Pro-Palestine protesters will be legally protected while marching across the Sydney Harbour Bridge on Sunday after a New South Wales supreme court decision.
The bridge is expected to be closed for about five hours, from 11.30am, and additional police are being mobilised to observe a march that could include up to 50,000 people.
In her judgment, Justice Belinda Rigg said “the march at this location is motivated by the belief that the horror and urgency of the situation in Gaza demands an urgent and extraordinary response from the people of the world”.
“The evidence indicates there is significant support for the march.”
50,000 seems a bit on the small side for a Sydney Harbour Bridge march. Hopefully there will be many many more than that.
A massive match on a bridge sounds unsafe because of resonance, but since OP says it’s on the smaller side, it’s probably ok.
Is it even true that resonance can collapse bridges??
I didn’t know about resonance either, that’s interesting. It would take a lot though, it’s an eight lane wide bridge+ trains in both directions+ pedestrian walkways on both sides.
Resonance on a bridge is only able to become an issue if you have everybody actually marching in step (and it’s worth noting that these days they make sure bridges can handle way more than they’re expected to). Getting a crowd of protesters on a bridge walking together is just gonna have the weight of the protesters.
This bridge had a march with 300,000 to 500,000 back into 2000. Huge bridge. Can handle a lot.
It was true, which is why they used to march out of step. It’s not a problem for protest matches that are not in time.
It’s only true of badly designed bridges, these days. Modern engineering tools can calculate the resonant frequencies, and they make certain that those are far away from the frequencies which humans or wind can create