The Blame Game: Why Elmer the Safety Elephant Can’t Protect Kids
A few years ago, I spoke to a committee of city councillors, advocating for the reduction of vehicle speeds in my city. In my presentation, I cited two local children who had recently and separately been killed while crossing the street. Both had been in pedestrian corridors with a parent, with crosswalk lights activated. Both had been doing everything “right.”
On a break, I got caught in a very uncomfortable conversation with a fellow meeting delegate ("conversation" is putting it generously; he was pretty much just talking at me). His cavalier attitude toward these deaths and the horrific way he trivialized them made me feel as though I’d been sucker punched. Well, he insisted, it’s the parents’ fault when kids get killed. It’s those mothers who insist on driving their kids to school. It’s the fault of all those parents who don’t teach their kids basic traffic safety. And one more thing: If we just brought back Elmer the Safety Elephant, we’d stop seeing these collisions.
Oh, Elmer. I hate that elephant.
Every time there’s a pedestrian or cyclist accident in my city, there is one thing I can count on, and it's that people will be talking about Elmer the Safety Elephant. “Bring back Elmer!” they cry. “Elmer’s rules are common sense!”
Haven’t heard of Elmer the Safety Elephant? It was a traffic safety public awareness program aimed at children aged 5 to 9. It debuted in Toronto in 1947 and quickly spread throughout the country.
If you were a kid in Canada during the '50s, '60s or '70s, there is a good chance you had visits from Elmer at school. You learned his rules, his song and his slogans. You saw him in parades and on TV PSAs. You might have even had your own toy Elmer figurine. In the '80s, the initiative began to peter out due to a lack of funding. But even today, the odd police department tries to revive it every now and then.
Initially, the program taught five key tenets:
Look all ways before you cross the street.
Never play near parked cars.
Drive your bike safely and obey all signs and signals.
Play games in a safe place away from traffic.
Walk when you leave the curb, don’t run.
Later, two more rules were added:
Where there are no sidewalks, walk on the left of the street, facing traffic (added in the 1960s).
Always wear your seat belt in the car (added in the 1980s).
All these rules seem pretty common sense, right? I remember learning the same things when I was a kid in the '80s (though I can’t remember if they were through this particular program).
Elmer was hailed as an immediate and significant success. After the first year of the program, “traffic collisions among Toronto children dropped an astonishing 44 per cent — even though vehicle registrations increased by 10 per cent!”
(Please take this with a grain of salt. Vision Zero Canada deconstructs a later claim from 1955, noting that, while there was a drop in the number of injuries relative to the number of cars after Elmer was introduced, the absolute number of injuries went up. That’s not a win in my books.)
So why does the mere suggestion that Elmer is the answer to all of our modern problems make my blood pressure spike?
It’s partly because Elmer wasn’t just about teaching traffic safety principles to young children. In a surely well-meaning but horrifying twist, the essential part of the program was about creating a culture of personal responsibility above all, essentially telling kids that they alone are responsible for their safety — that, and using shame as a tool to ensure compliance:
Each school would be given a triangular green pennant featuring a picture of Elmer. The pennant would be raised on the school’s flagpole and stay there as long as no child was involved in a traffic accident. If an accident did occur, the pennant would be lowered to half-mast (or, in later times, taken down altogether) for periods ranging from 15 days, to 30 days, to an entire year. All children in the school would attend a pennant-lowering ceremony so it would impress on them the importance of following Elmer’s rules.
The narrator of this 1955 news clip puts it bluntly: “When a child is involved in an accident through his own fault, the police come and run down the school Elmer flag.”
A quick look around social media turns up lots of comments along this vein:
“I'll never forget the shame at our school when Elmer the Safety Elephant got taken down because some kid had an accident. He wasn't killed, but we hated to lose it. (That kid probably was never able to hold his head up in that school again.)”
Lately, I’ve been thinking that understanding this mindset — that safety can be responsibly mastered by young children and that staying alive in traffic is just a matter of faithfully following a few commonsense rules — is vital to understanding the cultural and institutional pushback on safer road design and lower design speeds that is so prevalent in North American cities. After all, Elmer was modeled on the Green Pennant program, which was common throughout the United States.
Is “Generation Elmer” Safer?
Today, many of the folks who are in decision-making positions of power within towns and cities were raised on Elmer. They grew up under a “personal responsibility” paradigm of road safety. They believed then — and evidently continue to believe — that if everyone just followed the safety rules, no one would get hurt.
