The first time I saw this ad I thought my eyes and ears were deceiving me. But no, there it is: a young woman holding a cellphone toward the camera as "nüvifone" maker Garmin beckons viewers to "communicate while navigating."

"With my nüvifone, I can take calls from my friends while I'm driving to them," she says as she's shown piloting an SUV with two passengers, one of whom accepts an incoming call on a phone mounted to the windshield. (Note to Garmin: Hands-free is not brain-free.)

Maybe the most egregious aspect is the "Do not drive while distracted" disclaimer -- which pops up as the young woman is depicted driving while distracted.

Toyota wants you to know that it's here for you. And not just as a car maker, as the company explains in this spot, ironically entitled "Community."

Like GM before them, Toyota wants to make sure you realize just how much their company means to you. Here's our voice-over:

"We acknowledge you are coming to despise automobiles, but your nation depends on our industry for so many jobs that, even if we only manufactured cardboard cut-out cars that you had to carry down your few remaining walkable Main Streets, you'd still need us, America."

Accompanying the ad is the aggressively cloying and patently manipulative "Beyond Cars" web site -- which if nothing else should serve as an irresistible culture-jamming target. What do we see, Toyota? For starters, we see a world where your product doesn't kill people.

Just in case I thoroughly depressed our cyclist readers with the overview of the timeline for the Draft Bike Plan, I wanted to provide some inspiration in the form of some funny and inspiring bike commercials from the Netherlands.  H/t to Dave Feucht of the Streetsblog.net discussion group.

Fortunately, since I can't speak Dutch, the good people at Bike Forums are a couple of years ahead of me in translating.  What follows is the rough translation of the ad above.  After the jump are three more advertisements, two of them don't need a translation, but below the fourth advertisement is another translation.  All translations by Nicodemus at Bike Forums.

The translation from above:

(macho key posing)
announcement: attention: driver of a blue Saab... you forgot your parking brake.

(guy on left chuckles)

announcement: attention: the blue Saab went into the yellow Lotus

(guy on left cringes)

Cyclist at the back walks out smiling.

Zonder ongemakken? (without inconveniences?)
Pak de fiets! (take the bike!)

The first phase is understanding.

And then you must take the initiative yourself.

And if he can do it himself, we let him loose.

Autoslavery is a serious problem

We must help these people.

Yeah, someone has to sit in traffic

Today was International Walk to School Day, and according to this Audi commercial, if you participated you're a big loser.

In all seriousness, this has to be one of the most obnoxious spots we've featured on Streetsblog. Basically, per Audi: If you take transit, you're a glutton for punishment; if you ride a bike, you're a hapless weenie.

But Audi owners? They're just like you: "trying to do their part" for the environment. Only they do it by driving a $30,000, fossil fuel-burning, CO2-emitting private automobile. Though it is "clean diesel" -- you can pretty much drink that stuff, right?

So, a lot of you didn't like the Emmy Award Winning P.S.A. put out by LADOT in 2008 which showed a young girl getting hit by a speeding car because it put too much of the blame on the girl and not enough on the driver.  I thought it was a powerful piece, maybe because as an expectant father any image of a child being mauled by a vehicle is going to get my attention, and many commenters thought it was a missed opportunity to make a point about dangerous driving.

Fair enough.

But to be fair to LADOT, yesterday I was only covering the advertisement that won the Emmy.  Above, is a companion announcement focusing only on the driver's role in the crash.  If I were an Emmy voter, I would have voted for yesterday's featured ad over this one because the voice-over from the driver in today's sounds a little off to me:

My God!  How did this happen?  As a child, I was always in a hurry.  As I got older, I was always distracted.   And in the next second, I'll kill a little girl.

Then, the same film of a young girl in a pink soccer uniform getting slammed into by the driver is shown before the voice changes to another man, presumably one of the police on the scene.

Good driving behavior starts at an early age.  Traffic safety is everybody's responsibility.  Watch the road.

Given how we've mocked LADOT's previous Emmy Award Winning P.S.A., you might think this headline was sarcastic, but it's not.

The above Public Service Announcement, a surprisingly graphic advertisement that delivers a powerful message that no matter who is legally "at fault" drivers need to watch the road carefully or they could end up with blood on their hands. For pedestrians, the advertisement delivers a warning to look both ways, after all they're the ones who's lives are literally on the line.  For drivers, a plea to drive more slowly when children are nearby.

