Like stockpiling nuclear weapons, constructing roadside billboards works best if you’re the only one doing it. Fortunately, today’s Capital Times brings good news for everyone who wants to live in a city that looks nice:

The effort to ease Madison’s 40-year ban on erecting new billboards has apparently run out of steam — although officials with Adams Outdoor Advertising said today they won’t give up.

My libertarian instinct to say “businesses can put up whatever signs they want to on their own land” is overridden by my liberal belief in the existence of public spaces, and in our right to protect those spaces. There’s no reason for large stretches of the beltline to look like an urban slum.

Billboards are obnoxious, garish, and intrusive, and the idea behind the proposed ordinance seems to be that, instead of allowing old billboards to go slowly but surely into the unlamented past of teepee motels and Burma Shave signs, owners can replace them with new billboards that add flashing lights and blinking plasma displays. Thank you, but no.

Things apparently not considered include the possibility that the presence of big shiny things deliberately designed to attract as much attention as possible could in any way distract drivers who are passing by at 65 mph; or the possibility that the primary social utility of billboards is as visual pollution, and that their continued presence is yet another tragedy of the commons.

Posted by Ben Brothers at 3:34 pm, 25 March 2008 and filed under Madison News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.