The Anonymous Widower

English Motorway Gantries Get New, More Secure Design

The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on The Guardian.

This is the sub-heading.

National Highways hopes design will prove more resilient to trespassers after last year’s Just Stop Oil protests

These two paragraphs outline the design.

National Highways has unveiled a new design for motorway gantries that it hopes will prove harder for protesters to mount and use to cause disruption.

The renovated structures, which are expected to become the standard design in England from 2025, will have their maintenance steps hidden inside their pillars and will be more difficult to gain access to without authorisation.

As a scientifically-correct non-driver, I wouldn’t support Just Stop Oil.

But I do remember a tale from a few years back, when a friend, who was travelling up the M1, towing two horses in a trailer behind his pick-up. A guy was on a motorway gantry, threatening to commit suicide and traffic was stopped for several hours.

At the time he was informed by the police, that increasingly, they were seeing suicide attempts from motorway gantries.

If these new gantries can stop a proportion of suicides, that must be a good thing all round.

 

March 24, 2023 - Posted by | Design, Transport/Travel | , , , ,

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