Now, I am mindful to avoid generational stereotypes. Many folks who grew up in the golden age of Elmer are now passionate about improving safety by design. But we know that older adults are getting hurt and killed while walking more than other age groups. According to Statistics Canada, the rate of pedestrian deaths generally increases with age, and seniors aged 70 and older are the most at risk of a fatal pedestrian incident. Is it curious that the folks who grew up with an extremely robust pedestrian safety education are now among the most likely to be involved in a fatal collision?
Not if we think for a moment about what other factors may be at play. Seniors generally move more slowly. They may use mobility devices. Their reflexes and cognitive abilities (like the ability to judge speed) are decreasing. And they are often less able to overcome a serious injury. There are plenty of physiological reasons that may explain why older people are involved in collisions more often. And that’s before we even look at the multiple environmental and design factors that can come into play.
These vulnerabilities of older age will always be true, even decades from now when no one grew up on Elmer. This illustrates perfectly that counting on model pedestrian behavior (what Daniel Herriges called “the cult of the fantasy pedestrian”) is not a valid traffic safety strategy.
Are We Doing Enough To Keep Kids Safe?
Many things have changed between the dawn of Elmer and now. By 1947, previously walkable urban areas were no longer the domain of the pedestrian. But a collective memory of a time when pedestrians were the default and cars were the guest remained. This collective memory was then replaced by the sense that motorized transportation is the default and others must defer. A new suburban development pattern began to take hold, marking the beginning of the end of sidewalks. And by the '80s, children had largely been regulated to the back seat of cars, rather than their neighborhood streets. You can see this shift taking place right there in Elmer’s rules.
According to Safe Routes to School, “Not long ago, children routinely moved around their neighborhoods by foot or by bicycle, and that was often how they traveled to and from school. That is no longer the case.” In 1969, 48% of children aged 5 to 14 usually walked or bicycled to school. By 2009, that number had dropped to just 13%.
Given how much of children’s present-day lives is spent in cars, it’s maybe not surprising if we’ve lost sight of how important it is to teach them traffic safety from a young age. How many of them actually experience being in traffic, outside a vehicle, on a regular basis?
Still, what makes me feel almost palpably ill is the Elmer program’s victim blaming of children — and, relatedly, its ultimate indifference to injury and death. The whole point of the program was to prevent accidents, but if a child should be involved in one, the message was clear: It was your own fault. Elmer gave you the tools you needed to keep yourself safe, but you failed. Shame on you.
As my friend Dave, who grew up learning about Elmer in school, put it, "It would never have occurred to me at the time it was putting responsibility on the most vulnerable: us kids.”
The “rules” part of the Elmer education was needed then, and it is still needed today, maybe more than ever. Safety practices and education of all kinds are vital for children, from fire and water safety to online safety. We don’t load these areas of danger with onus and shame. Yet that vestigial belief — that road safety is a pedestrian’s exclusive responsibility — is still pervasive.
Perfect Pedestrians Are Not Enough
This brings me to the second reason that the rallying cry to “bring back Elmer” is so frustrating. It’s because, for all the complaining that folks do about distracted pedestrians, oblivious pedestrians, pedestrians with a death wish, etc., we still have a very real problem with people doing everything “right” and still getting hurt.
My point is not that every part of the Elmer program was bad. Certainly, there were aspects of it that were successful. My point is that, given what we know about pedestrian collisions, you could behave perfectly and still be hit or killed by a car. Education can only go so far. When we look at places that are succeeding at preventing fatalities, they’re the ones that are making physical changes (check out the Strong Towns profiles of Jersey City and Hoboken to see what I mean).
We are all imperfect humans sharing a transportation system. We are people driving, walking, biking and everything in between, and any of us could make a mistake that results in severe injury and death for others or ourselves. Insisting that it’s the fault of individuals and not a transportation system designed to promote speed and convenience of cars at all costs… that is the problem we fail to address.
So, enough of the urging to bring back Elmer while simultaneously refusing to get on board with traffic calming. Enough with railing about oblivious pedestrians with a death wish while simultaneously railing about how reducing vehicle speeds will bring traffic to a standstill. Enough indulging in the cult of the fantasy pedestrian — and the fantasy driver!
Our children deserve a whole lot better than that. If we want to prevent kids (and all people) from getting hurt in traffic accidents, we need to ditch the shame and victim blaming and do the things that actually work.
Emma Durand-Wood likes walkable cities, front porches, street trees, bumping into neighbors, riding her bike, downtowns, and any excuse to check out a new coffee shop, bakery, or shop. A Winnipegger by choice, she lives in Elmwood with her husband and three children. You can connect with her on Twitter @emmaewood.