Do motorists really need bollards to keep us safe?

WE’RE all sick of the sight of red and white in Ashbourne. Sharing our streets with pointless plastic bollards for so long has been a necessary evil, we’re told, but it’s hard to resolve the justification for keeping them in place for so long.

The argument seems to be that safety regulations dictate pedestrians can only share a public highway with traffic if there is some sort of physical barrier in place and, on the face of it, that seems very sensible.

But for months and months there hasn’t been any sort of physical barrier for most of the time.

Look at St John Street, for example – Ashbourne’s busiest pedestrian pinch-point. The widened walkways are very welcome in certain stretches, and even now that social distancing rules have been relaxed, many people still want personal space.

But do motorists really need to have a physical barrier in place to guide them away from causing carnage as pedestrians share the road with them?

Is a kerb stone, the measure we currently have to separate 40-tonne lorries from sentient beings, really any more effective a barrier than a painted line?

A lot of money, we’ve not been able to establish exactly how much, is being spent on some very smart bollards which will tick the health and safety box and apparently defend us all from 30mph traffic, but given these are still very much a temporary solution, is there really any point?

Eventually, hopefully with help from the Levelling-up Fund, the pavements will be widened and bollards will no longer be necessary. We’re told this could take up to a year, in an ideal world. And, of course, the new bollards can be reused. They won’t just be thrown away.

But do we really need bollards? Let us know in the letters page. Tell us if you think they’re a good investment.