We’re doing something completely different compared to our campaign last year to raise awareness about more kids being on the roads this first week back at school. In fact, our latest campaign is a Canadian first.
Preventable, BCAA Traffic Safety Foundation, and the District of West Vancouver have launched a 3D illusion geared to make drivers slow down at high-risk intersections.
If you’ve read the Vancouver Sun, Province, or National Post articles or heard interviews on Vancouver radio and TV programs about the illusion, you’d know that drivers near 22nd street in West Vancouver will be confronted with what seems like a young girl running after a ball in front of their vehicle. In reality, it’s a decal on the pavement that looks like a real person. Signage near the 3D image reads “You’re probably not expecting kids to run out on the road.”
The police, traffic engineers, parents, and The Community will be monitoring traffic around this 3D illusion to see if there is any change to driver safety and the safety of children in the area.
The aim of such attention-grabbing tactics is to change the attitudes of drivers around schools.
David Dunne, Director of the Traffic Safety Foundation and spokesperson for Preventable, tells us that
“Most child pedestrian-related injuries occur in September and October, followed by May and June. Children aged 5 to 14 years are [at] the greatest risk for pedestrian-related fatalities.”
Combine this info with Dunne’s following facts, and it becomes evident that change is needed to reduce injuries.
• The most frequently reported child pedestrian action that results in injury or death is crossing at an intersection followed by running onto the road.
• Approximately 25 children visit the BC Children’s emergency department each day due to a preventable injury, including traffic safety injuries.
• At least 1 person dies each day due to motor vehicle crashes in BC.
According to Dunne, the reasons for why child pedestrian injuries happen around schools are many:
“The biggest risk to children in school zones are parents who continue to make U-turns, stop in no-stopping zones, back up into crosswalks, roll through stop signs, ignore the school safety patrollers, let their children out from the driver’s side and into oncoming traffic, and speed.”
Now it’s your chance to join the conversation on motor vehicle safety around schools.
What attitudes have you observed around schools involving vehicles and children? How do you think dangerous practices can be changed to make our schools and school grounds less injury prone?
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On Friday, September 3rd, 2010 Chris wrote:
I read in the Sun about the campaign you plan to run with the 3-D image. Please consider that you may actually put children in danger with this. If Drivers see it once it works but the next time they may mistake an actual child as a 3D image and not stop. It is not a high risk but I see it as a risk. Be careful.
Chris
To which I replied on the same day:
Chris, thank you for the comment. We assure you that The Community takes the safety of children very seriously. The police, traffic engineers, parents, and The Community will be monitoring traffic around these 3D illusions to see if there is any positive or negative change to driver safety and the safety of children in the area.
The effect is very ‘cool’, but I have to add my voice to a chorus of others on various forums that there are significant risks to this method.
After seeing the video I would agree the ‘panic swerve into pedestrians’ scenario is unlikely (unless the driver is moving at unsafe speeds already, in which case this image really would pose an added threat to bystanders).
More likely is just the desensitization that I think would naturally occur in people who have encountered this ‘little girl’ hundreds of times in the past.
At that ‘magic’ distance of 100 feet or so a person may have conditioned themselves subconciously *not* to react in that split second that could mean the difference between life and death.
I just can’t see how desensitization would not occur if these images become more prevalent. You’d think people would slow down for *any* visual cue like that, but human nature being what it is…
Used rarely in isolated locations, maybe it could work temporarily. But for the expense and effort (of repainting vandalized images, if nothing else), I’m a little dubious.
It is a neat effect tho :)
The more I think about this, the more I think the “kidbump” is a bad idea on the whole.
You’re providing drivers with an optical illusion that will trip up our mental processing a little bit in hopes of drivers slowing down.
This only works once, then, drivers know it’s a trick, and a large percentage of users will ignore it. Worse yet, some drivers may focus extra attention to the image, watching to ensure it really isn’t a kid, and NOT where they are supposed to be.
Now you have drivers used to paintings of kids on the road that jump out at them at certain distances, drivers that are used to having the idea of their car running over paintings of kids, be a normal occurrence.
Hi from Australia. Interesting idea. What about a driver swerving out of control? I would hate to see a bunch of real children get run over on a a footpath because a driver was desperately trying to avoid an image.
any idiot who does not slow down when they see an image of a child or a real child needs their licence taken away…ANY OBSTACLE SEEN ON THE ROAD YOU MUST SLOW DOWN.
