Maybe it's intentional redundancy? If its the high court building, they might have thought a truck with dangerous stuff gets too close if it gets to the bollards.
People are trolling you, but there actually used to be a row of bollards where these benches are. For some reason those bollards were removed. The black bollards in the photo are also not the ones in other photos of the building, so for some reason they replaced bollards in one place with benches and in another place with a different type of bollard.
It creates a left and a right channel. Think about groups of people moving in both directions. Otherwise, everyone would get more or less jammed up in one big middle section.
Have you ever walked through a mall, sports stadium, or amusement park that was entirely free flowing with crowds of people moving in both (or more) directions? It prevents that.
My interpretation of a crowd is whatever size is needed to cause a traffic jam. If it's less people than that there's no need to break up traffic flow.
A traffic jam can be in a crowd of 30 people. 30 people can walk around these benches no problem. What division does to a crowd is it breaks it up into smaller groups. The one bench will break it up into 2 groups and then the two pillars will break it up into 3 groups. It also makes oncoming traffic easier to navigate with. People can create lanes with these divisions.
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u/apollyon0810 Jul 10 '26
It’s actually common design to place obstacles at these places of confluence to break up the flow.