Nice bollards

TAIWAN — Taipei is a surprising city. There’s a fine line between ugly haphazardness and charming idiosyncrasy; for the most part, the Taiwanese capital seems to land on the latter side. Its broad boulevards would be bland and overwhelming if it weren’t for the arcaded sidewalks filled with parked scooters. The rambling lanes that run between those boulevards are lined for the most part with architecturally uninspiring apartment buildings, but the abundance of potted plants, hidden café terraces and dilapidated wooden bungalows more than make up for that. In theory, Taipei has everything going against it, but it gets so many small things right that it’s actually a pretty remarkable place.

These bollards are just one example of what I mean. Many people have a love-hate relationship with bollards: on one hand, they’re often ugly and overzealously implemented, but on the other, they keep cars out of pedestrian space. (In any case, they’re a lot nicer than the hideous grey fences that Hong Kong uses to segregate pedestrian and vehicular traffic.) Only rarely do they exceed their immediate purpose, which is why I like the bollards just outside Ximen metro station, in which images of historical streetscenes are embedded. Over on busy Yongkang Street, meanwhile, chubby concrete bollards add to the street both a place to sit and something a bit more unexpected.

I can’t think of too many places where bollards are used in Montreal. I wonder, however, if it would be possible to add some of these decorative flourishes to our other pieces of street furniture. I particularly like the idea of incorporating historical photos into municipal property — imagine walking down St. Denis and being taken back a hundred years by an old street scene displayed on a traffic control box, a real-life version of the then-and-now images that our own Guillaume St-Jean posts every day.