Barricade Styles

[Charc]

So ladies and gents, what's your favorite barricade styles?

I've had the pleasure of working both with real steel "concert" style barricade, and aluminum "bike rack" style barricade.

The latter made me want to kill myself.

My qualms:

*It's too light. It will go anywhere the crowd pushes.

*The interconnecting sections pivot, allowing the barricade to flex and give in sections, as opposed to moving the whole length. This makes it easier for the audience to move around.

*The bottom rail not only holds the vertical pieces in place, but it allows a perfect foothold. Girls climbing over... girls riding the barricade... you get the idea.

*The feet are too small to avoid some hazard of rolling.

I'm a rather small guy, but my patented "I swear to god I'll rip your head off, and by the way I do not care that you're an attractive girl and your shirt is off: you're really sweaty, and thanks to you now both my hands and the barricade is, by the way do you know where that guy's hand is going?" look really helped me out.

My consensus... "bike rack" style barricade is not to be used as stage barrier, especially when it's a pulsing dance party, and the talent suggests the audience "go wild", "mosh", and "break stuff".

Please kindly give me "concert" style.

What's your preference?

[avkid]

The "concert" style steel plate can be quite dangerous and tedious to setup.

I can pretty much toss around bike rack by myself.

[soundlight]

Real concert barricades are the only thing that I trust to truly keep people away from the artist, their gear, me, and my gear. Bike rack is only to put around FOH, put at the ends of a long piece of steel barricade in front of the stage, or as a crowd guide (not force-barrier).

[BDS0111]

Bike rack is certainly good for somethings...such as light crowd control.

Barriers are a must for some concerts, not all though...Mojo Barriers make the best ones in my opinion. You can find them online. They even developed a system that measures the forces and pressures that people put on barriers with sensors...a great tool for the security people.

[len]

Bike racks are really only good for directing crowds from point A to point B. If a crowd were to get wound up, a bike rack would be easy to push over. IMO worse than no barrier at all since they just seem to incite people to do something you don't want them to.

[mstaylor]

MoJo barrriers is the best, Mountain Productions makes one similar. They are not tedious to set up, moving them around because fire marshals and promotors can't agree is tedious. I can take myself and a couple of hans and set 160ft of MoJo up in under 45 minutes.

[Charc]

P.S.

Who thought I was the right size to be a yellow-shirt on the stage barrier?!

[Nate1714]

I worked with both styles, and the bike rack style was easy to setup but just as easy for the crowd to push around if they wanted to. The heavy steel ones are hard to set up hurt like hell if the idiot helping you drops it on your foot and are even worse at the end of the night to put away...but guess what...they worked and everyone was safe. Both have worked for me I prefer setting up the bike rack style but feel its safer in general to set up the heavy duty steel ones...

[DuckJordan]

I have actually worked with a custom built barrier where most of the stopping power didn't come from the security standing on the opposite side but rather the croud standing in front of the cage trying to push it over. the "Deck" as we all called it extended 10 feet from the actual wall which was the same as a mojo barrier so when the croud tried to push the barrier over the people behind them kept it down we went from a needed 12 yellow shirt to just 3 by using that barrier.