A car barrier is seen down on Orleans Street in the French Quarter, a block from Bourbon Street, after 14 people were killed during an attack early in the morning on January 1, 2025 in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Photographer: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Imagew
What Can Cities Do to Protect Public Spaces From Vehicle Attacks?
The Bourbon Street truck attack in New Orleans has focused fresh attention on an old problem: making pedestrian zones safe from vehicular mayhem.
The first few weeks of 2025 have been busy for Rob Reiter, a security consultant who specializes in protecting people from hostile vehicle attacks. It’s a brand of urban mayhem that ranges from storefront crashes to acts of terror like the one that occurred in New Orleans early on New Year’s Day, where a man plowed a rented pickup truck through crowds of revelers on Bourbon Street, killing 14 people and injuring at least 35.
Since then, Reiter has found himself doing a lot of interviews about what went wrong in New Orleans. This frustrates him. “Nobody calls me on the third of July saying, ‘What should we be doing tomorrow to keep the parade safe?’” he told me. “People call me on the fifth of July and say, ‘What should they have done to have prevented this?’”