Yokohama Tire and Roads For Life team up with "Shrine Saviors"

Yokohama Tire has teamed up with Roads For Life in a new interesting mission.

First the facts. When anyone has a deadly car crash on those mountainous Lebanese roads, it is a tradition for the family to establish a shrine there. This text comes from the film accompanying the launch (here): "Our unlit roads are taking thousands of victims’ lives due to traffic accidents that could’ve been avoided. We launched a simple initiative, hooking solar panels to shrines, lighting up the spots commemorating the victims at night, transforming these roads of death, to roads for life."

Of course, all of this is just too praise-worthy. I myself has a very treacherous road that leads to my village filled with such shrines - youngsters either driving badly, or not seeing the road, or imbued with alcohol etc.... Apparently Lebanon has the highest rate of death per capita in road accidents at this point in the world.

However here's the disturbing though. If you add this to what Tide did earlier in Beirut (here) all of this means that we are now relying on private initiatives to fill in where the government work should have been done - lighting up the streets of its citizens.

All of this is both, encouraging and deflating at once.

Tide - when we have to rely on advertising to light up the streets

The other day I had to go from Sassine square to Monot - a trip normally that takes 20 mins on foot. It took around 105 minutes for me to get there. Why? Because Achrafieh was - post ABC mall - completely plunged in the dark. What's with government electricity coming at barely an hour a day, and generators only covering apartments (with exhorbitant prices so the residents pick and chose which rooms to light), I almost tripped twice, thankfully found a hair salon still open to at least "see" something in a dark street.

All this is to tell you that Tide has actually instigated billboards that light up - and if this is not a sore need in Beirut at this point I have no idea what else is. So the billboards which alternate other ads during the day became exclusive to Tide starting 7 PM - an idea which came about from our friends at Leo Burnett Beirut.

Of course, when advertising brings lights to streets in Beirut it basically tells you of how things are lacking on all respects.