— Karen O'Brien Winkler, Lower Saucon Township
A: Now Karen, just ease off the gas for a second and take a look at the photo of the tastefully informative electronic billboard advertisement that accompanies today's column. Seriously, how could anyone complain about such a work of art?
Ha ha. Juuuuust kidding!
In first gear I considered this to be among the personal-taste issues — those that tend to be more troubling to some motorists than to others, and this one was not particularly concerning to me.
Texting or using the phone while driving, failing to use turn signals, on-ramp drivers who don't yield to highway traffic, those are behaviors that elicit a wide road of opposition from motorists, judging by the traffic that steers its way into my email garage. Distracted driving of any sort — eating, applying makeup, reading — gets broad condemnation.
I'm not so sure about billboards. I don't much like them in any form, whether the original concept of a simple, unchanging gigantic placard, or the newer boards with rotating vertical panels that switch between different messages, or the newest model, electronic billboards that use light-emitting diodes to blare their message more distinctly to the eye, and can change messages many times in the course of a minute.
First lady Claudia "Lady Bird" Johnson campaigned to rid the countryside of roadside advertising in the 1960s, helping clear the road for passage of the Highway Beautification Act of 1965 — for as much good as it did.
Max Ashburn of the nonprofit group Scenic America said the billboard industry dug significant potholes into the surface of the highway act, and today's roadside scenery in the Lehigh Valley and elsewhere certainly seems to bear him out.
But are billboards that distracting? They're designed to draw a driver's attention away from the road, which seems the very essence of distraction. And if the billboard industry is sold on LED boards, it would follow that the LEDs are that much more effective, which is to say, distracting.
Using that common-sense approach, I'm trying to talk myself into joining the traffic on your side of the road, Karen, which seems to be the prevailing direction. Feeling the heat from all those engines, municipal governments are trying to establish controls, at least, and in some cases, even outright bans on LEDs.
According to Scenic America, four states — Maine, Vermont, Alaska and Hawaii — ban billboards of any sort. Good for them! Montana slams the brakes only on the LED models.
The group reports that some cities ban LED boards (San Francisco) and others prohibit new LEDs while "grandfathering" existing boards (Denver). Many municipalities, including some in the Lehigh Valley, impose controls, regulating the size and location of LED boards, as well as their message-changing frequency and other functions.
At the same time, PennDOT and other government agencies, as well as safety organizations, sometimes use billboards and electronic message boards to advertise highway-safety programs or features. LED boards carry public-service messages including Amber Alerts, and police in Allentown and elsewhere have used LED boards to post electronic versions of "wanted" posters.
There's traffic in both directions on this issue, and conclusive results from objective safety studies aren't yet available, at least not that I could find. Ashburn said a comprehensive study by the Federal Highway Administration has been under way for about three years, with no results released as yet. A section in the description of the study methodology notes that the existing literature consists of "a disjointed array of isolated studies revealing sometimes contradictory and inconclusive results."
Billboard opponents including Scenic America are doing their best to throw nails onto the road in front of LED boards, and billboards in general. "Each year, hundreds of communities seek tighter billboard controls — the surest sign that citizens are fed up with billboard blight," the group's website states. "Though the industry claims billboards are essential providers of important information, polls reveal most people see them as ugly, intrusive and uninformative."
But Paul Wright, principal of SignValue, a billboard industry consulting firm in Mesa, Ariz., said his sense is that anti-LED forces have been losing ground in this skirmish over the past five years or so. When I spoke to Wright about LEDs in December 2006, for example, Lamar Advertising had about 165 LED boards among its 170,000 billboards. As of November, the relative figures were 1,378 LEDs and 180,000, Wright said. Though LEDs were relatively new models six years ago, that's an eight-fold increase, and Wright foresees the trend continuing, propelled by market demand and declining costs for LEDs.
I hate to ride in the middle of the road, but I can't decide. It seems as though LED billboards should pose a significant driver distraction, but to me they seem easy to ignore. Whatever brief glances they elicit don't take my eyes fully off the road, as traffic remains in my peripheral vision. It's never advisable to allow your visual focus to drift off the road ahead, but in these micro-second instances it seems harmless compared to, say, texting behind the wheel.
I want to steer in your direction, Karen, but the issue doesn't really rev me up. Am I wrong, fellow warriors? Should we be as concerned about LED billboards as we are about texting or cellphone use? Or, in the view through your windshield, do they qualify for prohibition simply because of visual blight?
Road Warrior appears Mondays and Fridays, and the Warrior blogs at mcall.com. Email questions about roadways, traffic and transportation, with your name and the municipality where you live, to hartzell@mcall.com, or write to Road Warrior, Box 1260, Allentown, PA 18105-1260.
