A New Zealand man who began drawing very large penises around the potholes in his home city of Auckland in 2018 in the hope of attracting the attention of his local council has been threatened with police action.
In a video road safety campaigner Geoff Upson made after the most recent addition to his oeuvre, he said: “I’m about sick of calling Auckland transport.”
“So what I’ve done is I’ve gone and drawn a great artist’s impression of a penis.”
The video shows two green and pink neon penises. Upson helpfully identified the address where the newly eye-catching potholes occur, and their dimensions.
“The stretch of road from here to the end of that other penis is 48 metres. The width of my lines is approximately 1.2 metres,” he says.
Auckland transport has now promised to take legal action against the phallic fuss-maker. Upson received a call from police last week, following a complaint over the his graffiti, the New Zealand Herald reported, which Auckland council says poses “a safety risk and distraction” to drivers, as well as being dangerous to carry out, according to Stuff.
Upson estimates that he has drawn 100 penises to date.
In 2019, Middlesbrough council in the UK repaired potholes within a week of their being graphically branded, the BBC reported.
When a Manchester man used penises to achieve the same result in 2015, the council reacted furiously, calling the drawings “obscene”, “stupid”, “insulting” and “a waste of valuable time and resources”. In response, the anonymous artist told the BBC the council “must be very prudish”.
