There is a war going on out there and it's all about bollards. traffic bollards, you understand - those much-abused and put-upon plastic pillars you see everywhere, wrenched from their island moorings, tossed into rivers, chucked over garden walls, hurled to the side of the road, writes George Frew/

Practically every Monday morning, after the drunken excesses and moronic japes of the weekend, humble traffic bollards may be found strewn around the county, victims of a vandal's whim. They lie around like stricken sentries of road safety, forlorn and abandoned, their directional arrows pointing nowhere.

One particular casualty opposite Toys R Us on the Botley Road suffers a regular and terrific caning. It's almost as if someone has a personal grudge against the thing.

Another, on the island up the road from Waitrose in Witney, can regularly be found after being pitched into the River Windrush.

Anthony Palman-Brown is a senior engineer in the county council's street lighting department. Along with his colleagues, he knows better than most the bollard problems faced by the powers that be.

And it is a recurring problem; every year, time and man-hours are spent on replacing our repositioning bollard casualties, to say nothing of the dangers to innocent motorists presented by bollards which have gone missing entirely. "It's a problem around the country, but especially in Oxfordshire," Mr Palman-Brown explains.

"There are certain roads with certain public houses where people leaving them think it is amusing to knock traffic bollards over or rip them off.

"Students have a habit of taking them back to their digs. We've had college bursars calling us after finding the things in students' rooms."

Though the design of traffic bollards has improved and developed over the years, there isn't much the county council can do to prevent this witless abuse. However you look at it, bollards are sitting - or standing - targets, completely at the mercy of any passing prankster.

Senior maintenance engineer Robert Newman agrees. He says: "They've developed a lot in recent years. The design has been made better, but there is still no particular way of preventing them being vandalised.

"The newer models are made of a flexible moulded plastic which bends if it is hit, but the older ones with nylon pins in the base tend to sheer off."

The much-targeted Botley bollard is 900mm high and its directional arrow measures 270mm in diameter. Traffic island bollards have been around since the late Twenties or early Thirties in Oxfordshire. The original models were called 'Pillars of Fire', according to Mr Newman. "Every year, we spend £250,000 on the maintenance of illuminated signs and bollards in the county," he reveals.

"If we have to replace one, it'll cost £590. If we have to attend the site and fit a new shell because the original has been smashed or gone missing, that will work out at £101.60p.

"If the old shell is still usable, the cost will be £42.41p. And we will attend the site within two hours of being notified of any damage."

There are about 2,200 bollards around the county. "If people are determined to cause wanton damage to them, there's very little we can do," Mr Newman adds.

"When they are knocked over or go missing, that represents a highway hazard to the road-user - motorist, cyclist and pedestrian alike.

"In a way, the people who design them are doing themselves out of a job because one day there will be bollards that can't be knocked down or torn off." Mr Newman adds that he has known cases where vandals have actually cut around the shell before making off with a bollard, leaving only a stump of plastic on its mountings.

But every single traffic bollard has a number and a personal history.

Records are kept on the number of times it is vandalised or knocked over accidentally, and of its maintenance cost.

After being contacted by the Oxford Mail, Mr Newman decided to check the number of the Botley bollard and, if need be, replace it with one of the newer, less vandal-prone shells.

This probably won't stop it being attacked, though.

For while drunks, miscreants and a certain type of student continue to think that creating a road hazard is the height of hilarity, the Botley bollard and its static brethren will remain targets for vandalism in a (traffic) island stream.

Story date: Thursday 02 March

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