Jul 2, 2016 3 min read

Almost exactly one year ago, we criticized the practice of groups soliciting for donations at intersections.

In the July 10, 2015, edition of this newspaper, we wrote members of clubs and athletic teams, students and volunteers for various worthy causes descend, cans in hand, on drivers who are sitting at stoplights in the City of Washington. “The traffic that builds up as drivers dig around for loose change is one thing; but of greater concern is that many of these solicitors are children, darting into the street and dodging moving vehicles in the quest for coins and dollar bills,” we pointed out. “It’s just a matter of time before one of these kids or adults is seriously hurt or killed.”

Twelve months later, our concerns remain, more emphatically than ever. This is a practice Washington and other municipalities should consider restricting, and the organizations that engage in what has been called “canning” should look for other ways to raise funds, such as washing the cars they used to stop in the streets or selling hoagies.

It would not be an outlandish step to ban it. In the Pittsburgh region, such communities as Cranberry and Ross townships, Bethel Park and Whitehall do not allow it. John Mackey, then the police chief in Bethel Park, told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in 2013, “We can’t have people walking in and out of traffic.” There is, in fact, a state law prohibiting anyone from standing in the road “for the purpose of soliciting employment, business or contributions from the occupant of any vehicle.”

Penn State University decided its students will no longer practice canning to raise money for Thon, the student-run philanthropy that benefits childhood cancer victims and promotes research. The practice, which had students fanning out across the commonwealth, will be phased out by 2019, in part because of safety concerns over students piling into vehicles and visiting communities they are not familiar with. In September, a 19 year-old student was killed on the Pennsylvania Turnpike when she and six other students were returning from a canning trip in Chester County. In 2011, a student from Huntington, N.Y., was killed in an accident when her vehicle flipped over after it hit some black ice.

Safety concerns aside, the organizers of Thon have found there are more effective ways to raise money. They told the Philadelphia Daily News last year online giving has increased by 32 percent while the amount collected by “canning” has remained stagnant.

Damon Sims, the vice president of student affairs at Penn State, told the newspaper, “I think there’s a general awareness that canning is a fairly archaic means of raising funds, and that other means may be more effective.”

And safer. And less of an annoyance to drivers.

Simply put, it’s time to can canning.