Yesterday, a man in an SUV mowed down dozens of people at a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin.
This morning on the NPR-distributed show 1A I heard a promo that questioned whether the light-weight barricades the driver crashed through were enough, implying, I guess, that every time there's a parade in the future we will have to go from these kinds of barricades...
... to these...
... or even these...
In case you don't know, the light-weight ones are owned by cities (their police departments or their Public Works departments), and can be distributed easily in a pickup truck, while the heavier metal and concrete ones are owned by private companies and have to be rented at a fairly high cost each time.
If you have to block every access point to a parade route or an Open Streets festival with either of these heavier barricade types, the cost would mount up very quickly. So basically, no parades, and no closing streets to cars for short periods of time, ever.
We cannot give into this kind of edge-case thinking. It's already known that cars are lethal weapons in almost uncountable ways, so this is just an outlier example.
If a change is to happen, given the larger problem we face (the climate crisis), the thing to modify is the presence of cars in our culture, not the type of barricades we erect to protect ourselves from them.
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