The Suicide-Proof Bridge

Why prevention should be part of building standards

“The Golden Gate Bridge is practically suicide proof. Suicide from the bridge is neither possible nor probable.” — Chief Engineer Joseph Strauss, 1936

When Joseph Strauss made the claim that no one would be able to jump from the Golden Gate Bridge, the plan was to line the span with a 5.5-foot railing that angled inwards. But the design was modified, shrinking down to just four feet and standing straight up, thus allowing people to climb over and make the leap into the bay below. Since the bridge’s opening in 1937, over 1600 people have jumped.

The change to the barrier’s design wasn’t a money issue. The GGB actually came in under budget. The going understanding is that Strauss was just over five feet tall and wanted to be able to enjoy the view from his own eye level. Whatever the reason, 80 years later, the landmark is about to be retrofitted with a series of steel nets designed to deter jumping and prevent death. This barrier will cost $76 million – more than double the cost of the bridge itself. If Strauss had stuck to the original plan or had imagined a way for people to enjoy the view while still preventing jumping, the bridge would be famous strictly for its style and grandeur, and not its status as the second-most used suicide site in the world.

Research shows that a physical intervention — some way of restricting access to suicide hot spots — is the best method of stopping suicide. It works better than encouraging help-seeking, hoping for intervention from a third party, and responsible media reporting. It comes down to this: if people can’t jump, they won’t.

Interventions don’t have to cost millions of dollars. They can be simple, fast, and sometimes weird. In China, government officials were fed up with traffic jams caused by drivers watching pedestrians jump to their deaths from the Guangzhou Bridge, so they came up with a surprising hack: Cover the railing in butter, which makes it too slippery to get a good hold on. This surreal solution worked where other non-physical interventions hadn’t. People couldn’t jump.

The officials in China weren’t out to save lives; they just wanted traffic to flow smoothly. Essentially, preventing deaths was a happy byproduct of getting commuters to their destinations in a timely manner. Suicide tends to be an impulsive act, and it’s entirely possible that the odd presence of butter on the bridge was enough of an interruption to deter people from attempting. The message wasn’t “Don’t kill yourself here,” but rather, “You can’t kill yourself here.”

Of course, butter is not the material most transportation agencies will turn to as a suicide prevention method – instead, more visible solutions like nets and fences get tacked onto bridges, and the public often bemoans both their expense and their appearance. In spite of evidence to the contrary, the misconception persists that physical barriers won’t deter a person bent on ending their life, and in the face of public resistance, they become an expensive, artless afterthought rather than an integral feature of a structure’s design.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. When constructing a bridge or building, designers and engineers are faced with safety challenges like maximum weight limit, wind tolerance, environmental stressors, vibrations, etc. Suicide could be viewed as just one of many design considerations to solve. What would it take to create a best practice or minimum expectation — a LEED certification of sorts for suicide?

There are countless examples of successful partnerships between designers and public health agencies. Take motor vehicles. Although the number of cars on the road today has increased 11 fold since 1925, the death rate has plummeted – from 18 deaths per 100 million miles driven to 1.7 per 100 million – which is a 90 percent decrease. This achievement is a joint effort across disciplines, but safety features introduced through design innovations have had significant impact; headrests, shatter-resistant windshields, safety belts, air bags, and turn signals have all contributed to the lower death rate. Today, more people die by suicide than from car accidents – but if designers took on the challenge, think how low those numbers could be in 100 years.

I’m imagining not simply design ingenuity, but large-scale public art. Last year, artist Leo Villareal’s 1.8-mile wide LED sculpture was installed across the western span of San Francisco’s Bay Bridge, turning a freeway into a spectacle of light and a tourist attraction. In 2005, Christo & Jeanne-Claude’s “The Gates” transformed Central Park with 99,155 square meters of fabric. This type of high-profile art can be integrated with the goal of suicide prevention, replacing plain steel fences and utilitarian nets with forms that are beautiful, striking, and culturally significant.

So far, the most moving stories of physical interventions to counter suicide are based on person-to-person contact – one man who stands vigilant with a pair of binoculars on the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge; another who offers a cup of tea to would-be jumpers in Australia. These sentinels can only be awake for so many hours of the day, alive for a single lifetime, while architecture lasts for generations, and can constantly, gracefully dissuade the desperate. As the Bay Area transportation board prepares to rig nets beneath the Golden Gate, Joseph Strauss’ story should serve as a cautionary tale, prompting designers to consider how elegant, life-saving interventions can be part of their grand infrastructural visions from the start.

You can follow Christopher Gandin Le on Twitter at @emotechnology. Subscribe to re:form’s RSS feed, sign up to receive our stories by email, and follow the main page here.

First and second photos by Donna J. Wan from her series Death Wooed Us