Vehicular attacks are not new. But preventing them has been a big challenge

Intentional vehicular attacks on crowds of people, like the one that killed 14 revelers in New Orleans on New Year’s Day, are not new. They have been carried out for decades. Although in recent years, they have increasingly been used by terrorist groups and individuals.

“Terrorism has changed,” said Devorah Margolin, senior fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Plane hijackings, such as the Sept. 11 attacks, have become less common, she said, while “these low- to medium-impact or low- to medium-cost [vehicle-based] attacks are kind of more popularized.”

The FBI said the man who intentionally drove a pickup truck into crowds on Bourbon Street early on New Year’s Day acted alone and that the attack is being investigated as an act of terrorism. While a specific motive is still unclear, the FBI said the suspect was inspired by ISIS.

Margolin said such vehicle-based attacks require less communication between a central organization and individuals, and therefore less risk. They’re also less expensive.

“All you require is a car in order to carry this out,” she said.

In an unclassified document from 2010, Department of Homeland Security officials warned that vehicle-ramming allows terrorists who lack access to or expertise in explosives or other weapons an opportunity to carry out an attack.

Whereas security measures at airports and other public venues have been bolstered following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, The Washington Institute’s Margolin said that “vehicular attacks are quite hard to stop.”

“Soft targets, such as areas in which civilians are enjoying themselves relaxing, are obviously easier targets because you can just drive right through,” she said.

A brief history of vehicular attacks

Islamic terrorist groups have been calling for these types of attacks for over a decade. But in 2016, ISIS began aggressively promoting vehicle attacks — particularly in the U.S. and Europe — through its online magazine Rumiyah, including instructions its supporters were encouraged to use to carry out such attacks.

In 2017, an Islamic extremist drove a rented pickup truck into a popular Manhattan bike path, killing eight people. The New York Police Department’s deputy commissioner of intelligence said at the time that the perpetrator followed the ISIS guidelines “almost exactly to a T.”

The year prior, a student at Ohio State University in Columbus injured more than a dozen people when he carried out a car and knife attack on campus.

Most of these attacks have taken place in Europe, where vehicles provide an alternative to firearms, which are more difficult to access relative to the U.S.

The deadliest vehicular attack in recent history was in Nice, France, in July 2016, which killed more than 80 people. ISIS claimed responsibility for the rampage.

However, many of the assailants behind a wave of such attacks that occurred in the region in 2016 and 2017 had no known ties to ISIS. Even where authorities have found no evidence that ISIS directed an attack, the terrorist group has often claimed responsibility in an apparent effort to get publicity.

In 2016, a truck mowed through a Christmas market in Berlin, leaving at least 12 dead and many more injured, in yet another incident in which the Islamic State took credit.

Similar attacks were also carried out around that time in Barcelona, Stockholm and London.

But the use of vehicles as weapons goes back even further.

In Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, a driver plowed into a crowd of people protesting a white supremacist rally. One person was killed and more than 30 others were injured.

And in 2008, at least three different Palestinian attackers used cars and bulldozers to kill people in and near Jerusalem.

That same year, 16 people were killed after a Uyghur attacked dozens of Chinese police officers with a dump truck and machetes.

What major cities have done to try to prevent vehicular attacks

No matter the motive, such attacks have proven difficult to prevent. Major U.S. cities have tried. 

After the Islamic State urged its supporters to attack the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2016, New York police deployed sand-filled sanitation trucks, bomb-sniffing dogs and other defenses along streets bordering the parade route.

Then, following the 2017 bike path attack, New York City announced a plan to install 1,500 bollards in some of the city’s most populated spaces as a way to block vehicles.

At the time of this week’s attack in New Orleans, bollards on Bourbon Street were in the process of being repaired in preparation for hosting the Super Bowl next month.

But police indicated that even functioning barricades wouldn’t have stopped the attack, as the perpetrator drove up onto the sidewalk to bypass those safeguards.

“We did have a car there, we had barriers there, we had officers there, and they still got around,” New Orleans Police Department Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said Wednesday. “We did indeed have a plan, but the terrorist defeated it.”

The New Orleans incident has prompted both public safety officials and private companies to go back to the drawing board, said Brian Stephens, a senior managing director with consultancy firm Teneo’s security risk advisory practice. He works with public and private businesses to come up with strategies to mitigate these types of security threats.

“A lot of times, where these bollards or barriers are sort of put in place and then forgotten about and never looked at again,” he said, “I am hearing from a lot of clients and a lot of partners that they have the need to revisit what they’ve done in the past.”

Greg Shill, a law professor who studies transportation policy at the University of Iowa, says that reducing car dependency in dense cities, including the use of large vehicles in urban centers, could help.  

“But I’m not aware of any U.S. cities that are seriously looking at measures to keep large vehicles out of the urban core,” he said. “Even modest measures tend to encounter pretty fierce opposition to pedestrianize a street for, you know, children at an adjacent school to play for an hour or two.”

Still, he acknowledges that vehicle rammings are a complex threat for any city with no cut-and-dried solution.

“I don’t think there’s a silver bullet here,” he said.

NPR’s Greg Myre contributed reporting.