#66 1995 · City of Bogotá (Mayor Antanas Mockus) · Traffic safetyincentive-flip
Bogotá answered jaywalking and reckless driving with mimes instead of more tickets
the problem
Traffic citations weren't changing how drivers and pedestrians behaved
background
Bogotá in the mid-1990s had some of Latin America's worst traffic fatality rates, and decades of the standard response — more traffic police, higher fines — hadn't moved the numbers. Antanas Mockus, a mathematician and philosopher who'd been rector of the National University before an unlikely run for mayor, took office in 1995 arguing that Bogotá's problem wasn't a lack of rules but a culture that didn't feel bound by them, and that citizens needed a sharper kind of feedback than a ticket arriving in the mail.
His administration trained and deployed more than 400 professional mimes to the city's most dangerous intersections. They wrote no citations — they trailed jaywalkers and reckless drivers, silently imitating and mocking their behavior in front of other pedestrians, and applauded those who crossed correctly or stayed in their lane, betting that public embarrassment would land harder than a fine most people never actually paid.
the move
Newly elected mayor and former philosophy professor Antanas Mockus bet that Colombians feared public ridicule more than fines, so in 1995 he deployed more than 400 trained mimes to city intersections to silently mock jaywalkers and reckless drivers — and applaud those who obeyed — instead of adding more ticket-writing police.
the payoff
Traffic fatalities in the areas the mimes worked fell by more than half during Mockus's tenure, and the tactic became a signature of his wider 'citizen culture' program, later copied by other Latin American cities.
what came after
Traffic fatalities in the areas where mimes operated fell by more than half over Mockus's terms, and the tactic became the signature example of his wider 'cultura ciudadana' (citizen culture) program, which used similar symbolic, non-punitive interventions on other civic problems. Other Latin American cities later copied the approach for their own traffic-safety campaigns.
filed under
references
- [1]Wikipedia — Antanas MockusWikipedia, 2026en.wikipedia.org
- [2]TheJournal.ie — How to stop jaywalking? Hire mimes...TheJournal.ie, 2012thejournal.ie