Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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There have been a handful of these attacks in the past 40 years in the USA, and many more outside. The barriers are about $2000, but simple to move and deploy as needed.
My city is much smaller than Seattle, but we see them everywhere. My guess is they are police equipment and the city had excess funds to spend on those.
That would be quite cheap. I guess this refers to simple concrete blocks blocking by pure mass?
Our community had to invest heavily in mobile blockers for our markets, especially the Christmas market (christmas markets have been a prime target for an increasing number of these kind of attacks here in Germany during the recent years).
They started with simple concrete blocks as a fast and short term affordable measure directly after the first christmas market attacks, but they aren't practical as soon as you have to set them up on a more frequent basis.
So by now they switched to easily deployable ones like those shown here: https://www.hoermann.de/portal/portal-48-lernen/de/hoermann-mobile-fahrzeugsperre-oktablock/
Price for single standard Blocker certified to be effective also against heavy transport trucks is around 6000-7000€ (roughly about the same in $).
You would need at least three or four of these to block the entrance in the picture, in addition to a retractable one (costing more than twice that) to allow access for delivery vehicles.
That would mean costs around 30000€ just for this single road entrance.
So I can understand to some degree that a community might be reluctant to invest so much money unless there was a pressing demand (as e.g. developed in Germany due to the frequent occurrences with many casualties).
I was looking at what I thought was the same thing, but it was quite different.
This place seems to be able to rent out heavy barriers for $3500 weekly
https://barrierhq.com/products/anti-ram-safety-barrier-mvb3x-3rd-gen-mifram
Sunbelt also has rentals.
https://www.sunbeltrentals.com/equipment-rental/general-construction-tools/anti-vehicle-barrier/1180030/
I don't know if you have the same thing available in Germany or if the EU at large makes it easier to find things international within the Union. I would think that a village or small city might have a hard time funding these. My city is just over a quarter million people, if you don't count the surrounding municipalities. Seattle is almost 3x as large.
There are also rental companies over here, probably useful for covering increased demand during huge one-time-events.
Most smaller communities help themselves by just parking a bunch of heavy cars or trucks across the streets leading to their events.
It is a somewhat ugly looking solution, but also works.