When I first started reading Mr. May’s op-ed piece (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 13, “Billboards benefit Missouri economy, safety”) defending billboards in Missouri, I thought it was a reasoned and measured article. However, on reflection, it all falls apart for the following reasons.

First, the very purpose of a billboard is to call attention to itself. It cannot do that without pulling a driver’s attention away from the highway. In other words, they are designed to be a distraction. Yet, Mr. May argues that billboards have no affect on highway safety! That’s as illogical as it gets. These unnamed “studies” that Mr. May refers to carry no weight unless we know more about them. Now we are faced with the prospect of even brighter billboards changing their message every eight seconds. This hugely compounds the distraction element. The fact that LEDs are energy-efficient, as Mr. May observes, is completely off the point.

Secondly, the Missouri Outdoor Advertising Association’s stated purpose is to preserve and protect the right to advertise on our highways. I don’t know where this “right” exists, but if it does exist, surely it is not unbounded, unlimited, unrestrained, and uncontrolled. Shouldn’t there be some balance, a sense of taste, some moderation involved here? The situation along I-70 is an obscenity. It is indefensible. Sure, some billboards are tolerable and even necessary, but the overwhelming number of them just makes them an eyesore. A motorist driving along I-70 feels hammered and battered by one annoying message after another. The only way to deal with this visual bombardment is to ignore it as much as possible. In other words, the billboards have become a self-defeating joke. And an ugly one, at that.

I think we’re far beyond a reasonable level. Enough is enough. The words of Ogden Nash were never more apt than in Missouri when he wrote:

I think that I shall never see

A billboard lovely as a tree.

And if the billboards never fall,

I won’t see a tree at all.

 
Fred Houska
Maryland Heights