Throughout South Africa, you fill find bollards located alongside bustling roads, around parking lots, in front of business properties and public buildings, and dotted around parks and gardens for landscaping. These practical posts perform critical functions of safety, space demarcation, traffic control, and aesthetics in their allocated space. Two critical aspects that go into ensuring bollards function adequately for their purpose are planning and spacing. To assist you with installing bollards correctly for their function, we have created a guide to bollard planning and spacing. Find the best bollard for your needs with our guide to Street Scape concrete and steel bollards.
Guide to Bollard Planning:
Planning is essential for ensuring that the bollards you install in your selected area function correctly to your needs. Bollards can be used for an assortment of functions, but their most practical uses are for safety, space demarcation, vehicle control, and aesthetics. To assist you with correct planning for your bollards, we have outlined the ideal bollards for property protection, parking area designation, traffic control, and landscaping.
1) Planning for Property Protection:
When you own a building that is located next to a busy road, protection will be the driving factor behind your planning for the bollards around your building. You will want to ensure that the building is protected from any unnecessary damages should a car veer off the road and cause a collision. You should also strive to provide the people visiting your building, such as clients to your business, customers to your store, or site-seers to your historical building, with a space that is safe to walk next to a busy road.
When planning which bollards to use to keep a building protected, you usually have two options to choose between. You can either install a steel bollard or a concrete bollard. The choice between the bollards will depend on the frequency of cars on the road, the general speed at which the vehicles drive, and the orientation of your building towards the road.
If your building faces a busy road with vehicles travelling at a high speed, you will want to choose a strong, sub-mounted bollard. The best-suited bollard for this purpose is a concrete bollard. Concrete bollards are strong and durable and will act as a sturdy barrier between your building and a vehicle that has been careered off the road. Concrete bollards are also generally sub-mounted, providing them with stronger resistance against the impact of a vehicle collision.
2) Planning for Parking Area Designation:
During your planning of a parking area, you will want to ensure that the cars parked in the parking area are safe from harm and that you can control who has access to your designated parking area. Bollards are ideal for parking area designation as they are a perfect barrier for unwanted cars and will prevent any accidents occurring to cars parked in your parking lot if a vehicle on the road loses control.
For parking area designation, you can use either a steel bollard or a concrete bollard. If you have a large parking lot and need permanent bollards, then a concrete bollard will be the best planning choice. Concrete bollards are generally more affordable as they are made from budget-friendly materials of concrete and aggregates. If you only need temporary parking designation, then a removable steel bollard is the ideal choice.
3) Planning for Traffic Control:
Traffic control is often necessary when there are major road renovations, large events happening in a city, or during the building of a large structure next to a busy road. For traffic control, a bollard is a perfect solution to keep vehicles moving in the exact desired direction and at the best speed.
The best-suited bollard for traffic control is a steel bollard. Steel bollards are strong and have a high impact resistance against vehicles, without causing excessive damage to the vehicle. Steel bollards can be permanent or temporary, with temporary steel bollards being the best solution to planning for short-term traffic control.
4) Planning for Landscaping:
An increasingly popular use for bollards is for landscaping. When selecting bollards specifically for landscaping, your main emphasising factor in the planning should be the design of the bollard. The style of the bollard will have a huge impact on the desired aesthetic that you are striving to achieve in your landscaping design. Both concrete and steel bollards are available in a wide array of styles and designs, allowing you multiple options to find the exact aesthetic for your landscaping project.
Concrete bollards are the most popular for landscaping as they are available in various designs. You also have numerous choices when it comes to the finish of a concrete bollard. You can have the concrete bollard as smooth and painted to your desired colour to pop out in amongst the vegetation or you can have the bollard with a textured aggregate finish to add an additional natural touch to your garden space.
Guide to Bollard Spacing:
Once you have selected the best type of bollard for your building protection, space demarcation, or landscaping needs, you then need to accurately plan the spacing to ensure the bollard functions adequately. We have outlined the standard spacing for the bollards when used specifically for property protection, parking area designation, traffic control, and landscaping. The spaces allocated to each function are drawn from the distance between the widest part of the bollards.
