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The current design of the concrete dividers stemmed from problems with the guardrails of the day. The issue wasn't cars shredding them like tissue paper, the i

The current design of the concrete dividers stemmed from problems with the guardrails of the day. The issue wasn't cars shredding them like tissue paper, the issue was that they were bouncing off the guardrails, and back into traffic. The current design of those concrete ones, with that angled base, is to basically let the car hit the barrier, and keep it there, so they grind to a stop rather than ricocheting across lanes of traffic. There used to be these old, I dunno, public service videos or something that they'd play on TV at 5am that I'd watch, and they had all sorts of ones about traffic barriers and what not. This was back during the rise of breakaway obstacles, toll booth buffers, large cans filled with sand and water, etc. It was all quite fascinating. They also had films on the local water projects and what not: huge tunnels, dirt moving explosions, monster earth movers. Right up the alley of a young man at the time. Whatever fills the air time I guess.

EdwardDiego 3y ago
Yeah, in NZ they use a lot of wire based barriers to slow you / stop you while sacrificially dispersing your energy by propagating failure along the barrier. We like to use them to prevent (or minimise the impact of) the head-on collisions our two lane main highways often lead to. They're far cheaper to install and repair than other forms, and easy and fast to fix after an impact, but have a significant caveat that they'll mince you up if you're a motorcyclist who hits them, other types of barriers aren't exactly great for riders either but they offer more chance of survival than the wire barriers, to the extent that riders know the wired ones as cheese graters.
- throwup238 3y ago
  > Yeah, in NZ they use a lot of wire based barriers to slow you / stop you while sacrificially dispersing your energy by propagating failure along the barrier. We like to use them to prevent (or minimise the impact of) the head-on collisions our two lane main highways often lead to. The barrier type you see in the video are backed by steels cables that attach to the sheet metal and anchored at the ends so same idea. You can kinda see them in the video in the side view.

EdwardDiego 3y ago

Yeah, in NZ they use a lot of wire based barriers to slow you / stop you while sacrificially dispersing your energy by propagating failure along the barrier. We like to use them to prevent (or minimise the impact of) the head-on collisions our two lane main highways often lead to. They're far cheaper to install and repair than other forms, and easy and fast to fix after an impact, but have a significant caveat that they'll mince you up if you're a motorcyclist who hits them, other types of barriers aren't exactly great for riders either but they offer more chance of survival than the wire barriers, to the extent that riders know the wired ones as cheese graters.

throwup238 3y ago
> Yeah, in NZ they use a lot of wire based barriers to slow you / stop you while sacrificially dispersing your energy by propagating failure along the barrier. We like to use them to prevent (or minimise the impact of) the head-on collisions our two lane main highways often lead to. The barrier type you see in the video are backed by steels cables that attach to the sheet metal and anchored at the ends so same idea. You can kinda see them in the video in the side view.