Support Bill to Put a Moratorium on Digital Billboards in Minnesota until Until June 30, 2013

Billboard companies (led by media giants Clear Channel, CBS Outdoors, and Lamar Advertising) are pushing to increase the number of digital billboards on our landscape. They seem especially eager to place as many as possible before the results of a federal study being conducted by the Federal Highway Admnistration (FHWA) are published later this year. That study is examining the safety of digital billboards.

According to the fall 2009 issue of Intransition, "Of 450,000 billboards nationwide, so far less than 2,000 are digital, according to the Outdoor Advertising Association of America. Yet many in the advertising industry see digital billboards as the hottest new growth market, next to the Internet. Improvements in technology jump-started the digital billboard market around 2005."

"A study on digital billboards ... released (in 2009) by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) and the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP). Wachtel, who served as a consultant on the study, said it found evidence from previous research over the last two decades that if a driver’s eyes leave the road for over 1.6 seconds the risk of a crash significantly increases. Digital billboards, the study concluded, tend to capture driver attention for longer than conventional billboards and often for well more than 1.6 seconds.

One of the past studies reviewed pointed to a possible 'moth effect' in which drivers not only look in the direction of a bright light source on the side of the road, but inadvertently steer in that direction as well, affecting their lane maintenance."

The billboard industry, not surprisingly, claims that digital billboards pose no more hazard than regular billboards. Most of the studies they cite, however, are funded by their industry. The industry claims that digital billboards haven't been proven unsafe. This is a classic case of shifting the burden of proof. Before they are allowed to proliferate, they should be proven to be safe. Yet the Federal Highway Administration issued a memo allowing digital billboards and then began the study to determine their safety. It certainly looks lik the FHWA bowed to industry pressure.

The current St. Paul city ordinance regarding digital billboards states, in part:

"Studies show that there is a correlation between driver distraction and accidents. Signs with dynamic displays can be a cause of driver distraction. Along highways, signs with dynamic displays tend to distract drivers if they are waiting to see the next change, especially if it is a continuation of the message or if the transition uses special effects. Signs with lettering that is too small to read at a glance also cause driver distraction..."

Common sense suggests that digital billboards are inherently unsafe, as their purpose is to distract drivers:

“They cannot be safe and (also) be an effective advertising medium,” notes Kevin Fry (president of Scenic America).

“No empirical studies are necessary for reasonable
people to conclude that billboards pose a traffic
hazard, since by their very nature they are
designed to distract drivers and their passengers
from maintaining their view of the road.”
—Major Media of the Southeast v. City of Raleigh, 621 F.Supp. 1446, 1450 (E.D.N.C.
1985), aff ’d, 792 F.2d 1269 (4th Cir. 1986), cert denied, 479 U.S. 1102 (1987).

Here's a document from Scenic America that gives a good overview of the issue of digital billboards.

A New York Times article dated March 1 (the latest in its "Driven to Distraction" series) discussed the issue. The full article is here. In the article, Abby Dart, the executive director of Scenic Michigan,  calls the signs "weapons of mass distraction."

Here is the bill as introduced, House version

Here is the Senate version

Increase the impact of your action:

To contact members of the Senate Transportation Committee to express your support for the bill, click here.

^{To call members of the House Transportation and Transit Policy and Oversight Division Committee, go here.}

Show your support for the bills if you can attend the hearings:

The MN Senate Committee on Transportation will hear the bill:

THURSDAY March 11, 2010 at 12:30 PM

Room 15 State Capitol, St. Paul

The MN House Transportation and Transit Policy and Oversight Division will hear the bill and vote on whether to move it forward:

WEDNESDAY, March 17, 2010
1:00 PM
Room: 5 State Office Building, Saint Paul

The gift that keeps on taking

Kevin Fry said that once the billboards are erected, they are hard to remove. If a sign is declared nonconforming or needs to be moved or changed, he said, the takedown must be paid for in cash rather than in payments. The cost includes the value of the structure plus any advertising revenue." In other words, the billboard companies are typically reimbursed by the community for the cost of removal and the anticipated lost revenue.

Not a level playing field

From the fall 2009 issue of Intransition,

"While federal law dating back to the Highway Beautification Act of 1965 has banned billboards along major highways, loopholes—including exemptions for commercial and industrial zones—and lack of funding for enforcement has led to a proliferation of signs in many states."

Scenic America adds this about the Highway Beautification Act:

"Thirty-six years of neglect, billboard-industry-sponsored amendments, and insufficient funding have transformed what was originally hailed as the harbinger of a new conservation movement into a legal and regulatory failure."

From the Scenic Saint Paul website: "When it comes to controlling land use, communities have two basic tools – condemnation and amortization. Condemnation is a slow and expensive option that isn’t a particularly viable option for many financially strapped communities. If you think communities should have the option to limit billboards use, amortization is the practical tool they need.

Under amortization, owners are given notice that their property no longer fits with the community’s land use preferences. It gives the owners a few years to make transition plans before they must comply with the zoning decision. It is a tool that has been used for decades by Minnesota citizens and their representatives to maintain their communities. Local residents and officials have used amortization to ensure that billboards, junkyards, sex shops and other inappropriate structures don’t mar Minnesota communities.

But when it comes to billboards, that tool has been taken away from MN communities. In 1999 the Minnesota Legislature, under pressure from billionaire (founder of Clear Channel) Red McComb’s billboard lobbyists, banned our communities from using the amortization tool to control billboard use. The League of Minnesota Cities and other community leaders strongly opposed the proposal, but billboard lobbyists proved more powerful."

Insult to Injury

It turns out that electronic billboards can have automated number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras embedded in them to identify passing vehicles. This is already being used in the UK, so the technology is certainly available in the US.