The video starts with a warning that the video may not be suitable for minors before we hear a child introduce herself:

Hi, I'm eight years old.  In the next fifteen seconds, I'm going to get hit by a car.  Look both ways before crossing the street.  Drive with caution around kids.  Traffic safety is everyone's responsibility.  Watch.  The.  Road.

In the moments before the Watch the Road tagline, we see the young girl who narrates the commercial chase after a ball and get slammed by a passing car.  The windshield implodes before we refocus on a gurney wheel rolling past a shoe.

Given the "cartoon violence" we've seen in some past P.S.A.'s, this new advertisement shows an agency willing to take a risk to prove a point.  The only complaint I have is that this P.S.A. ran in 2008 and I never heard of it until today!  Memo to LADOT, get this one up and running again!

According to Movieline (via New York Mag), Jay Leno's new prime time show, set to debut on NBC in September, hasn't exactly been generating a lot of buzz. But since nothing says funny like a grisly hit-and-run, this promo, co-starring Fred Armisen of "Saturday Night Live," should turn things around.

Though I'm pretty sure Leno has never gotten as much as a chuckle from me, I understand where the humor is supposed to be here. Yet for some reason the laughter isn't coming.

Somewhere, though, I imagine pedestrian-hater Robert Novak is yukking it up.

Last week Streetsblog NYC's Brad Aaron posted what is sure to be a car-culture classic.  This three minute web-only commercial celebrates people that enjoy putting so much money into their cars' sound systems that they can terrorize entire neighborhoods by blasting music at ear-splitting volumes.  A lot of times when I'm writing an "Ad-nauseam" post I might exaggerate a part of the commercial to help make a larger point. 

If you watch this video, you'll see that now is not one of those times.

The people in the commercials are so proud of their cars, and their sound systems that they just want to share with the world whether they wish to receive this gift or not.  Witness one dude who smirks as he describes cranking it up when people in other cars look at him in disgust or my personal favorite the dude who's music is so loud he makes children on the streets cry and then shrugs at the parents because, "these things happen."

It sort of puts the rather modest sound systems that accompany some Midnight Ridazz and Critical Mass rides into perspective, doesn't it?

Even without the taglines at the top of the video, I'm guessing that you could figure out which city's P.S.A.'s were a strident warning to drivers to pay attention or they're going to kill someone and which city's compared cyclists to insects.

Over at NYC Streetsblog, Brad Aaron notes that these new advertisements "don't flinch" and remind drivers of the deadly consequences of even a moments negligence.  These ads, available here, will run through June, and are accompanied by direct mail pieces for city homeowners and drivers license holders.  Powerful stuff, but part of me wonders if the ad will also discourage people from taking up cycling.  I mean, that dude in the stretcher looks pretty messed up.  He's not bug-splatter or anything, but still...

And for anyone that thinks that it's unfair to pull an LADOT advertisement from a couple of years ago to compare to the hard-hitting stuff being put out in NYC, components of the "Laws of Physics" advertisement campaign are still being circulated today.  At Bike to Work Day, I received a yellow bracelet bearing the slogan "Ride right and stop at the light;" a slogan which still confuses me.  Are they telling me to ride correctly, or urging me to ride in the gutter?  Is the bracelet an example of bad grammar or bad advice?

In the interest of fairness, the LADOT has released advertisements encouraging safe driving, but even those rely on a somewhat cartoonish level of violence than the hard-hitting stuff being put out by our friends across the country.

Welcome to town Chase.  I'm super impressed you have been reading Streetsblog San Francisco and made an ad that reflects some of the knowledge you've acquired here. This is obviously a shout out to the car-free community. Might the admen understand the incredible cost savings of ditching the car for a bike, which can save you more than $9,000 every year in direct vehicle costs, not to mention the health savings from an active lifestyle and the peace of mind of contributing fewer greenhouse gases to a dangerously warming planet?

Or maybe this is an homage to the cyclist as hero, walking into the sunset after defeating the highway lobby in Washington and securing billions for transit in the re-authorization of the transportation act.

I'm not sure a big bank like that has the time in between taking billions of taxpayer bailouts and spending them on new airplanes to focus on the subtleties of the message they're sending to the more than one-hundred thousand San Franciscans who ride weekly.

What do you think, Streetsblog Nation?

