The Pedestrian Safety Review Board’s On the Move campaign will continue its education outreach effort on Thursday, June 21, 2018 from 11:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m. in the parking lot of the Valero gas station at 1290 Gray Highway (across from BB&T, BP, and CVS).
 
During this time, members of the Board will hand out (to people walking and any drivers and passengers that stop by) education safety cards and safety reflective armbands, explain the information on the card, and demonstrate how the bands work. The Bibb County Sheriff’s Office will also be on hand to reinforce the message. The Safety Board intends to distribute the cards and bands around the county at a variety of events through September 2018.

Previous outreach efforts have taken place in:

February 2018 in the parking lot of the Fastee Foods at the corner of Pio Nono and Montpelier Avenues;

in April 2018 in the parking lot of the of the Walthall/Exxon (currently closed) at the corner of Riverside Drive and Spring Street; and

in May 2018 in the parking lot of Sheridan Solomon LLC Realtors on Riverside Drive and in the parking lot of the Sunoco on the corner of Pio Nono Avenue and Eisenhower Parkway..

“We want to let people know how important pedestrian safety is to our community and to help people become more responsible for their actions as they “move” from one location to another,” says Violet Poe with the Safety Board. “We also want to put an emphasis on driver and passenger behaviors that will help make us all safer.”
                                                            
Locations selected for this education campaign were selected because they are heavily traveled by pedestrians and are on or near State Roads, or are near the locations of pedestrian fatalities between 2012 and 2016. On the Move is paid for with a $20,785 grant from the Governor’s Office of Highway Safety that was awarded in October 2017. Click here to watch a video of that announcement, and click here for a MaconBibbTV feature on the campaign.
 
“We’re going to where people walk and where there have been fatalities; we want to reach the people this type of information will most benefit,” says Dr. Tom Ellington of the Safety Board. “We want to help make sure people get where they’re going safely, no matter how they choose to get there.”
 
The On the Move campaign is in addition to the Safety Board’s Cross the Walk campaign which began in 2016. This campaign focused on different pedestrian safety aspects and used billboards, presentations, outreach to student groups, bus wraps, mascots, PSAs, and more. Click here for a MaconBibbTV feature video on this campaign.