"But what could possibly go wrong?"

[unixronin]

Officials in West Vancouver, Canada, apparently aren't satisfied with the driver-slowing properties of traditional speed bumps.  On Tuesday, the town unveiled a new way to persuade motorists to ease off the gas pedal in the vicinity of the École Pauline Johnson Elementary School:  a 2-D image of a child playing, creating the illusion that the approaching driver will soon blast into a child.

(Original Discover magazine article here)

I don't know about anyone else, but this sounds to me like a really, REALLY BAD idea.  I can imagine the mental dialog already after drivers get used to these "speed bumps":

<hindbrain>  Oh, it's just another optical speed bump...

<forebrain, a second or two later>  OH SHIT, NO IT ISN'T!!!      [THUD]

I can see this basically conditioning drivers that the visual image of a kid in the middle of the street is NOT a hazard, and delaying realization that this time it's a real kid for just long enough that the driver no longer has time to stop.  I have severe concerns that this experiment is going to result in dead kids.  Apparently Yahoo's Michael Dykes shares this concern:

You have to wonder if the designers of the "speed bump of the future" considered that drivers might become conditioned to disregard Pavement Patty and her imaginary cohorts, creating something similar to a "boy who cried wolf" effect.  Couldn't such conditioning reduce drivers' caution if a real child should cross their path?

"I have a really bad feeling about this."