Part of a city campaign against litter. Photo of stencil (and gum) taken at de la Gauchetière O and de la Cathédrale.
Photo du jour – Les mégots et les gommes, c’est assez!
By KC Bolton
Read more articles by KC Bolton
7 comments
I’m happy to see the city using new mediums to get a message across. It is relevant and unusual.
Personally I find it insulting. Essentially Labonté is the 2nd grade teacher smacking you with the yardstick for chewing gum all over again.
Personally I find it embarrassing that people keep throwing gum and cigarettes on the ground and that people like Cyrus find the request to stop insulting.
There’s a gum stuck on the sidewalk print in the photo ^_^
Interesting initiative by the city but it would have to go hand in hand with more garbage cans and ashtrays available, not to mention recycling cans…
I find this campaign quite insulting. If YOU and I would use some stencils to put some “save the Earth” message on a sidewalk, we could get arrested for vandalism and public misconduct. Yet now, the “audacious” borough mayor is using what would normally be illegal methods to let us know about stuff we shouldn’t do. Well, I dunno, what about preaching by example?
The City sued Roadsworth for doing essentially exactly what they are doing with this campaign. You can’t sue visual artists for doing something while stating their behaviour is “endangering the public” and is a question of public safety while turning around and… doing exactly the same.
Maybe if the city actually had street sweepers instead of those ridiculous MADVACs litter would be less of a problem. Seriously, I’ve seen those things fail in picking up leaves. They cost about 30k USD and I’ll bet the person driving it has a higher pay grade than a street sweeper would as they are “operating a vehicle”. I really wonder how many street sweepers could be hired for the cost of one ineffective MADVAC unit – I’m guessing at least 2.
I agree that it would be nice if people littered less, but that does seriously require more ashtrays and garbage cans – nobody is going to just carry around a piece of used gum or a cigarette butt hoping there’s an appropriate receptacle within the next block. At least cigarette butts fall apart when they get wet – the gum seems to be semi-permanent, and frankly I’d rather step in an entire ashtray than get a piece of gum stuck to my shoe, or even worse, stuck to my clothing because some creep has left their gum on a metro seat or bench.