Terrorists and road safety

[Cudzoziemiec]

The November edition of the Isis magazine, Rumiyah (Rome), used Nice as an example of the kind of attacks jihadis could carry out “behind enemy lines”.

“Though being an essential part of modern life, very few actually comprehend the deadly and destructive capability of the motor vehicle and its capacity of reaping large numbers of casualties if used in a premeditated manner,” a Rumiyah commentary said.

We've been here before, when roads were blocked and junctions altered to prevent IRA attacks in the City of London back in the early '90s. Not all of them were put back to their earlier state after the IRA threat receded. A connection to be made?

[Kim]

Defence against this sort of attack isn't uncommon.  Mordor Central is surrounded by extremely sturdy bollards, for example.

The law of security theatre would suggest some sort of clamp-down on public gatherings.  But nobody really wants that, so I predict continued attempts to downplay the terrorist aspect of such attacks.

[caerau]

Yeah, when the UN met down here in Newport - and spent one night dining out in Cardiff* - they had stuff knocking about in the town centre that probably had its prototypes on the Beaches of Normandy in 1944.  Noone was going to be crashing anything larger than a pushbike into them - not that they were here...


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* I never did work this out - they were in NEWPORT and when they did visit Cardiff Castle (which is a CASTLE - think thick walls 'n shit) - they helicoptered in.  Never mind the tank traps all you really needed was a grenade launcher.

[Asterix, the former Gaul.]

Autonomous vehicles. 

They could be hacked of course but they could also be impossible to drive into crowds.

[trekker12]

You have to consider practical access.

To have a Christmas market means all of the stalls and food wagons etc would need a van or similar to get into the area within a practical distance for the stallholders or it wouldn't happen. You can probably prevent a 40 foot artic getting into somewhere but Nice Bastille day was conducted with a 7.5 tonne and caused more fatalities. My local market is full of 7.5 tonne lorries behind each stall awning.

It's tragic, but we can't put our lives on hold or not go out or make normal peoples working lives to difficult just because there are a few fundamentalist lunatics around. Sadly, this has to be stopped at source. Roadblocks did not stop IRA bombs, they just worked around them.

[Kim]

Autonomous vehicles. 

They could be hacked of course but they could also be impossible to drive into crowds.

Easier than hacking round the pedestrian safety (assuming you can't just use an older vehicle or drop it into manual mode), is to use the autonomous Uber to politely park up beside the crowd with your WMD of choice inside it.  I suspect that one's a question of 'when'.

[Veloman]

There is no protection if someone is minded to use any vehicle to randomly drive into you.

In the Nice thread I suggested I was surprised such methods were not used earlier. Much easier than making bombs etc.

If someone is minded to commit an act whereby random folk are harmed, there is no defence to prevent that happening. Such folk will not be bothered by consequences of their act.

Also, the main aim of terrorism is to terrorise and change behaviour. That is why life must go on as it did before, albeit with measures to protect the public in general.

[Cudzoziemiec]

I wasn't really thinking in terms of bombs or even deliberate attacks. The OP was clumsily written, sorry. I was wondering aloud, as much as anything else, whether seeing this kind of thing – where all the damage is done by a motor vehicle, no specific weapons – would have a side-effect of making us more conscious of the responsibility of being in charge of such a large, fast object. Yeah, ridiculous optimism, I know.

[Kim]

I wasn't really thinking in terms of bombs or even deliberate attacks. The OP was clumsily written, sorry. I was wondering aloud, as much as anything else, whether seeing this kind of thing – where all the damage is done by a motor vehicle, no specific weapons – would have a side-effect of making us more conscious of the responsibility of being in charge of such a large, fast object. Yeah, ridiculous optimism, I know.

Unlikely.  Consider the differing reactions to a theoretical lorry-vs-crowd incident, once it's revealed that:

a) the driver was an Asian Islamic fundamentalist who drove into the crowd deliberately
b) the driver was a white neo-nazi who drove into the crowd deliberately
c) the driver suffered an unforseen medical problem resulting in a sudden loss of control
d) the driver lost control of the vehicle because the vehicle was undroadworthy and suffered a predictable mechanical failure
e) the driver swerved into the crowd accidentally because they were concentrating on their phone
f) the vehicle's AI drove into the crowd deliberately to avoid hitting a wind-blown plastic bag at higher speed, mistaking the crowd for foliage
g) the vehicle's AI drove into the crowd accidentally due to a computer virus that inverted steering outputs at 13:37 on the first Friday of the month

[Cudzoziemiec]

Absolutely. And we can add:
h) considering that the first deliberate running down of pedestrians probably happened not long after the horse was tamed and before the invention of the wheel.

[Asterix, the former Gaul.]

The best plan is to have a world in which the minimum possible number of people feel inclined to do such things.  Unfortunately I don't believe we have been going in that direction.

[Kim]

The best plan is to have a world in which the minimum possible number of people feel inclined to do such things.  Unfortunately I don't believe we have been going in that direction.

I'm fairly sure we have.

[Terry72]

I have noticed a lot of new bollards and street barriers being put up in Leeds.

Rather glad of it to be honest. The city was a sitting duck beforehand.

[mllePB]

I heard a busker next to the Frankfurt Market in Brum as belting out The Smiths

And if a double-decker bus crashes into us
To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die

the day after and no-one was either listening or cared.