Ban LED Billboards
Letter to the Denver City Council:
We at Scenic Colorado applaud and support your efforts to ban LED (electronic) billboards! These unsightly and potentially dangerous devices have no place in the beautiful city that is Denver.
Scenic Colorado wishes to share with you some of the information that has been compiled concerning the hazards of LED billboards to both the environment and to public safety.
First, we would like to direct your attention to an April 2009 study conducted by Jerry Wachtel for the National Cooperative Highway Research Program. Dr. Wachtel is a leading authority on transportation safety. In his study titled Safety Impacts Of The Emerging Digital Display Technology For Outdoor Advertising Signs he reached the following conclusions:
The psychology of cognition, perception, psychophysics and human factors, suggest [that] stimuli such as roadside digital billboards can capture and hold a person’s attention, even at the expense of the primary task (i.e. driving a car).Research sponsored by government agencies, insurance companies, and auto safety organizations regularly demonstrate that the presence of roadside advertising signs such as digital billboards, contributes to driver distraction at levels that adversely affect safe driving performance.
Research sponsored by the outdoor advertising industry generally concludes there is no impact on driver attention, even when, in one case, the actual findings suggest otherwise.
The objective of Dr. Wachtel’s study is “[t]o develop guidance for State Departments of Transportation and other highway operating agencies with respect to the safety implications of digital display technology being increasingly used for outdoor advertising signs.” To achieve these ends, Dr. Wachtel undertook a review of 150 studies, including 20 in the last decade representing original, empirical research, addressing driver distraction from outdoor advertising signs. (p.5)
What is undoubtedly the most sobering about his study is that the distraction of a driver for mere seconds can be disasterous and is summarized as follows:
· Distracting driver’s eyes off the road has been estimated to cause more than 23% of all crashes or near crashes. This is based on studies at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute involving 100 drivers in 100 heavily instrumented cars over 18 months.
· Using a driving simulator, it has been shown that the maximum duration for distraction outside the vehicle averaged 3.54 seconds. Furthermore, both younger drivers and older drivers were “equally bad” at being distracted for long periods. Even an outdoor industry study seeking to minimize differences between digital billboards and other roadside distractions showed longer glances due to digital billboards compared to standard billboards.
· Distractions of 2 seconds or longer increase the likelihood of a crash by 3.7 times. Other studies suggest even lower thresholds of 0.75 seconds or 1.6 seconds.
· Eyes are drawn to an object of different luminance (such as digital billboards) and away from the primary task (such as driving) “regardless of whether we have any interest in this irrelevant stimulus.”
Certainly, if these findings are not fully persuasive, there are added aspects that relate to the environment that few people are aware. Most notably would be the amount of energy required to illuminate an LED billboard:
· One digital billboard consumes 397,486 kWh/year*· The carbon footprint of one digital billboard = 49 traditional billboards or 53 homes
· One digital billboard = 108.41 tons/year of carbon dioxide
· Standard size digital billboard contains 449,280 light-emitting diodes
The following link has video footage of a number of LED bill boards. In looking at these clips it is easy to see how distracting an LED could be for a driver of a vehicle.
http://www.scenic.org/billboards/billboard_videos
Below are photographs of two Denver LED’s. The first is located at East Mexico Ave and South Colorado Boulevard. The second is located at South Colorado Boulevard just North of Cherry Creek Drive North.
Additionally, we at Scenic Colorado encourage the City Council to rethink grandfathering in any out-of compliance billboards. The revised ordinance makes very clear what constitutes maintenance and modification of a billboard and again, this is something that Scenic Colorado supports. However, by grandfathering in 11 out-of-compliance billboards that have not met these standards or the standards of the Outdoor Advertising ordinance in its current form, is simply a gift to the outdoor advertising industry.
There is a due process system in place to address whether these out-of-compliance billboards were legitimately modified. That system should be allowed to continue.
By allowing these billboards to become non-conforming under the revised ordinance would merely maintain 11 billboards on the Denver skyline, where otherwise they would have been removed. And though 11 seems like a small number given the 500 plus billboards in Denver, they are 11 too many to those who live or drive by these unsightly obstructions on a daily basis. Additionally, recently in Colorado Springs, the city balked at paying about $400,000 to buy a large standard billboard out on a major intersection. In circumstances where the city might want to buy out a billboard in order to make necessary improvements, the cost associated with a digital billboard could be astronomical. It is my understanding that the Colorado Department of Transportation CDOT has paid as much as $3 million for large billboards in high traffic areas along I-25 in the heart of Denver. That was before digitals. A digital billboard could cost many millions to buy out once established.
Again, thank you for keeping LED billboards from the Denver skyline! And please, reconsider allowing any billboards to remain that otherwise should go. A billboard’s useful life is probably longer than many of us will be around. Let’s leave a lasting legacy of uncluttered cityscapes to the generations to come!
Very truly yours,
Miles E. Davies
President
Scenic Colorado
489 S. Gaylord St.
Denver, CO 80209