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New Safety Report Urges Major Restrictions on Digital Billboards

Digital BillboardA major report has been issued that for the first time recommends policies to improve the safety of digital billboards by severely limiting appropriate locations for the signs and establishing new criteria governing sign behavior, including the frequency with which the brightly illuminated electronic images should be allowed to change.

Written by renowned human-factors expert Jerry Wachtel, the report, Safety Impacts of the Emerging Digital Display Technology for Outdoor Advertising Signs, was produced as a project of the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO).

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Scenic America provides array of scenic services

byways workshop photoScenic America announces a new section of our website devoted to exploring the many scenic services that we can provide.

Scenic America provides effective, on the ground help for communities, citizen groups, government agencies, and organizations on protecting and enhancing valued landscape character.

For more information contact Brad Cownover by email or by phone at 202.638.3360.

For more information on Scenic America's services, click here to visit the scenic services section of our website.

Fry urges sensible billboard policies in California


Scenic America president Kevin Fry visited both California's capital and its largest city recently to advocate for strong, responsible billboard control at the state and local level.

California GIFIn Sacramento, Fry provided testimony to the State Assembly Committee on Judiciary in support of AB109, a bill proposed by committee chairman Mike Feuer (D-Los Angeles), that would impose a two-year moratorium on digital billboards statewide, pending the outcome of ongoing federal research into whether or how digital signage can be operated safely.

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Presenting: A Visual Essay on Urban Advertising

New York City Building WrapScenic America is pleased to present our first in a series of visual essays in which we will examine a wide variety of scenic issues. In this episode we take a look at the encroachment of advertising on our urban places, and ask what this growing threat means for our historic cities and their residents. Choose an option below to watch the essay, and be sure your volume is up!

Click here to watch the Flash version. For any of the options below, you can right click and "save target as" to save the file to your computer.

Large (75 Mb) Quicktime version.

Small (5 Mb) Quicktime version.

MP4 (14 Mb) for your video iPod!

Watch it on YouTube!

If you have a comment about the presentation or have ideas for issues you would like to see addressed in future essays, please email us.
Scenic America featured in the New York Times

Dan Barry's weekly New York Times column 'This Land' was recently titled "A Place Just Like Every Other Place. Only Not," and featured an interview with Kevin Fry, Scenic America president, and Brad Cownover, Scenic America's director of conservation services. Click here to view the article.

NY Times slideshowFry and Cownover accompanied Barry on a tour of a suburban landscape near Washington, D.C., and discussed the impact of the built environment on the collective human condition. Barry juxtaposes the unique, unforgettable American landscapes he has seen with the "familiar and hideous commercial stretches that all but dare us to guess the state we are in."

Supplementing the column is a fantastic slide show narrated by Kevin Fry.