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LADOT P.S.A. – Same Crash, Different Perspective

8:15 AM PDT on September 1, 2009

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.

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