1) Spacing for Property Protection:
The general spacing for bollards that have a protective function is between 0,92 metres and 1,52 metres. For building protection, we would recommend in your spatial planning to opt for the happy middle of 1,22 metres. This will ensure that your building is protected from vehicles that have lost control while still allowing for pedestrians to walk in between the bollards and people in wheelchairs to move through the bollards.
2) Spacing for Parking Area Designation:
You need to ensure that the spacing between your bollards for parking area designation is close enough to prevent unwanted vehicles from accessing your parking area. The same standard spacing of 0,92 metres to 1,52 metres applies again, but for parking area designation you can have your distance as 1,52 metres. As parking areas are generally large and it can be expensive to block them off with bollards, a wider space in between the bollards will ensure that you are sticking to your budget in your bollard planning while still controlling vehicle access.
3) Spacing for Traffic Control:
The spacing for bollards for traffic control is also the standard 0,92 metres to 1,52 metres. You can decide on your desired space in the planning of your bollard installation for traffic control. When planning the spacing for traffic control, you should also bear in mind any cars that may need to access the other side of the road during the construction process or event planning stages. If you install temporary steel bollards, these can be easily moved and replaced to allow for controlled vehicle access and therefore not have any impact on your spatial planning.
4) Spacing for Landscaping:
There is no standard spacing requirement for bollards used for landscaping. As these bollards will be purely aesthetic, you can choose your desired distance between each bollard. You can have them lined in a row along a planter bed to keep the plants and flowers protected or you can have the haphazardly dotted in amongst the plants for an interesting design.
Guide to Street Scape Bollards:
Street Scape is a Cape Town-based manufacturer of bollards. We produce high-quality and affordable concrete and steel bollards that are perfectly suited to your property protection, parking area designation, traffic control, and landscaping needs. We have created a brief guide to our concrete and steel bollards to assist you in selecting the best bollard for your needs.
Street Scape Concrete Bollards:
Street Scape offers a wide range of high-quality concrete bollards. The concrete bollard is made from a strong combination of concrete and aggregates that produce a sturdy and durable bollard suited to building protection and parking area demarcation. In addition, our concrete bollards are available in various finishes and designs to ensure they are the perfect aesthetic touch to your landscaping. Our concrete bollards also have additional features, such as chains, fencing, a water fountain, or an ashtray, that will increase the functionality of the bollard in your selected location.
Street Scape Steel Bollards:
Street Scape manufactures exceptionally high standard steel bollards. Our steel bollards are made from strong and corrosion-resistant stainless steel that is then hot-dip galvanised for extra durability and strength. For aesthetics, we have various steel bollard styles to ensure that it suits both your functional and decorative needs. You can choose to have your steel bollard powder coated into a colour that will seamlessly fit your location and purpose for your bollard.
All of our steel bollards are available with a removable sleeve. This means that you can easily remove the steel bollard if you would prefer a temporary bollard. We also offer a removable flat plate that can lock the steel bollard into place, also allowing for temporary bollard placement. These two features make our steel bollards superb choices for traffic control and parking area demarcation.
About Street Scape:
Street Scape specialises in high-quality and affordable landscaping elements. We manufacture a wide range of landscaping elements, including bollards, bins, steps, aggregate paving, tree elements, planters, signage, wall coping, kerbing, and seating. We have every landscaping element you will need to make an urban space functional and spectacular.
We ensure that we provide you with the highest standard of landscaping elements by selecting only the best materials for the manufacturing of our bins, steps, aggregate paving, and all our other landscaping elements. Whether you are installing bins outside your business or pavers for a patio at your home, you will enjoy long-lasting quality with our landscaping elements.
At Street Scape, we strive to make your landscaping project as affordable as possible. We offer free quotes for all landscaping projects to ensure that you know exactly the expected cost before you make any commitment to our landscaping elements. This free quote service is to ensure that you are always kept informed without costing you more when you partner with Street Scape.
No matter where you are in South Africa, you can incorporate Street Scape landscaping elements into your next project. We will manufacture your ordered planters, kerbing, signage, or other landscaping element and then deliver them to your home, business, or project site. Our trusted delivery system will ensure that your landscaping elements arrive timeously and at the same standard that they left our manufacturing building.
Ensure your Street Scape bollards perform to their required functionality with the correct planning and spacing outlined in our quick guide.