Digital Billboards
Digital Billboards: The biggest threat now facing America's communities and highways is the proliferation of digital billboards. These huge TVs-on-a-stick distract drivers, throw off huge amounts of light into neighboring homes and the night sky, and constitute a magnified blight on the landscape.
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Digital billboards, electronic billboards, changeable variable message centers - whatever you call them they are the same thing: huge roadside distractions and aesthetic catastrophes.
It seems common sense that digital billboards are distracting, after all, that's their job. But while the billboard industry tells advertisers "drivers won't be able to avoid them," they tell regulators that the signs don't pose a safety hazard.
The billboard industry sees digital signs as the future of outdoor advertising, and they are engaged in a full-court press to get as many of the signs up as quickly as they can around the country. We'll try to keep tabs on the latest developments here.
In recent years three seperate states (California, Florida and Pennsylvania) have floated the idea of turning over their official highway message signs to the outdoor advertising industry. The billboard companies would pay the state for the right to show advertising on the signs in between official messages.
The latest edition of the Rutgers Law Review includes a note by law student Susan C. Sharpe -- "Between Beauty and Beer Signs" -- that argues that digital billboards violate the spirit and letter of the Highway Beautification Act (HBA) of 1965.
The photos below were taken
in Stockholm, Sweden in 2009,
during the country's test of
digital billboards. The signs
have since been removed.
Click to enlarge.
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A new study published in the journal Traffic Injury Prevention concludes that digital billboards attract and hold the gazes of drivers for far longer than a threshold that previous studies have shown to be dangerous.
The study, conducted by researchers at the Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute and funded by the Swedish Transport Administration, found that drivers looked at digital billboards significantly longer than they did at other signs on the same stretch of road, with the digital signs often taking a driver’s eyes off the road for more than two seconds.
A well-regarded 2006 study by Virginia Tech for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that anything that takes a driver’s eyes off the road for more than two seconds greatly increases the risk of a crash. The study also found that nearly 80 percent of all crashes involved driver inattention just prior to (within 3 seconds) of the crash.
The Swedish study’s authors reasoned that it’s not surprising that digital billboards attract greater attention from drivers: the signs are brighter, visible from greater distances, and display a constantly-changing series of advertisements. They concluded that digital billboards “have the potential ability to keep up the driver’s curiosity over an extended period of time.” Previous human behavior studies have shown that drivers are hardwired to notice bright, changing lights in their peripheral vision and to anticipate additional motion.
The Swedish government had given temporary authorization to erect digital billboards in 2009, but as a result of this and related studies the government ordered the removal of all digital billboards. Meanwhile in the United States these signs continue to go up at a rapid pace despite a growing body of evidence suggesting they pose a threat to traffic safety.
Download the Swedish study’s abstract here: http://www.scenic.org/storage/PDFs/eebdd.pdf
Virginia Tech Study fact sheet: http://bit.ly/UJ0Gre
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