Our city just installed speed bumps in our neighbor hood, did no good….. this may be an answer in Anetlope, Ca
It’s an interesting concept. One thing I did find odd about the video though – why is the ‘illusion’ after the crosswalk? Doesn’t that draw attention to an area beyond the very part of the road on which the driver should be focusing?
This illusion seems very dangerous.
I can see a driver swerving to avoid the fake child and hitting an actual oncoming vehicle or plowing onto a sidewalk.
It is almost certain to happen.
In our community here in Italy, local officials had to remove signs that looked like real deer from the sides of a nearby road, because the signs *caused* accidents, with several incidents of people slamming their brakes on when they saw them. If anything, this 3D image of a child on the road is even worse. A profoundly bad, ill-conceived idea that warrants further consideration before even considering a week-long trial.
Wow where to begin!? I’ve been part of the road and highway safety business nearly all my life as it’s a family business for us. I’m not claiming to be an expert but this is a bad idea on so many levels. First, I noticed you’ve put the decal just after a cross walk. I’m certain that drivers experiencing the decal for the first time will have their attention drawn to the decal rather than the cross walk. This potentially will cause incidents with pedestrians in the cross walk. I’ve also noticed that in the video the vehicle seems to be traveling very slowly. I noticed that this is a school zone and further identified the school as being Pauline-Johnson. I was able to locate an interactive street view of the roads in that area. All approaches to the decal are listed as 30km/h. This means that the driver has a long time to distance ratio for the stimuli to cause comprehension and reaction. If a driver comes up on this decal at a higher speed the driver will have less time to comprehend the decal and react to it. I realize that at a higher rate of speed the driver is breaking the law but I must assume that most cases where a pedestrian child is hit the drivers are not respecting the speed limits. In such a situation where a driver is traveling at twice your video’s speed, lets guess at about 60km/h, the driver has half the time to comprehend and react. This will likely cause the drivers to do a hard brake or swerve before the driver can acknowledge that they’re viewing a decal and not a real child. I’ve seen a highway safety product similar to this. In this case though the issue was deer crossing the roadway. So the local government bought life like cardboard cutouts of deer, moose and elk and installed them at various points along the roadway. Initially they were installed after blind curves and over the tops of hills always as if they were about to leave the woods and cross into the roadway on the same side as oncoming traffic. This caused a lot of dangerous reactions from drivers. I can’t attest to any accidents being cause because I’ve not see the study yet but the first time I saw them I locked up my brakes. After a large number of complaints and I would imagine the concern of potentially deadly accidents they change the positioning of the cut-outs. They placed them so that it appeared the deer had already crossed the road and was heading into the woods on the opposite side of the road as the on coming traffic. I would think this might be a good idea for you all to consider as well. Furthermore, as with the deer/moose/elk cut-outs the initial stimulus wears off because the driver eventually anticipates the stimulus. For example, take a typical drive to work in the morning. The first several times a driver takes their daily route to work they can describe things they’ve noticed along the route. As time goes by the descriptions become less and less detailed until the point where the driver might remember leaving for work making the occasional turn or merge with traffic and then arriving to work with no other detail. As if they’d driven on autopilot which in fact they were. On the other hand if the driver is introduced to an unexpected stimuli, new work zone, building, accident, banner, etc., etc., the brain kicks out of zombie/auto pilot mode and pays attention. I’m sure this is your desired effect with this decal. I noticed that you’ve placed this decal in-front of the Pauline-Johnson French Immersion (K-7) School. I also notice that the school is in a residential area. This means that a majority of drivers passing through this area will be parents dropping off students, teachers and school staff, and people living in the immediate vicinity. These people will quickly become desensitized to the decal and as this represents a majority of your traffic it’s likely they are the drivers most likely to encounter a child in the road. A driver inexperienced to this area will be stimulated merely with the school zone signing. What you need to install is something that changes frequently to draw attention of the brain of the zombie driver. I’d recommend installing a LED School Zone signs with a drivers speed display below it. This type of signing accomplishes two things: 1) wakes up the auto-pilot/zombie driver because the sign has a moving component (changing speed read-out) that is only activated as the driver approaches and changes with the driver as he/she slows down so it’s a new stimuli each time; 2) brings to the drivers attention their speed without the need to look down at the speedometer. While I applaud your efforts to increase awareness of drivers and change up the scenery to stimulate “zombie” drivers this should have been thought through a little more prior to testing.
Bad bad bad idea. Seriously BAD. First time, whow, second time cool look at that (then they aren’t paying attention to what they should be), third time, oh it’s just a picture, bang they hit a real kid. It’s more of a distraction.
