Scare-cars
Tom Vanderbilt's recent book "Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do" highlights some of the paradoxes involved in trying to "calm" traffic. Solutions involving signs and engineering often backfire, for example: In the case of speed bumps, annoyed drivers will speed up between the humps to make up lost time. Engineers combat this by packing the bumps tightly, but speeders often just switch over to a nearby alternate route. And the more stop signs in a small town, the more people blow through them.
One positive finding from traffic research is that the more "human" a driving environment appears to be -- the more that drivers are made aware that there are other people out there depending on the drivers' attentiveness (and the less people behind the wheel think that stop lights, speed limits, and lane markings will do their work for them, automatically) -- the more sensibly people drive.
Residents of a small English town, Lockeridge, appear to have figured this out on their own. Tired of drivers using their roads as shortcuts between major arteries -- while keeping up arterial speeds -- they put "scare-cars" in key locations: mannequins placed on the side of the roads to catch the attention of drivers. One looks like a father and daughter, in matching blue sweatshirts, playfully running near a school -- just possibly into the street! A figure in an orange safety vest, with binoculars, could be a maintenance worker, a cop monitoring drivers, or just a hyper-cautious bird-watcher. In any case, you're likely to touch the brakes. Then there's Sponge-Bob, who pops up from behind two rocks as if to say hello.
The scare-cars are designed to snap speeders out of their cocooned haze -- their sat-nav complacency -- and observers say it works. Best of all, there's no need to wait for someone to get run over before more official measures are put into place, which is the usual pattern.
Via How We Drive and Cognitive Edge. Photographs by Dave Snowden, of Cognitive Edge, reproduced under the terms of a Creative Commons license.).
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There are also "Little Green Men," which are child-shaped "slow down" signs sold in various toy stores. There are a few in my neighborhood, and I *always* notice them.
These are stupid, just like birds and scarecrows, people will get used to them and expect them, then one day a real kid will be there and the driver wont recognise it,.
As well as the vast number of speed cameras in the UK: http://www.speedcamerasuk.com/locationsdatabase.htm
most drivers are constantly on the lookout for 'hidden' mobile speed traps and tend to get paranoid when seeing something different.
A coyote decoy is often used to scare geese but like these scare cars they are useless after a few viewings.
And I assume that even a few more actual, live cyclists using the roads (which at least in the U.S. were historically built for cyclists as much as cars) would also help calm traffic.
good way to hit a real person when your distracted and looking at a fake person.
After a while people get pissed and just steal these things and toss them in the woods. Like those stupid green men.
Yeah... this is brilliant. Wait until drivers are desensitized to the dummies on the side of the road and then when its a REAL father and daughter going into the street, they're going to get run over... FAIL.
I always notice them as well...but i always thought they were turtles...
After a while this could desensitize speeders (such as myself) to actual pedestrians just like more stop signs make the stop sign taken less seriously.
I love quotes like this one: "After a while this could desensitize speeders (such as myself) to actual pedestrians just like more stop signs make the stop sign taken less seriously." - Yeah, that's the spirit. Don't bother to take responsibility for your own actions...blame somebody or something else!
"Your honor, really it wasn't my fault. How was I supposed to know that person was real, when I have been so desensitized by other attempts to get me to slow down?"
If you want people to slow down in a neighborhood try this - set up a sprikler so that some of the water goes into the street. Guaranteed t make people slow down, almost every time.
Try it!
After reading the article, I thought it was a good idea until I saw the pics and how half-fast (pun intended) they looked.
A parked retired police car with thick window tint should do the trick.
This is how I would approach these scare-cars, in order of appearance:
1. Perfect targets to drive by and whack with a baseball bat while hanging out the passenger side window.
2. Free pair of decent binoculars.
3. Cool decoration for my apartment.
It boggles my mind that someone out there believes this will solve any sort of problem at all. The first time you see one, maybe you decrease speed by 5 mph to be safe. The next time you see it, increase speed by 10mph to spite the idiots who put them out there to begin with.
This blogger might want to review your comment before posting it.
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