(Editor's note: I left all the San Francisco references in the article because it reads better than my attempts to re-write it.  Rest assured, I've seen the same billboard here in L.A., although I didn't have my camera on me at the moment - D)

If there was ever a weekend that shows the fallacy of that kind of thinking, we just experienced it.  Below are four different pictures I took this weekend, and you tell me which one seems out-of-touch with the others and who are making the healthy decisions.  The four pictures are from Santa Monica Critical Mass, my Transit People team approaching our first transit stop at Wilshire and Fairfax, the Curry Festival celebrating Thai New Year and a shot of traffic on the 101 from the Wilton Boulevard Bridge.

And yes, the title for this post is from the song in Thrive from the Kaiser Permanente commercial that's been running since last summer.  I had the song stuck in my head all weekend, so it seemed appropriate.

Not so Good Frickin' Chickin'

As KFC's press release from March 25th notes, the company gave Louisville $3,000 to fill the potholes on the condition that they could stencil their logo on the new asphalt.

For more than half a century, KFC has "filled up" its fans with the Colonel's world famous, freshly prepared fried chicken. Today, in a marketing first, KFC is celebrating its continued dedication to freshness by launching a pilot infrastructure renewal program, becoming the first-ever corporate sponsor of freshly filled up potholes in up to five major cities across the U.S.

Barf.  I know a lot of Los Angeles streets are in a pretty awful way, but I pray Mayor Villaraigosa has not taken the Colonel up on his offer to fix our potholes.  Can you imagine the KFC logo dotting the "4th Street Bike Boulevard?"

The daily bombardment of advertising clutter we consume is already staggering, but now we've got sponsored pothole repair.  Do the admen think they're going to get any value out of the actual advertisements, or is this more of a Romain Mesnil (PG-13, maybe NSFW) stunt to get the attention of befuddled bloggers like this one? 

I imagine it would be pretty hard to see what's stenciled on the pothole from behind the wheel of a car, except by craning out the side window.  And we need more distracted drivers like we need a hole in the road.  Cyclists will certainly see the ads, as we look down at the streets for surface hazards, but I don't know how many of us would then crave fried chicken and reconstituted mashed potatoes.

"This program is a perfect example of that rare and optimal occurrence when a company can creatively market itself and help local governments and everyday Americans across the country," said Javier Benito, executive vice president of marketing and food innovation for KFC.  "Everyone could use a little help during these tough economic times and this initiative, like our commitment to provide affordable, freshly prepared chicken, is our way of carrying on Colonel Sanders' legacy."

I'm wondering what you smart Streetsblog readers opine about this development?  This strikes me as one of those awful ideas, like Pepsi sponsoring the Mir Space Station, that should crawl back down the dark hole whence it emerged. 

(Editor's note: Yeah, I "LA'd" that paragraph right below the pull quote.  In the original, it reads "Mayor Newsom and Market Street")

Amtrak is back on the air with a new commercial that uses children's toys to make the point that taking a long distance trip via train is far less stressful and more enjoyable than either driving or flying.  While I personally never lined all my matchboxes up in three parallel lines to create a traffic jam in the living room, I guess it's a sign of the times.

The bulk of the commercial shows young boys playing with their toy cars and planes while uttering adult complaints about life trapped in car culture and airports.  The last couple seconds of the ad show another youngster happily playing with a model train zooming around happier toys and proclaiming, "The train has now arrived."  From there, a narrator takes over, "The train has arrived indeed.  Amtrak, enjoy the journey."

Personally, I laughed at one kid glumly wondering, "I wonder how much gas costs today" as his toy car pulled into a plastic gas station.  The chortle was matched followed shortly by another going "An extra bag costs WHAT?!?" as his plastic figurine put on a shocked face.

Over the past year we've seen a spate of advertisements about how wonderful traveling by bicycle is compared to car from health insurance companies, banks and others; so it's nice to see train service promoting itself likewise.  We'll know we arrive when well meaning celebrities shoot commercials about turning off your lights on trains instead of airplanes.

h/t Carfree USA

The Ad Council has some new material in its campaign aimed at teenage drivers. In these spots, a comedic actor (Fred Willard in the ad above) in the backseat of a car with three teens cajoles or threatens the driver into slowing down or minding the road. The gist of the campaign, corresponding with the title of its web site, is "speak up or else" -- a name perhaps more suited to hard-hitting PSAs from overseas.

Here's a particularly egregious bit of "open road" propaganda from Mercedes. In this ad, currently airing in US markets, a new Benz GLK whips through the narrow streets of what appears to be a small European village, the inhabitants of which are reduced to slo-mo scenery.

