Crowds return to reopened Bourbon Street on January 2, 2025, the day after the deadly truck attack in New Orleans.
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Jack Brook/AP
Intentional vehicular attacks on crowds, like the one that killed 14 revelers in New Orleans on New Year’s Day, are nothing new. They have been done for decades. Although in recent years they have been increasingly used by terrorist groups and individuals.
“Terrorism has changed,” said Devorah Margolin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Hijackings, such as the 9/11 attacks, have become less common, she said, while “these low-to-medium impact or low-to-medium cost (vehicle-based) attacks are in somehow 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 was being investigated as an act of terrorism. Although the precise motive is not yet clear, 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 are also cheaper.
“All you need is a car to get this done,” she said.
In an unclassified document from 2010, Department of Homeland Security officials warned that ram vehicles gave terrorists who did not have access to or expertise in explosives or other weapons the possibility of carrying out an attack.
While security measures at airports and other public places were increased after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Washington Institute’s Margolin said “vehicle attacks are pretty hard to stop.”
“Easy targets, such as areas where civilians are having fun relaxing, are obviously easier targets because you just walk through them,” she said.
A Brief History of Car Attacks
Islamic terrorist groups have been calling for these types of attacks for more than a decade. But in 2016, ISIS began aggressively promoting vehicle attacks – particularly in the United States and Europe – through its online magazine. Roumiyahincluding the instructions his supporters were encouraged to use to carry out such attacks.
In 2017, an Islamic extremist drove a rental van onto a popular Manhattan bike path, killing eight people. The New York Police Department’s deputy commissioner for intelligence said at the time that the attacker followed ISIS’s guidelines “almost exactly to the letter.”
The year before, a student at Ohio State University in Columbus injured more than a dozen people in a car and stabbing attack on campus.
Most of these attacks took place in Europe, where vehicles are an alternative to guns, which are more difficult to access than in the United States.
The deadliest car attack in recent history took place in Nice, France, in July 2016, which left more than 80 people dead. ISIS claimed responsibility for the rampage.
However, many of the attackers behind a wave of such attacks in the region in 2016 and 2017 had no known links to ISIS. Even when authorities have found no evidence that ISIS led an attack, the terrorist group has often claimed responsibility in an apparent effort to gain publicity.
In 2016, a truck mowed down a Christmas market in Berlin, killing at least 12 people and injuring many, in another incident for which Islamic State took credit.
Similar attacks were also carried out around the same time in Barcelona, Stockholm and London.
But the use of vehicles as weapons goes back even further.
In Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, a driver crashed 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.
The same year, 16 people were killed after a Uighur man attacked dozens of Chinese police officers with a dump truck and machetes.
What major cities have done to try to prevent vehicle attacks
Whatever the motive, such attacks prove difficult to prevent. Big American cities have tried.
After the Islamic State urged its supporters to attack the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2016, the New York Police Department deployed sand-filled sanitation trucks, bomb-sniffing dogs and other defenses along the streets bordering the parade route.
Then, following the bike lane attack in 2017, New York City announced plans to install 1,500 bollards in some of the city’s most populated spaces to block vehicles.
At the time of this week’s attack in New Orleans, the Bourbon Street bollards were being repaired in preparation for next month’s Super Bowl.
But police said even functional barricades could not have stopped the attack, as the perpetrator moved toward the sidewalk to bypass those protective measures.
“We had a car there, we had barriers there, we had officers there, and they were still moving around,” New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said Wednesday. “We actually had a plan, but the terrorist foiled it.”
The New Orleans incident has prompted public safety officials and private companies to go back to the drawing board, said Brian Stephens, senior managing director at Teneo, a security risk consultancy. security. He works with public and private companies to develop strategies to mitigate these types of security threats.
“A lot of times when these bollards or barriers are sort of put in place and then forgotten about and never seen again,” he said, “I hear from many customers and many partners that they need to revisit what they did in the past.
Greg Shill, a law professor who studies transportation policy at the University of Iowa, says reducing auto dependence in dense cities, including the use of large vehicles in urban centers, could help .
“But I don’t know of any American city that is seriously considering measures to keep large vehicles away from the urban center,” he said. “Even modest measures tend to be met with pretty stiff opposition to pedestrianizing a street so that, you know, kids from an adjacent school can play for an hour or two.”
He recognizes, however, that vehicle congestion poses a complex threat to any city with no ready-made solution.
“I don’t think there’s a silver bullet here,” he said.
NPR’s Greg Myre contributed reporting.
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