Residents in rural Denmark are placing children’s tricycles, scooters and plastic toy vehicles along roadsides to make drivers slow down. The Danish Road Safety Council, motorist organization FDM and local police all question the method.
DR reported on Monday that toy vehicles now stand in the verge in several rural areas of the country. One of them is on a country road near Hoby on southwest Lolland. There, resident Søren Nielsen has put a small toy tractor next to the road outside his house.
Nielsen told DR he has grandchildren and cats at the property, and he hopes passing drivers will reduce speed and pay closer attention. Some motorists take the tractor seriously, he said, while others are indifferent. The practice is informal and has no official status as a traffic-calming measure.
Neither Rådet for Sikker Trafik, the Danish Road Safety Council, nor FDM supports the approach, although both say they sympathize with homeowners. Both organizations urge residents to remove the tricycles and instead ask the police and their municipality for help.
Council warns toys can create new risks
Jakob Bøving Arendt, director of Rådet for Sikker Trafik, said he understands that people become desperate and frightened by fast driving in their local area. He does not consider it the most effective route to better road safety in the longer term. According to the council, drivers who pass the same tricycle for the fourteenth time stop reacting to it.
The council also warned that the objects themselves can roll onto the roadway and become a hazard. In a 2021 background article, FDM described residents using tricycles, toy scooters, homemade child-sized dolls on bicycles and reflective cat figures for the same purpose. That article noted municipalities may remove unauthorized objects at the owner’s expense and can report them to police.
FDM’s 2021 piece also cited the Road Safety Council as acknowledging that such objects sometimes work, because unfamiliar drivers brake when they see them. No hard data on the speed-reducing effect of the toys has been presented.
Mikkel Kjærgaard, vice police inspector at Sydsjællands og Lolland-Falsters Politi, told DR that officers have several tools available. Police can help residents establish whether speeding is a genuine problem on a given road, and can carry out speed measurements at the location.
Kjærgaard said visible enforcement has a preventive effect. Drivers remember seeing a police motorcycle, an ATK camera vehicle or a patrol car a day or two earlier, he noted, and adjust their speed. Formal traffic safety measures on rural roads are handled by police and municipalities.
Nielsen, however, fears the speed checks are not frequent enough. He said controls need to happen more often than they do now, because drivers who rarely use the road, including those heading to summer houses, never see them.
The road runs through Lolland municipality, one of the areas where the roadside toys have appeared.
