(with the 10 mph crash rating) for the purpose it was intended -- which was to stop a vehicle attack on pedestrians, exactly as occurred.
Cities were pressured by federal officials in 2017 after the 2016 vehicle attack in Nice, France that killed 86 people, and a string of other such attacks globally (so the threat is not some "new" thing in the past year or two).
So this is how they responded -- install something just to install something knowing full well the something was worth nothing. It was mostly chosen for cost and especially that it only took one person to move it out and back in, whereas higher mph-rated ones would need a special vehicle and equipment to do that (Bourbon street has the barriers removed during the day time when the street is used for vehicular traffic, and then put back in early in the evening when it is pedestrian-only).
A case of resisting them thar woke Federals' regulations by going thru the motions. Hah hah, we owned the libs, they snickered gleefully, as they approved the 10 mph design.
Another scandalous thing is that they didn't guard against a vehicle driving on the 8 foot wide sidewalk -
Attack suspect Shamsud-Din Jabbar, ..., exploited another vulnerability in the city’s security planning: He squeezed his seven-foot-wide pickup onto an eight-foot-wide sidewalk between a drugstore wall and the police vehicle, .. . . The city’s security modeling, in an engineering study conducted to help choose a new barrier system, had only considered scenarios where a vehicle entered Bourbon Street on the roadway - not the sidewalk.
Edit - Clarification - the old bollard system wasn't in place the night of the attack because it was removed and scheduled to be replaced by the new 10mph bollard system by February 9. So on the night of the attack, a police vehicle was acting as the bollard at the location the attacker used. The attacker squeezed his vehicle onto the sidewalk between the police vehicle and a drug store.
The article doesn't say what the crash resistance of the old bollard system was (FWIW), other than it wouldn't have protected against this attack either.
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