Pedestrian Access Control Products
At a Glance: Full Height Turnstile Misuse and How to Prevent It
Though you can control access, you cannot control against turnstile misuse
Turnstile misuse may cause injuries
Full height turnstile padded safety sleeves prevent injuries and increase turnstile usability
A customer of ours in the United Kingdom utilized our “Safety Orange" sleeves to successfully raise awareness and protect users.
Full Height Turnstile Misuse Is an Uncontrollable Eventuality
There are very few aspects of pedestrian access control that cannot be regulated with an access control system and some turnstiles. One thing that cannot be controlled for, though, is turnstile misuse.
In our modern world of increasingly divided attention, it is very easy to become distracted or to divert our attention away from the task at hand. This momentary lapse of attention is anything but safe when someone is passing though the arms of a turnstile. Stopping short or doing something as simple as looking down at your phone while passing through a turnstile can result in a bump from the turnstile's arms as the turnstile attempts to complete its mechanically guided rotation. Though these collisions are usually very minor, they are a cause for concern, nonetheless.
Turnstile Misuse May Cause Injuries
Any impact between a turnstile and its user has the potential for causing injuries. For example, we have seen head injuries, heel impacts, and other similar minor impacts commonly occur as a direct result of turnstile misuse. Though our full height turnstiles provide floor-to-ceiling protection, there is no easy way to protect against misuse.
In a perfect world, everybody would know how to properly use a turnstile. But, in reality, most people wouldn't even know what a turnstile was if you brought it up in a conversation, so it would be wishful thinking at best to assume that the common person would know how to pass through a full height turnstile safely.
So, let's face it; you can control access, but you cannot control against misuse. Because of this, there has to be another way to simultaneously protect users and increase the usability of a full height turnstile.
Benefits of Choosing Tandem Full Height Turnstiles
One of our now loyal full height turnstile safety sleeves customers over in the United Kingdom, Bouygues UK, was having some all-too-familiar problems with the full height turnstiles they had installed at the entrance to their construction site. At this particular site, they unfortunately experienced several minor head injuries and one reported accident all with their line of entrance control full height turnstiles.
Though we don't know exactly how these incidents happened, we do know that construction sites are full of distractions. For example, a user could have walked towards one of the turnstiles thinking about something else entirely and simply tried to gain entry through the exit lane or tried to exit through the entrance lane. By doing this, the turnstile's arms would not budge, and the unknowing entrant would have walked right into what was effectively now a wall. I'm sure you could imagine how painful and embarrassing that might be.
So, Bouygues was faced with an ultimatum; either get rid of the full height turnstiles or find a way to prevent these incidents from happening. Like many other construction companies, Bouygues was not about to get rid of their entrance turnstiles because construction site turnstiles are the most dependable way to protect a construction site from vandals, unauthorized entrants, and thieves. So as Bouygues' own Stephane Hossard stated in his article about the matter, they “…came up with a simple but effective solution: protect the turnstiles in order to protect peoples' heads."
And what was this simple yet effective solution? A set of Hayward Turnstiles Full Height Safety Sleeves that they were able to buy directly from our online Safety Sleeve Store. Though they could not find these products anywhere in the UK, the Hayward Team was willing to export a bunch of our Safety Orange colored sleeves to them right away.
Full Height Turnstile Safety Sleeves Prevent Accidents and Enhance Usability
Bouygues UK found, like many of our happy Safety Sleeve customers, that implementing these orange turnstile arm pads made their turnstile arms immediately more visible: cutting through distractions and alerting each entrant to pay attention while passing through their turnstiles. Further, they found that the soft foam padding was crucial to reducing the severity of impacts if the turnstiles ever jammed or if users ever misused them.
Like at Bouygues UK, many full height turnstiles are installed outside and are subject to the elements. As you can imagine, metal turnstile arms can get extremely hot in the summer and freezing cold to the touch in the winter months. But Bouygues UK and other similar installments can rest assured as padded turnstile Safety Sleeves don't just protect against impacts, they also regulate turnstile arm temperature and protect users from touching metal bars at extreme temperatures.
Full height turnstile padded Safety Sleeves help to prevent accidents and enhance usability with nearly all full height turnstiles. The beauty about these sleeves, though, is that they zipper onto a turnstile's arms in seconds, unlike those cheaper cylindrical pads that you need to spend hours shimmying on to your turnstile's arms.
