Mixed reviews for MOTU’s snarky new pedestrian safety campaign

“A driver hits a pedestrian once every five hours in the city of Philadelphia,” says Ema Yamamoto, of the Mayor’s office of Transportation and Utilities.

Standing at the corner of Cecil B. Moore and Broad Street this morning, Yamamoto, the project manager for the city’s pedestrian education and enforcement program, introduced MOTU’s new public safety ad campaign, “It’s Road Safety, Not Rocket Science” that’s meant to educate motorists, and pedestrians, and cyclists about the rules of the road.

“In 2013 alone we saw more than 1800 pedestrians hit by drivers,” she said, “These are shocking statistics. Injuries and fatalities caused by traffic crashes are not mundane, and they should not be an acceptable part of our lives here in Philadelphia.”

The intersection of Cecil B. Moore and Broad was selected for a reason: between 2008 and 2013, 13 pedestrians were hit by cars there. And it sits within one of three zones the city has identified as high-crash corridors that they’re targeting for stepped-up road user education and enforcement: Broad Street from Race to Lehigh,  Market Street from 5th to 22nd, and the area around the Olney transportation center. 

Check out Azavea’s map of pedestrian crash locations between 2008 and 2013, and click on the dots to see how many pedestrians were hit there, and read our analysis of the city’s most dangerous intersections:

PennDOT released a report this week that found traffic fatalities falling to a new low statewide, but rising 9% in Philadelphia.

“Since 2001, pedestrian crashes have fallen by 25% statewide,” said Brad Rudolph, safety press officer for PennDOT’s District 6 office, “but here in Philadelphia we’ve seen a spike in those numbers in recent years.”

To combat this trend, in the spring of 2014, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration awarded PennDOT and the City of Philadelphia a two-year “Pedestrian Focus Cities” grant to conduct a public education campaign aimed at reducing pedestrian crashes and fatalities across the city.

Since Christine Fisher covered the campaign when it was first announced in 2013, MOTU has released more details about the enforcement and education components of the campaign.

Police have been issuing warnings to pedestrians, and warnings and citations to motorists, in the high-crash corridors since October. Failure to yield citations are $50.

Also, by now you’ve probably seen some of the snark-laden campaign posters bearing common-sense road safety tips that are destined for over 1,100 buses, trolleys, and transit shelters throughout the city. If not, you can check some of them out on the website, along with some new videos produced for the campaign.

You may have guessed from the branding that PennDOT and MOTU’s goal is to reach 18-34 year olds. There’s a reason for that: people in this age group are most frequently the victims and the perpetrators of pedestrian crashes.

“They make up 40% of the drivers who hit pedestrians and 30% of the pedestrians who are hit by drivers,” says Yamamoto.

Interestingly, all of the new videos are focused on pedestrians’ bad habits, not motorists’. And that emphasis on pedestrians has been causing some consternation about the campaign on urbanist Twitter. 

Local transportation planner Victoria Harris has been one of the campaign’s most vocal critics on social media, arguing that the framing unhelpfully draws an equivalence of culpability between motorists and pedestrians.

“The campaign is unfortunate,” she wrote in an email, “It misses the real reason we have safety issues in traffic. Certainly everybody is responsible for paying attention to their surroundings. But a car can kill people. Drivers should be a million times more the focus of this campaign because a driver bears the responsibility for not killing people. Distraction is a problem, yes, but in Philadelphia more people are hit by aggressive drivers than distracted ones.”