Ridiculous idea. Once you condition people to know it’s a picture – then what?
I know, same comments as everyone else – but surely someone at prevetable.ca had these very same thoughts. How did this pass a committee?
[...] It’s getting a crazy amount of attention. Not only is it being reported across BC and Canada, news outlets around the world are picking up the story as [...]
[...] It’s getting a crazy amount of attention. Not only is it being reported across BC and Canada, news outlets around the world are picking up the story as [...]
Why not just teach our children not to play on busy streets? Better yet why not supervise any children that are playing outside its not like getting hit by cars is the only danger they face if left alone unsupervised outside the house
On the railway in the UK, drivers have to press a button if they go past a yellow signal to show they are aware the next signal will be red. However, since the volume of traffic is so high, nearly all signals are yellow rather than green and the button press becomes habitual; the drivers learn not to slow down because the next signal will turn yellow by the time they get there.
Surely it’s obvious that making drivers run over the image of a child will desensitise them?
This is a bad, bad idea and trials should be stopped.
[...] Shifting Attitudes with Illusions: anamorphosis of a little girl playing ball in the street, designed to increase safety on Vancouver roads. [...]
[...] non-sensically in a parking garage. The image above is from the actual school, and was found on the preventable.ca website, which also shows a illustrative video of the [...]
So, if I run down a child in this area, can my defense be “I thought it was a decal”?
Lets stop messing around and start giving out tickets! I see lots of signs saying “increased fines…” but never any action. The only way to get people to slow down is to make it hurt their pocket books!
[...] Preventable Injuries, BCAA Traffic Safety Foundation and the District of West Vancouver painted a 3D optical illusion in the street of a girl chasing a ball in order to make drivers slow down. The optical illusion of an illustrated girl chasing a ball has [...]
Hi,
can I buy those images and apply them to roads where I think they will have a positive effect on the drivers behaviour?
I know a road (in Germany) where this is really necessary (and unrisky for innocent bystanders) because
1. speed limit is exceeded by a factor of 2-3
2. drivers do not keep safety distance
3. only ~10 pedestrians during the day
Besides, a massive use of radar control, video surveillance and fines (thinking about getting 100% of offenders for a week) would also have a positive impact. Getting fined for the same thing five or ten times might make you think.
Just start enforcing the goddamn traffic laws. Drivers who don’t slow down in school zones, who don’t stop at red lights or occupied crosswalks (that includes cyclists) – need to be FINED until it becomes too expensive to continue to violate the law.
[...] Source 1 2 [...]
Isn’t this trial more likely to temporarily increase traffic in a school zone, as people made aware of this story now want to go there and try it out for themselves?
This idea might be counter-effective when automatic pedestrian brake systems are considered. Such driver assistence systems, which are currently under research/development at various car manufacturers could trigger false interventions, especially if the recognition of pedestrians is based on monocular vision.
[...] this under ‘might potentially backfire’. A new Canadian campaign is using 3D road decals that depict children playing on roads, making drivers all the more careful. Or it could just make [...]
[...] 3D illusion rises up gradually from about 100 feet away and fades away by the time a driver approaches. [more info] [...]
I would get a chock – if i suddenly noticed it. Perhaps even stand on the brake. It could be dangerous if someone is driving closely behind me.
After a few times the effect would be gone.
Also I completely agree: After having been taught that i shouldnt instinctively react to a child on the road – the reaction with a real child might be slower – since I would have learned that I should identify if its an illusion first.
Its simple animal psychology – noone is beyond that when they are into the routine driving mode.
[...] You’ve probably already seen 44 Amazing Julian Beever’s 3D Pavement Drawings, but this time preventable, BCAA Traffic Safety Foundation, and the District of West Vancouver have launched a 3D illusion for practical reasons - to make drivers slow down at high-risk intersections[1]. [...]
Pancake Patty is not a good idea. Some Lawyer will have a field day with this one.
I’ve notice dual speedbumps usually do the trick. If you don’t slow down you’ll damage your car. If it’s some punk – he/she will damage their parents car.
I think many people are missing the intent here; the idea is to raise peoples awareness. This is not the same as a speed bump or traffic sign! From what I have read on this initiative, it is already having the desired affect – people are talking/thinking about childrens safety during a time of year where incidents are at the highest. The best deterent is being a careful responsible driver and setting an example for your own children! Each time you speed to drop your kids off at school, then ignore the crossing guards, and park in the crosswalk, you are teaching them that the laws do not apply if you are “in a hurry”.
Can I acquire one of these for our street