We had a surprising amount of discussion in our office last week about pedestrian fencing with horizontal rails beside roads.
Sounds like a pretty niche engineering discussion… until you see the aftermath of a car hitting one.
The big concern is the potential for horizontal members to break away and become spearing hazards. VicRoads RDN 06-14 specifically calls this out, including concerns with some modular “no weld” fencing systems.
Used selectively, pedestrian fencing can have advantages (e.g. protecting pedestrians from falls). But once it sits close to traffic, it also becomes part of the roadside environment. Which means we need to ask:
- What happens if a car hits it?
- How does it fail?
- Where do the components go?
- Does it create a bigger hazard than the thing it was trying to solve?
Long horizontal rails separating from posts is not something you want happening in a live traffic environment.
A good reminder that roadside safety is often about the little details. Connections. Failure mechanisms. Offsets. The stuff that can seem overly cautious right up until the moment something goes wrong.
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