Enter the Safe Princeton Cartoon Contest

Princeton Township and Borough are sponsoring a Safe Princeton Cartoon Contest designed to raise awareness of accidents involving pedestrians and bike riders in the community.

The contest take place during the month of April. Participants are asked to create cartoons that use creativity and humor to lampoon the recklessness that leads to these injuries. The characters created by participants on posters will placed around town, in videos and leaflets and in newspapers.

The contest is the start of a safety educational campaign designed to promote more sensible traffic behavior in Princeton, according to Anton Lahnston, chair of the Princeton Borough Traffic and Transportation Committee.

"As the mayors (Township Mayor Chad Goerner and Borough Mayor Yina Moore) have pointed out, 114 walkers or bikers were hurt in vehicle accidents from 2008 through 2011 in the borough alone," Lanston said. "It is really disturbing that the rate has increased by almost 60 percent over the past two years. During February of this year, typically a low accident month, four pedestrians were hit.

"We take great pride in the fact that this is a town of walkers and bikers, but we have seen an increase in careless and inconsiderate behavior that is just not typical of Princeton," Lahnston said. "We want to promote more sensible behavior without getting into a tough enforcement program. We hope that the famous good sense of people in our community will prevail. If we police each other by, say, making fun of a friend or family member when he or she is about to do something that might hurt him or herself or others, that beats getting a ticket and paying a fine.

"We want to raise the awareness of all pedestrians, bikers, and drivers about these troubling trends. This is why we have asked our students to help us out by satirizing some of the recklessness. This is why we asked volunteer Tom Florek and his colleague, Jennifer Imbrigiotta, to help us produce a SAFE PRINCETON video to show just how prevalent this kind of inconsiderate conduct has become. In a 2010 survey, we  found that many of our citizens share these concerns.

"We are going to take the message everywhere we can," Lahnston continued. "We will ask for cooperation from every segment of the community: the university and other educational institutions, our merchants and other businesses, our churches. We will place videos about safety in as many gathering places as we can. We will post the "Safe Princeton" cartoons on posters throughout town. We will talk to school assemblies, university orientations for incoming students, church groups, and any others who share our concerns. In the fall, we hope to see the "Safe Prineton message woven into year-round school programs. Then, maybe we will begin to see a decline in the number of accidents and people hurt.

According to Princeton statistics, the accidents that occurred between 2008 and 2011 happened for reasons such as people driving through a crosswalk where people were, pedestrians texting or talking on a cell phone in the middle of traffic, bicyclists and skateboarders racing between people on Nassau Street sidewalks, bikers getting smacked with a card door and bikers riders at night without a light.

Contest participants are asked to:

• Compete to name one or more of six cartoon characters drawn by Joy Chen, owner ofJoyCards, that spoof some of the most dangerous behaviors; and/or
• Come up with a good punch line for one or more of the cartoons. 

There will be 12 prizes of $100 each: six for the best names for the characters, six for the punch lines. (If you are really good you might win more than one prize.) Wherever used, the name of each winner will be identified with each cartoon character and each punch line.  

CONTEST RULES

The contest runs through the end of the school day on April 30. By mid-May a panel of judges will pick the six winning character names and the six winning cartoon punch lines.  It is possible for a contestant to win more than one prize.

To stir your creative juices, take a look at the eight-minute "Safe Princeton" video produced for us by volunteers Tom Florek and Jennifer Imbrigiotta.

Instructions:

1. Find the entry and submission form on-line at— http://www.prs.k12.nj.us/safeprincetoncontest/.
2. 2. Complete the entry form (pdf). Include your name, school, address, telephone number and e-mail address.
3. Fill out your proposed name or names for one or more of the characters on the line corresponding to the number for each drawing. Do the same for one or more of your proposedpunch lines for the cartoons.
4. Submit via email to: SafePrinceton@gmail.com; or you can also—
5. Download the form, fill it out by hand, and (if you are a public school student) turn it into your school's main office by the end of the school day on April 30.
6. If you are not a public school student and choose not to e-mail your entry, mail it to: Office of the Mayor, SAFE PRINCETON CONTEST, 1 Monument Drive, Princeton, NJ 08540. It must be post-marked no later than April 30.