As the narrator talks up the GLK's "smarter" performance features, considering the potential real-world outcomes, we're left to wonder if it might be smarter to avoid spreading the notion that drivers can wield your company's SUV with absolute control.

What if, instead of constantly relying on depictions of dangerous driving to sell cars, Mercedes and other auto-makers tried promoting utilitarian, responsible vehicle use? Now that would be brilliant.

On the heels of TA's report on the human toll of driving too fast, we bring you this highly disturbing ad from the UK Department for Transport's THINK! campaign, showing the difference a few miles-per-hour can make when it comes to avoiding a collision. Ideally material like this (Australia has a similar PSA) would be part of a required curriculum for American drivers -- not to mention police, prosecutors and lawmakers, who all too often seem just as unwilling to draw connections between the act of reckless driving and its consequences.

But we probably shouldn't expect to see this brand of reality TV on US airwaves anytime soon. Instead we get crash test dummy cartoons and spots like this new Acura commercial -- motorist-centric, sanitized and disconnected from the grim truth of auto-inflicted violence.

In the same vein, though cast in a more suburban context, is this equally disturbing Irish ad, offering a real-world antidote to ubiquitous car-maker "Just you and the open road" propaganda.

Video: anacarol80/YouTube

You know what's really funny?  Pedestrians getting hit by a bus in the crosswalk. 

At least that's what the marketing department at Jack in the Box apparently decided before putting together their "Hang in There Jack" campaign which kicked off with a bizarre commercial during the third quarter of the Super Bowl.  I can only imagine what friends and family of Gwendolyn Coleman thought if they were unfortunate enough to be watching the Super Bowl and paying attention to the commercials.

In the commercial, "Jack" is walking next to a random person, trying to sell Jack in the Box food, and steps into a crosswalk on "Hope Street" in what could very well be Downtown Los Angeles.  Because Jack is the only person who crosses the street, we're supposed to believe that he is so happy talking about fast food that he crosses against the signal without checking to see if traffic is coming.  Sure enough, what appears to be a Metro bus, just marked as an Express in the advertisement, slams into the cartoonish commercial personality sending his hat flying and his body sprawling.  The ad ends with a plea to find out how Jack is doing at the "Hang in There Jack" website.

I'm sure that if criticism of the advertisement makes the mainstream someone will explain that the campaign is designed to raise awareness of safety issues but with a website that says things such as "In lieu of sending flowers, please ORDER ANYTHING ON THE MENU, ANYTIME OF THE DAY, Jack would want it that way," the fast food chain seems to be having way to good a time parodying what is a horrific tragedy that wee see way too often.

Fortunately, there's plenty of spaces on the "Hang in There Jack" website to leave feedback.  Feel free to leave some here as well.

I know this is probably old news to some of you, San Diego has been running it's Road to Happiness tourism campaign since August, but what can I tell you?  I have Tivo.

The above ad, which I can only assume was filmed before the "gas crisis" this summer features still shots of people loving life in their cars as they drive the freeways to the Car-Culture-Capital-in-Waiting, San Diego.  In the background a song plays about how darn happy these people are to be driving.  Hooray, cars!

About half way through the commercial, they mercifully switch to shots of other things one can do in San Diego such as play on the beach, go to the zoo, or watch the Padres lose before a narrator takes over:

San Diego's paving the way to your next getaway with great deals on all the best hotels and attractions.  The road to happiness starts at sandiego.org/happiness.

Get it?  Paving the way.  Because there's apparently no other way to get to San Diego than by car. Hilarious.

Finally, an advertisement that portrays cyclists as well-adjusted and happy human beings who love their chosen mode of transportation instead of people looking to save money on car insurance, people too poor to afford a car or insects.  This pleasant ad from health care giant Kaiser Permanente makes a clear statement that cycling is a smart thing to do if you care about your community and want to live a healthy life.

The first three quarters of the advertisement is nothing more than a pleasant sounding song about doing activities in the sun played over film of a diverse group of people biking around town.  For the last 15 seconds, the music is replaced by a female narrator who drives the point home that cycling is a clean and healthy way to move from place to place:

We believe that good health belongs to everyone, that it's more than some card you keep in your wallet.  It's the air we breathe, the food we eat, the community we live in.  We're Kaiser Permanente and we're here to spread the health.

Some of the commenters at bikecommuters.com noticed some problems with the video, but others agreed with me that they're not seeing the forests for the trees.  After all, isn't it nice to see a corporation portraying cycling as something good to do in their television ads?