Moving vehicles are still one of the most consistent causes of death on British worksites. HSE recorded 126 fatalities in 2025/26, and being hit by a moving vehicle is something that’s always up there.
Traffic management cones and bollards are one of the main ways to manage that risk, so the choices around how to use them and which ones are a matter of safety, not budget.
Temporary
A traffic cone isn’t a generic product like many think. Within BS EN 13422, it’s a specified product as temporary traffic control.
- On a standard UK road, a cone must be at least 750mm tall
- On a motorway or high-speed dual carriageway, the minimum is 1000mm
- Reflective collars are needed so the cone still reads as a hazard marker in low light.
These are the musts in order to ensure their compliance. The height difference between the two isn’t random, because a driver approaching at motorway speed needs to pick out the marker from further away and at a worse angle than someone crawling through a car park. The taller minimum can buy back some reaction time that the higher speed otherwise takes away.
A cone that falls short of the height or reflectivity minimum is non-compliant and possibly dangerous. It’s also a sign that it’s been purchased through a general retailer, not a safety specialist like Seton, where all cones are compliant.
The spec exists to match the risk – it’s managing a recurring problem, where people have less tolerance for any workplace injuries or fatalities that could have been better mitigated. HSE’s provisional fatal injury data recorded a rise in deaths from being struck by a moving vehicle at work. 20 in 2019/20 to 25 the following year, and 24 in 2025/26.
When temporary becomes the wrong answer
Cones make sense for a defined and short-lived task, like a delivery bay in use for an afternoon or a spill being cleared. But the calculation changes once a route or vehicle-pedestrian conflict point becomes a fixture of how the site now operates, rather than an exception to it.
Wheeldon Brothers Waste Limited was fined £250,000 as well as £4,102.32 in costs at Manchester Magistrates’ Court after a worker was run over by a shovel loader on his first day. HSE’s found the company had “failed to ensure there were adequate measures in place for the safe segregation of vehicles and pedestrians”. Essentially, staff worked on the ground with no separation from moving vehicles at all.
Nobody involved sufficiently planned for the inevitable outcome, and the site had simply never revisited a traffic pattern that had since stopped being occasional. Once duration stops being the answer to “how long will this arrangement last” then access requirements, sightlines and the consequence of a vehicle reaching the point being protected all start to matter more
What a permanent rating means
Once a site decides to just implement a fixed bollard, the question now isn’t so much how heavy it is, but what it’s certified to stop. The two shouldn’t be implied, because this is where the crash-rating codes are your engineering spec reference.
Under PAS 68:
- A rating of 7500/48/0 = tested against a 7500kg vehicle impacting at 48km/h and stopped it with zero metres of penetration
- A 7500/80/0 rating = zero penetration with the same vehicle mass at a much higher 80km/h impact speed.
The latter is a rating the standard treats as broadly equivalent to M50-P1/K12-L3 under the comparable international classifications. The newer IWA 14-1 is similar, where a rating written as V/7200[N3A]/64/0 certifies a 7200kg vehicle stopped at 64km/h with no penetration, and the standard’s vehicle classes run from 1,500kg small cars up to 29,000kg heavy trucks, so the code tells a buyer exactly which end of that range the bollard has actually been tested against.
Ultimately, both standards measure penetration in the same way, which is the distance from the barrier’s front face to the furthest point the vehicle reaches. So, a “0” in either code means the vehicle never got past the line at all. So a crash rating is the answer the facilities manager needs before signing off on investing in more permanent infrastructure: what is this rated to stop, at what speed, and how far will it let a vehicle travel.
A remember, there is an in-between, in that permanent bollards can be retractable posts. So, vehicle access management can be reactive and adaptive to the situation.
The practical guide isn’t cones versus bollards, but to match them to the environment and operations. The control must be proportional to the site’s own traffic pattern and risk profile. Going with a permanent option isn’t enough alone, as the spec sheet must be read closely to know whether it’s actually rated for the vehicles that will hit it. Get it wrong in either direction and the cost is the same kind Wheeldon Brothers paid.
