A new advertising campaign on Staten Island seeks to stigmatize motorists who speed by showing smiling images of men, women and children who have died in car crashes.

But if you're like a lot of Islanders, you might be driving too fast to notice.

The sepia-toned ads at about 80 locations boroughwide depict haunting, soft-focused faces with bold legends: DIED For Movie Previews, or DIED To Cash a Check, among several variations.

Below the words is the campaign's slogan: Speeding, there's no excuse.

Planners hope that the ads in bus shelters, on ferryboats and in Staten Island Railway cars will put speeders in the same category as drunken drivers by powerfully showing the potential human cost of aggressive driving.

"I think the first reaction [to the ads] is shock," said Paul White, director of Transportation Alternatives, which organized the campaign. The Manhattan-based group advocates for bicyclist and pedestrian safety.

The faces in the advertisements are of models, not actual accident victims.

"Clearly, people make the link between the excuses for speeding and the human faces," White said during a press conference yesterday along Hylan Boulevard in New Dorp.

Still, conversations with passersby suggested that the ads miss the mark with some people amidst the borough's traffic and the media chatter.

"It doesn't get the point across," said Bob Mooney, a Tompkinsville resident and postal worker who saw an ad at a bus shelter on Victory Boulevard at Cebra Avenue. "It looks like a movie advertisement."

"You've really got to look into it to understand what it means," said West Brighton resident Lionel Williams, who saw an ad while waiting for an S46 bus on Castleton Avenue at Broadway.

Speeding and aggressive driving are as central a transportation issue on Staten Island as traffic congestion. Eight pedestrians died after being struck by vehicles last year on Staten Island, and one bicyclist died after being hit by a car, city statistics show.

City Councilmen Michael McMahon (D-North Shore) and James Oddo (R-Mid Island/Brooklyn) together allotted $25,000 to pay for printing the ads, which were designed pro bono by Y&R, a high-end ad firm, and installed in space donated by Kinetic Worldwide.

Oddo said another key to reining in aggressive drivers is to get the Police Department to really buy into the fact that they're needed, perhaps via a high-profile shock-and awe campaign of increased enforcement. McMahon agreed: "Unless we have strict enforcement, we're not going to make the progress we need."

Police handed out 10,235 speeding summonses last year on the Island alone, and the city has seen a dip in the number of pedestrians injured in vehicle-related accidents.

Staten Island University Hospital has reported an increase in trauma patients from pedestrian accidents -- inexplicably, however, city statistics show a 16 percent reduction, to 385, in pedestrian injuries since 2001.

Citywide, the borough had only about 3 percent of the 12,376 pedestrian injuries tabulated citywide last year.

Seth Solomonow covers transportation news for the Advance. He may be reached at solomonow@siadvance.com.