Billboards, Distractions, and Highway Safety

(#2 in a series of 5 including Lamar, Billboards, Advertising and Supply & Demand, Advertising and Propaganda, and Advertising and the Information Age.)

Here's how I look at billboards: they are devices that intend to distract you while driving on the highway. They do this for money. 37,000 Americans die annually in car accidents. A system that permits and rewards the distraction of drivers is indefensible.

Billboard companies sell a brief slice of your attention, which is not theirs to sell, by using their skill and art to distract you, to catch your eye and stay in your mind. If that puts your family at risk on the highway, well, we still have freedom of speech in this country, tough noogies.

Billboards are designed so that your eye wants to read them. That's intrusive and obnoxious. It would probably be considered brain washing (if not torture) to strap somebody into a seat and make them watch a screen of briefly projected messages, and yet this is the experience of somebody traveling in the front seat of a car on our highways.


You may not be allowed to have a TV screen in the front seat of your car, but it's all right if somebody wants to show you a bright, colorful, digital billboard as you're driving. So we kill a few pedestrians or bicyclists every year while drivers are looking at the pretty pictures - we've got to keep the economy moving forward.




Not to mention that the messages may be loathsome or offensive to you.








I'm sorry to repeat myself: they distract drivers for money. Everyone of those signs has a permit from a local politician. The only explanation of how this persists, and even thrives, is corruption.