Road Rules: Creepy Crosswalk Kids in France

These life-size bizarro children are horrifying for drivers

I am not sure who thought putting nearly life-sized creepy fiberglass statues of kids around crosswalks in France was a good idea, but at least they seem to work. It may just be a bit of a shock at the disturbing large cartoonish figures standing at crosswalks, but I do slow down. If I were to actually hit one of these things with a car, I think it would be traumatic.

3D figures of children stand over 3-4 feet tall near crosswalks as part of the "Ville Prudente" project. They seem designed to scare drivers. You can't miss them, even if you try—these plastic toy colored children are more noticeable than the actual crosswalks they guard.

Driver rights vs. Pedestrian rights

As a driver, I get it—we need to be cautious. A French saying I’ve heard here goes, "The pedestrian is the red light," but not everyone pays attention to it. As a rule, pedestrians always have more rights than drivers here, regardless of the situation. Most people seem to cross at crosswalks, they cross with the lights and I don’t see a lot of jaywalking in general - of course, that is likely different in Paris.

Pedestrian behavior has some rules and there is a €4 fine for pedestrians crossing against the light,  but I’ve never heard of it being enforced. Drivers, on the other hand, have ready stories about being hit with heavy fines and points on their license for messing with crosswalks. Drivers have their complaints, but they don’t want to hit pedestrians with their vehicles either.

A guy I work with has the only story of ever being given a pedestrian crosswalk ticket and he said he only got it because he was drunk at the time. I didn’t ask much more after that.

These kiddie statues haven’t been embraced by everyone. Some think that they distract more than they protect. The schools are busy only so many hours of the week and those statues are there in the middle of the night, when they seem a bit like a thing from a badly-written horror movie. However, proponents argue they create a visual reminder for both drivers and pedestrians, fostering a safer environment. People seem to even like them in some places and to accept them as normal, which is really what is strange. One village we went through couldn’t have had 500 people in it, but there were 6 of these little creepy things around the center of town.

Something must be working. France has roughly the same number of annual pedestrian deaths as NYC alone. I’d prefer to hand out bricks for pedestrians, myself or something more traditional, like speed bumps, but these bizarre figures seem to have captured the imagination of city planners.

There are some instructional videos for children that are very long, which also exist in the United States in some places, but we haven’t resorted to weird statues yet.