Quote:
Originally Posted by A930Rocket
When we were little kids, we used to position ourselves on either side of the neighborhood street. We would all pretend we were pulling a rope across the road and struggling to keep it tight. I don’t recall that anybody fell for it.��
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"Never wage war with children that possess the means".
This was 48 years ago.
We had a speeding problem on my street when I was a kid about 8 or 9. People were hauling about 60 mph down our narrow street as a short cut when the posted speed was 20mph. It was not uncommon back then to have kids playing outside at 9PM.
We made our own cutouts. At night with people advertisements we grabbed from the local market trash bin. Just a flat piece of cardboard. We cut them out and short to kid height (3 feet or so). We used kite string one end tied to a tree and the other we would pull on when a car was in proximity. Both sides of the street were lined with parked cars so you could not swerve to avoid the inevitible. It was a true gauntlet.
Pull quickly and suddenly a little carboard person appears in your headlamps in front of you. On impact the string would break and cardboard cutout would go under or over the offending vehicle. That was a SPECTACLE. No time to pump the brakes.
You could hear both men and women scream if the windows were open like a horror movie. Complete colonic expulsion.
The behavioral effect on motor vehicle operation was outstanding. It stopped the speeding problem over one summer.
We thought we got caught one night and were in big trouble. One of the neighbors about 5 houses down was an older LAPD Homicide Detective and would walk his dog at night. We didnt see him but he saw what we were doing and when one of the drivers hit the cutout he locked his brakes up, jumped out and while he was checking under the car my neighbor confronted him, pulled his badge and berated the driver to tears.
We thought about a grapefruit on a string pulled taught but that might have broken a windshield or worse. The grapefruit was ruled out since real kinetics was off the table and my house was the only one with a grapefruit tree.
Evidently at the time some of the parents on the block knew about what we were doing and since it solved a problem they just let it go. I'm sure some were lurking in the shadows catching a front row visual that we were unaware of.
Funny thing is the Police use cutouts everywhere now. How many of you have been nailed on radar by a realistic cop cutout? I remember the fully uniformed police mannequin on the police motorcycle on Laurel Canyon south of Mulholland. I think Coldwater had one also in somebodies driveway. They gave drivers strokes.