Newton Students Win MassDOT’s 'Safe Streets Smart Trips' Video Contest

NEWTON, MA — Four Newton North High School students have won MassDOT’s annual Safe Streets Smart Trips High School Video Contest.

Savannah Bond, Asher Salmon Hansen, Yuli Ziblat, and Josie Lee won the grand prize in the freshman/sophomore category for their video “Signs Are Your Friend.”

This year, 43 videos were submitted from high schools across Massachusetts and six videos receiving honors were shown during MassDOT’s 2022 Moving Together Conference, which was held on Tuesday, November 1.

The contest, which began in 2014, encourages high school students to showcase their understanding of roadway safety across all travel modes to try to decrease pedestrian and bicyclist injuries and fatalities. It serves as an initiative of the Massachusetts Strategic Highway Safety Plan to promote safe walking, bicycling, and driving behaviors within the Commonwealth.

“The Safe Streets Smart Trips High School Video Contest is an important part of MassDOT’s safety education efforts,” Transportation Secretary and CEO Jamey Tesler said in a statement. “The contest gets young people thinking about ways to teach each other about road safety and this peer-to-peer teaching is highly effective. Students from across the Commonwealth take time to create informational videos that encourage people walking, biking and driving to pay attention to their surroundings, obey traffic laws, act courteously and role model safe behavior since doing that will save lives and prevent injuries.”

The video contest was open to all Massachusetts high school students and featured freshman/sophomore and junior/senior award categories. Per contest guidelines, students were asked to write and produce a 30-60 second video focused on interpreting the various signs and pavement markings that are on roadways and in school zones and explaining their meaning.

Grand prize, runner-up, and honorable mention videos in each category were chosen by a MassDOT panel. Video creators received prizes including $600 Amazon gift cards for the grand prize videos and $300 Amazon gift cards for the runner-up videos. Top videos may also be used in future safety campaigns.

The videos are scheduled to be posted soon on the mass.gov site.