The MCPS Director of Transportation was in Kansas City, Missouri in November at a transportation conference and here's what he had to say about MCPS. (How much did this "vacation" cost taxpayers?)
“In the period I’ve been at Montgomery County (since 1996), we’ve had
zero fatalities on school buses, yet we’ve had several fatalities among
student walkers. Different things have led to situations when kids have
been injured or even killed. Often we’ve found students either walking
with earphones or texting while walking,” Watkins told STN. “The reality
is, if we could get students to act more safely when they walk, I think
many of these (incidents) could be prevented, so that’s the target of
the [YOLO] campaign.”
Transportation Chief Turns Attention to Student Pedestrian Safety at NASDPTS
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Here's what MCPS students had to say about MCPS' YOLO Campaign.
They came overnight. Attaching themselves to neat blue boxes like
barnacles to a whale, posters of somber, tire-marked faces have
populated the halls. Part of a new campaign
by MCPS to raise awareness for pedestrian alertness and safety, these
intensely emotional posters are meant to shock students into realizing
the dangers of distracted walking. But one thing detracts from this
meaningful campaign: YOLO.
The #YOLOwalksafe campaign uses the popularly hashtagged acronym,
short for You Only Live Once, juxtaposed with gloomy photographs to
create “an ominous warning of the dangers on the road,” according to the
campaign’s website. Unfortunately, this counter-intuitive use of a hip
phrase falls flat.
YOLO is nearly always used as an excuse to act brash or recklessly.
You only have one life, so why waste it being lame, right? An exception
is the Lonely Island song “You Only Live Once,” which used the phrase
ironically as a statement to act carefully. In other words, a satirical
group thought it would be hilarious to use YOLO in this opposite way.
This doesn’t bode well for #YOLOwalksafe...
http://www.theblackandwhite.net/2014/10/16/yolo-detracts-from-mcps-pedestrian-safety-campaign/
