shops open to make deliveries.) In the run-up to Christmas last year, Madrid experimented with banning cars from a vast downtown area (cabs, buses and residents’ vehicles were allowed).

The most ambitious plans for car-free zones in Europe have been driven not by fear, but a desire to reduce pollution and create more convivial public spaces. Paris, which experienced heavy smog in 2014, has followed a ban on diesel cars with car-free days on the Champs-Élysées, which have proved very popular. The right bank of the Seine has also been permanently pedestrianised — and parts of it become an urban beach in the summer.

Recently, however, in some cities, security concerns are acknowledged as the motivation for creating pedestrian-only zones. In many cities, for either practical or political reasons, a complete ban on private vehicles is unlikely. But given a newly heightened awareness of vehicle-ramming attacks, many city administrators are working on smart ways of separating cars and crowds. Pedestrian zones work best when they are porous for people but impermeable for vehicles. Concrete blocks should be temporary solutions. No physical barrier can entirely forestall the threat from hate-filled individuals armed with guns, bombs or knives determined to inflict spectacular harm. This is a menace that has stalked crowded Western cities since the heyday of the bomb-throwing anarchist.

But we should not have to live with the fear that a stroll among city crowds could be cut short by a van, tractor-trailer or Mercedes zooming toward us. Expanded and intelligently designed pedestrian areas will reduce the danger. And that is a win all-around, because what keeps our citizens alive is also good for the life of the city.

In the last three years, at least 14 vehicle ramming attacks, as they are known, have claimed 129 lives in the West