Cardboard Kids Slow Traffic

I remember one April Fools day a while back, a man in Geraldton I think, up north anyway, made a cardboard speed camera and stuck it on the side of the road. It was so convincing, everyone slowed down, even a policeman on his way to work.
There was also another couple who made their letterbox to look like a speed camera and that is also very convincing. A few people sought to complain to the cops about the fake cameras but the cops seemed to be of the opinion that if it made people slow down, it can only be a good thing.

Oh I like this. Great practical joke.

They did this round my way. I got pissed off with the dirty trick though and decided to run them all down - to make a point - and one of them turned out to be a real child. It was an unbelievably horrific experience, and you can imagine my guilt - it wasn't even my car and it got a really nasty dent on the bumper. Took ages to get all the bits out of the tyre treads, too.

outeast,
That is a horrible comment! You should be ashamed of making it!

....almost as ashamed I am at laughing my ass off at it.

In other words he's purposely desensitizing drivers to the image of a child at the side of the road. After a few days the drivers will realize what they're seeing and ignore it. Then when it does turn out to be a real child (especially if it's his child) they won't bother slowing down at all.

Brilliant logic here.

Oh,and as for the traffic cones and detour signs, a neighborhood here had a problem with heavy traffic. Their road was the main shortcut bypassing the busier main road, so they blocked it with wooden sawhorses. Much hilarity ensued as drivers got out of their cars to move the sawhorses, homeowners fought them to put them back, the police came and took them away for being illegal obstructions to traffic, homeowners bought more and put them back.

Such a happy neighborhood.

Here in the NorthCentral Pennsylvania mountains, many of our roads are still unpaved dirt, and it's quite regular to see signs along these roads peppered with shotgun pellets and the like. It's also been custom for some of the residents to decorate their lawns with plywood cutouts of bears, babies and old ladies bending over to work in the garden. Many of these, too, have bulletholes. If they should place these cardboard cutouts around here, their lawnlife would be very short indeed. We regularly keep our children inside during deer season, for fear of them being mistaken for a doe or buck. I personally don't have a problem with anyone shooting at my likeness; most people who hate me are gunning for the real thing, so, as such, I stay inside until the sun goes down

Then, of course, there were the many times various police agencies placed a ploice car along the road, or in a median, with a dummy in the car wearing a police uniform. That normally slows people down. And Charybdis, someone standing around with an AK-47 or a shotgun, or a LAW or whatever can do wonders to slow traffic down. Just be careful what you shoot. (A shotgun might be best, it's easy to get and has no rifling to prove you did it.)

This doesn't work with real children. People fly up and down my street when when the neighbor children are playing outside

A couple of old stories I've read:

A man slowed traffic past his property to a crawl by putting up a sign saying "Danger, Nudist Camp Crossing."

Another man was annoyed with trespassers on his land and posted this sign: "DANGER! RADIATION HAZARD TO UNPROTECTED PERSONNEL." It worked, even scared the hell out of his neighbors. Eventually an inspector from the Atomic Energy Commission came up to find out what was going. "It's really simple," said the homeowner. "If you walk on my property without clothes on, you'll get a sunburn."

We tried it for a while. At first it worked well, but eventually a bunch of cardboard predators started showing up.