‘Fake’ roadside memorial set up with busted kid’s bike, photo to slow down high-speed drivers: ‘Slamming on the brakes’
Warning! Children at play.
A Utah resident put together a “fake” memorial using a mangled bicycle, prayer candles, flowers, and a “child’s” photo in hopes of slowing down speeding motorists on a potentially dangerous stretch of highway near his home.
David Smith, the creator of the mock shrine in Murray, a neighborhood in Salt Lake City, told Fox 13 he sees cars doing “60 miles an hour, just double the speed limit” on the road every day and hopes to avoid a terrible tragedy.
“I don’t want to wait ’til I’m putting out a picture of a kid that I know,” Smith told the outlet. “So we went ahead and put this out there to try and slow people down a little bit.”
Smith said he used a photo of his friend as a child — who is alive and in her 40s — and even ran over the kid-size bike in his own driveway to form the hard-hitting props for what he called a kind of “art piece.”
And the makeshift shrine appears to be working, according to Smith and a fellow neighbor.
“From the moment that we put it out, we see people slamming on the brakes where they used to pump on the gas,” he told the outlet.
Charles Andrews, who lives across the street from the “art piece,” said that he noticed cars slowing down even before discovering the shrine was fake and believes it’s a “clever idea.”
“It helps you reflect on people who have experienced loss, and you don’t want to put someone in that way,” Andrews told the outlet.
Smith understands the crude “memorial” might leave some feeling uneasy once they discover it’s a fake, but says it’s worth it to keep the neighborhood safe.
“I can accept that there’s a bad feeling associated with this,” Smith explained.
“I probably have the worst feeling because I’m the one who had to make it, and I’m the one who has to have it in front of my house, and I don’t want that.”
Nevertheless, the clever Salt Lake City resident says he has no plans to take down the shrine and will continue maintaining it.
“We’re going to keep it going to try and keep that memory out there for people, that we’re all community here and everyone needs to look out for each other,” he told the outlet.
“I really don’t want your kid to be next.”
In 2022, there were over 42,000 traffic-related fatalities across the US, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Over 3% of those fatalities involved children 14 and younger.
That same year, there were over 1,100 bicyclists killed in traffic-related incidents, with about 5% of the fatalities being children 14 and younger.
An average of 3 children lost their lives, and an estimated 429 children were injured daily in traffic crashes in 2022.
