Wow, Awesome video and find! 😁 That's really quite interesting to hear yet another purpose for an E2S Apello alarm. It's quite cool hearing it sound and seeing the bollards move up and down for the buses to use the busway. Cambridge is so quirky in terms of transport infrastructure!
Haha to right it is lol. Yeah it’s quite interesting to find these type of bollards actually still in use, there are others in Cambridge that have been decommissioned or just don’t work anymore so these ones are quite something if I do say so my self.
Having them speak seems ridiculous when the vast majority of the time they don't get more than 'caution' out before the bollard has finished moving. If you want to draw attention to the bollard then stick a flashing light on top of it or around where it is in the ground with maybe flashing arrows on posts next to the footpath crossings to guide them away from where the bollard rises. In a country where parking meters/ticket machines can have a dozen different languages on them, a voice message doesn't seem like the right way to go, especially when it can't even get the sentence out before the thing it's warning of is over. If they're standing on the bollard they'll be on the floor with a head injury or whatever long before the thing utters a single word, equally if the thing is rising when they approach and trip over it. If it's for drivers, same problem, but they should be reacting to red and green lights and already know not to proceed when a regular alarm is sounding as is the case with railway crossings, so something speaking is redundant.
