Commentary: The Super Bowl ad you haven’t seen … yet

Forget the Super Bowl ads starring Will Ferrell, the Jeep remix of “Electric Boogie” and the spot from Elon Musk’s chief critic. The most interesting transportation-related commercial to debut this Super Bowl season is one that never actually aired on network television.

If you missed an advertisement called “The Distance” making the rounds on social media last week, it’s worth 1 minute, 27 seconds of your time.

Modeled on Super Bowl-style, extended-length ads, the spot’s creator juxtaposes some of America’s ambitious achievements, like space travel, with basic failures that thwart a child’s ability to reach school without dodging traffic hazards.

“With all this progress moving us into the future, why can’t our kids walk, bike and roll a single mile to school like they did in the past,” a narrator says.

The advertisement is the brainchild of Tom Flood, principal at Ontario-based Rovelo Creative. He described it as a passion project made with the intention of “reshaping the discussion in this space and trying to remove the imbalance that we’ve normalized.”

Flood did not consider a car-dominant culture or the general traffic environment problematic until he started taking his two boys, now 11 and 9, to day care and then school about a decade ago. Now he “can’t unsee” some of the everyday dangers like speeding and poorly designed bike lanes that contribute to traffic fatality figures that now eclipse 40,000 per year in the United States.

Conversations between car enthusiasts and mobility and safety advocates are often charged with emotion and venom. Flood wants people to know he’s no zealot. He’s a car owner who regularly drives.

“I am driving all the time,” he said. “I just think it’d be great if my kids could walk to school a little bit safer.”