Bollards can be flexible and plastic, such as those that government officials used to protect the bike path, and they can be concrete and steel, such as those officials used to protect the waterfront offices of Goldman Sachs. Traffic engineers chose bollards for the bike path that would collapse, just in case a driver needed to drive through.
Little changed after the accident that killed Eric. The next day, government workers reinstalled the same flexible bollard his killer had driven over.
But a few days after Sayfullo Saipov drove over the same bollards again, the City of New York and the New York State Department of Transportation installed concrete and steel barricades at every entrance to the path. At thirty-one driveways where drivers were permitted to cross the path, new barricades blocked them from turning onto the path, and at twenty-six pedestrian intersections where drivers were not normally permitted but could still potentially fit through, new barricades made the space too small for a car to fit past. It was airtight—government officials simply worked together to prevent what had happened from happening ever again. Murder merited a preventive response in a way that multiple identical accidents did not.
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