Niche Biz: Cardboard Kids
A family in West Salem, Ohio, is using life-sized cardboard children placed near oncoming traffic to slow speeders in their neighborhood.
Mike Wood and his wife said their homemade cutout children make them feel uneasy at times because they look so real but said they force motorists to slow down.
“First when (motorists) saw them, it scared them that the kids were so close to the road,” Woods said. “And they thought why are they letting their kids play next to the road like that?”
The Woods family house is on the fringe of town so many drivers have a tough time slowing down to 35 mph.
Some motorists have stopped after realizing the children were not real.
“A man stopped here a couple of weeks ago and bought one because traffic is going by his house so fast,” Wood said. “It had such an effect on him, he wanted to put one in his front yard to slow the traffic down going past his house.”
Wood said his initial idea to create the cardboard children was not to slow down speeders but to start selling the posters to their grandparents.
Wood said he is now getting calls from police departments and neighborhood associations across the country. He is selling the cardboard kids on his web site.
Photo by Local6.com.
Tonya Pruitt on August 31st, 2007 5:01 pm
I absolutely LOVE this idea. I am proud to know these people are doing this.. that way when a real child is out there the traffic will slow down.
Congrats to these folks for this ingenius idea!
capcity on September 3rd, 2007 11:11 pm
that idea would never work in major cities…in NYC REAL kids get hit often enough….no cardboard kid is going to slow ANYthing down…..
Mark on October 21st, 2007 6:35 am
As long as people don’t catch on to too many of these cardboard kids and then they just start screaming by…
And then when there is a real kid by the side of the road…
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