By Harold herskowitz
This Thursday the Lakewood township plans on giving away the rights to install five 40 foot high digital billboards. Besides the eyesore, and incovenience these signs will cause ,there is a direct correlation to traffic accidents. I can write a lot about the corruption,and the obvious payback... for positive press. I will leave it to this excerpt from a national article on the subject of electronic billboards
If we know that flashing digital billboards are guaranteed to increase distraction, and we know that driver distraction is the number one cause of traffic fatalities... then why would we even consider placing commercial digital billboards on highways?
The precautionary principle argues that we have a social responsibility to protect the public from exposure to harm when scientific evidence has found a plausible risk. This alone should lead every jurisdiction to implement an immediate ban on outdoor digital advertising.
Let’s not make the same mistakes we did about smoking. The first suggestion that cancer was related to smoking was in 1912, followed seventeen years later by the first statistical evidence of a lung cancer-tobacco link. The first Surgeon General report stating the health risks of second-hand smoke appeared in 1972, but due to industry lobbying it took more than twenty years before smoking was fully banned in bars, airplanes and workplaces.
These days, we laugh at how absurd it was to allow smoking in restaurants, decades after we knew about the risks. And I have no doubt that one day, twenty years from now, we’ll look back at this time and laugh at the absurdity of allowing bright digital billboards to be installed along highways and near urban traffic flow, designed explicitly with the sole purpose of intentionally distracting drivers.
New proposals are being submitted by the billboard industry every month, for increased digital signage on North American highways. And community groups are fighting back.
Today’s politicians need to decide what side of history they want to be on. Do they want to help enable the growing corporate denialism of the outdoor advertising industry? Or do they want to be remembered as the ones who stood up to protect public spaces and save lives?
This Thursday the Lakewood township plans on giving away the rights to install five 40 foot high digital billboards. Besides the eyesore, and incovenience these signs will cause ,there is a direct correlation to traffic accidents. I can write a lot about the corruption,and the obvious payback... for positive press. I will leave it to this excerpt from a national article on the subject of electronic billboards
If we know that flashing digital billboards are guaranteed to increase distraction, and we know that driver distraction is the number one cause of traffic fatalities... then why would we even consider placing commercial digital billboards on highways?
The precautionary principle argues that we have a social responsibility to protect the public from exposure to harm when scientific evidence has found a plausible risk. This alone should lead every jurisdiction to implement an immediate ban on outdoor digital advertising.
Let’s not make the same mistakes we did about smoking. The first suggestion that cancer was related to smoking was in 1912, followed seventeen years later by the first statistical evidence of a lung cancer-tobacco link. The first Surgeon General report stating the health risks of second-hand smoke appeared in 1972, but due to industry lobbying it took more than twenty years before smoking was fully banned in bars, airplanes and workplaces.
These days, we laugh at how absurd it was to allow smoking in restaurants, decades after we knew about the risks. And I have no doubt that one day, twenty years from now, we’ll look back at this time and laugh at the absurdity of allowing bright digital billboards to be installed along highways and near urban traffic flow, designed explicitly with the sole purpose of intentionally distracting drivers.
New proposals are being submitted by the billboard industry every month, for increased digital signage on North American highways. And community groups are fighting back.
Today’s politicians need to decide what side of history they want to be on. Do they want to help enable the growing corporate denialism of the outdoor advertising industry? Or do they want to be remembered as the ones who stood up to protect public spaces and save lives?