Pavement bollards at Royal Hospital, Belfast
This photograph showing bollards installed on the pavement of the Royal Hospital, Belfast, to prevent nurses from parking their vehicles reminds one of the plague of bollards that infests the Town of Cobourg. One wonders how long it was before the workmen in Belfast realized how they were to get home.
Cobourg owes its pestilence to an over-enthusiastic council with more money than sense. Bollards of the same design and appearance as those in the illustration are installed throughout Cobourg, overrunning the side streets, back streets, main traffic arteries. They are anchored at intervals to lumps, bumps and projections from the sidewalks into the roadway and superciliously referred to as ‘traffic calming’ devices.
Traffic calming may be the clever intent of the Works Department, but they are hazardous to drivers and induce in them a fury of frustration. As a result, calming traffic is the last thing bollards do. To Town bus drivers and tractor trailer operators making deliveries they are pestilential nuisances that add to the perils of negotiating tight corners and parking.
Bollard sales representatives have done a sterling job of selling these monstrosities, for they crowd the thoroughfares of North America and Europe alike. There is no stopping their spread.
A letter to the local rag referring to ‘those bollards on council’ was rejected, one presumes, for the perceived obscene insinuation regarding their parentage when all one meant was they had the same brainless imagination as bollards.
Tags: Cobourg life