These New Drunk Driving PSA’s Are Arty, Terrifying
- John Morse/Department of Transportation
New York has a pretty long, solid history of bone-chilling PSA’s (especially the brutally simple “Two Drinks Ago…” series), but a new “Blotto” campaign is aiming to do something different, and arguably more subtle: forcing you to look at a nice Rorschach drawing of a martini for a few seconds before you realize oh, those blots going into it are crashing cars, and yes, if you drink and drive people might die, and the world is a scary, scary place. Ah.
The posters, up in phone kiosks in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, come courtesy of artist John Morse (who also did the “Curbside Haiku” campaign back in 2011) as part of a larger, ongoing campaign, and are meant to invoke the “messy, confusing, and destructive” nature of drunk driving, according to a press release from the Department of Transportation.
“We’re using creative imagery to help motorists recognize there is no room for interpretation when it comes to drinking and driving,” explained Commissioner Janette Sadik-Kahn. So, fair enough point. Whether these make you re-think your driving habits or just appreciate the 24-hour availability of the subway a little more than usual, we could all acknowledge that if they wanted to, the DOT could make this campaign so much more graphic than it is.
Follow Virginia K. Smith on Twitter @vksmith.
