ATG Access: 35 years of perimeter security – design lessons for civil engineers
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on New Civil Engineer
30 Second Briefing
ATG Access marks 35 years in perimeter security engineering, tracing the shift from basic manually operated bollards in 1991 to today’s PAS 68/IWA 14-tested automatic bollards and sliding barriers designed to stop 7.5 t vehicles at impact speeds above 50 km/h. The company describes how hostile vehicle mitigation has moved from ad hoc street furniture to integrated systems with buried foundations, shallow-mount cassettes for congested utilities corridors, and impact-rated street furniture. For civil and highway schemes, the message is to design security early, coordinate with below-ground services, and plan for whole-life maintenance of hydraulic and electromechanical components.
Technical Brief
- ATG Access reports early schemes often retrofitted bollards into pavements without structural foundations or load paths.
- Coordination with highway authorities has shifted from ad hoc permits to formalised design approvals and method statements.
- Long-term operation has shown hydraulic bollards need scheduled seal and fluid replacement to avoid unplanned lock-down failures.
- Electrical cabinets and control pits are now routinely detailed above recorded flood levels to maintain fail-safe behaviour.
- Lessons from dense utility corridors include pre-construction GPR and trial pits to avoid cutting critical fibre or gas.
- ATG notes that misaligned civil works (levels, ducts, reinforcement) remain a primary cause of late-stage rework and safety compromise.
Our Take
ATG Access’s 35-year perspective on security and infrastructure lands in a corpus where most of the 857 Infrastructure stories focus on project delivery rather than long-term operational security, so this piece helps fill a relative gap around lifecycle safety thinking.
New Civil Engineer’s recent webinars on BIM, CDEs and digital handover suggest that future infrastructure safety – including physical security solutions from firms like ATG Access – will increasingly depend on how well asset data is structured and transferred at project close-out.
With New Civil Engineer also running early careers challenges and awards, the institutional memory from a company founded in 1991 is likely to influence how younger engineers in these programmes think about integrating security-by-design into mainstream project workflows.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
