Canada Paints Roads with Illusions of Vehicular Homocide and Children

Let’s say that you’re Canadian and a couple of your pals have come over to visit, bringing with them a deego of beasters to smoke you oot with.  You’re feasting on some poutine, but the one thing that they didn’t bring was the booze.  What the fuck is that aboot?!  You could be getting pissed.  You should jersey these hosers for not grabbing a couple of forty pounders or a two-four before coming over.  You collect some loonies from these fools and head out to pick up some alcohol.  The store is only a few clicks away, so you put your runners to the metal and rock out to the radio jams until your toque falls off.  “Sheena is A Punk Rocker” by the Ramones is blasting through the stereo of your red semi truck and you’re so into it that you don’t notice the little boy running through a meadow and chasing his kite into the middle of the street.  Oh shit!  You try to react, but you can’t deke the kid until its too late!  “…. what?  Nothing happened?  Oh beauty!  It’s just an illusion, drawn out confusion style like that guy with all the 3-dimensional chalk images, of internet fame.”  Whew!  That’s a relief, but it’s still kind of a fucked up hoax.  “No fair… no fair…

No.. but, seriously… Canada has started a campaign to help prevent reckless driving and the pedestrian casualties that they can be responsible for.  To “help” in making such reductions in tragedy a reality, an illusion of a young child has been placed in the road to frighten the shit out of people bring awareness.  There’s a claim that it’s been “carefully tested“, but it still seems a little questionable and as if it may actually have the potential to create more damage than it prevents.

Here’s are the details accompanying it’s promotion:

Marking the back to school term, Preventable together with BCAA Traffic Safety Foundation and the District of West Vancouver have launched an optical illusion geared to making drivers slow down at high-risk intersections.

The optical illusion of an illustrated girl chasing a ball has been placed on the road northbound at 22nd street in West Vancouver. There are signs leading up to it saying “you’re probably not expecting kids to run out on the road” to prepare drivers. The installation is meant to draw attention to the risk of children running into the street and was carefully tested before being put in place. It is in place for a few days only and is being monitored as a pilot to ensure pedestrian and driver safety are not risked. The illusion rises up gradually from about 100 feet away as not to surprise drivers, and it fades away by the time a driver approaches.

Now, watch the video of the illusion in effect:

Regardless of how much you test it and what you “discover” there is at least a potential for danger with something like this.  At one point or another, somebody is going to drive over that thing high or drunk on something and it’s gonna register in their minds a little fucky.  I’m not convinced that creating images of children that you are expected to drive over is necessarily the best method to help train people NOT to drive over little girls with toys.  This would likely prove especially true, if you swerved to avoid it the first time that you saw one and it forced you to roll your car.  It’s probably not too safe to have people pulled over to the side of the road trying to inspect what they had just encountered, either.  This is the type of shit that people call in, claiming that some kind of “vandalism” or “street art” nearly caused them to front end their Aries K into a creek.  If you really think about it, by placing multiple campaigns like this out there , you would probably become more likely to encounter one of these fake kids in the street than a real one.  After a while, that real kid that gets laid out will be a simple result of the toddler who cried, “Please don’t run over my oblivious and unattended little torso” too many times.

If you want to find out more about this campaign, go to http://www.preventable.ca

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