VW's Speed Camera Lottery paid safe drivers from speeders' fines — 32 to 25 km/h

In 2010 the Swedish ad firm DDB Stockholm ran the Fun Theory contest for Volkswagen Sweden, inviting ideas that made unglamorous social challenges — speed-limit adherence, recycling, taking the stairs — enjoyable. The winner was Kevin Richardson, a San Francisco father of three and a producer for Nickelodeon's games division, whose Speed Camera Lottery proposed photographing every driver under a camera and pooling part of the speeders' fines into a lottery drawn among drivers who had stayed within the limit.

Volkswagen built and ran the concept in Stockholm, one of several Fun Theory projects — the Piano Staircase video drew over 600,000 YouTube views — and the results were, per the company, compelling: average speed on a multilane street fell from 32 km/h before installation to 25 km/h during the three-day November test, despite the device having no ability to issue financial penalties.

Richardson framed the idea as a correction to enforcement psychology: 'Thinking of all the interesting ways we can penalize a few bad or distracted apples is a mis-distribution of energy and attention', he wrote. No traffic authority had approached him about a permanent pilot as of the NYT report.

Photograph every driver and let speeders' fines fund a lottery that only speed-limit-keepers can win — turning compliance into a ticket instead of an obligation.

The mechanism is self-funding: the prize pool comes from the fines, so the carrot costs the authority nothing.

It rewards the compliant majority instead of only punishing the violating few, changing who pays attention.

The measurable speed drop happened without any actual penalty being issued, isolating the lottery promise as the active ingredient.

It came from an open contest, not an agency — the winning insight cost VW a prize, not a consulting fee.

Let the violators pay for the carrot: pooling penalties into rewards for compliance makes enforcement self-funding and flips the psychology from fear of the fine to odds of the prize.

The concept won the contest and was demonstrated in Stockholm through November 2010 with the 32-to-25 km/h result credited to Volkswagen; Richardson said he was receptive to a permanent pilot, but none had been proposed to him at the time of the article.