Human Barriers, Helping Pedestrians??

Picture of human barriers near Lincoln Financial Field on game night.

Above you can see a picture that I took a while back leaving a Sunday night Philadelphia Eagles game.  The game was against the rivaled New York Giants so the crowds were expected to be higher than usual.  The area around the stadium has a lot of pedestrian traffic coming from the dozen or so massive parking lots that supply parking to most of the stadium.  Because of this, for this game the city lined some of the curbs around the stadium with pedestrian barriers.  This was obviously done to prevent pedestrians, especially ones under the influence of alcohol, from attempting to cross the street and obstruct traffic, or worse, be hit by a car.

While I think that in some cases this type of pedestrian protection is great, and I do believe that this may have helped, I think it also could have, and may have caused some issues.  For one thing, the barriers then corral pedestrians into the crosswalks, which cause a back up in pedestrian traffic.  This in fact causes pedestrians to then hope the barriers and walk in the roads.  I know this because I was one of those pedestrians who chose to jump over it at a point where the road was actually closed off to vehicular traffic.  I also witnessed several drunk pedestrians try to climb over them and fall, landing almost directly on their faces (luckily I saw no injuries.)

My point is, while these barriers were placed to make everyone safer and keep vehicular traffic moving, from what I saw they did more harm then good.

What do you think?