The cityscape of Los Angeles is under assault by a wave of electronic billboards. They loom, glowing, over the busiest intersections on the Westside. They beam their rotation of images into bedroom windows in Silver Lake. They rise above the downtown freeways, demanding attention from drivers.
In December, the Los Angeles City Council called for a cease-fire in the form of a moratorium on new billboards for three months. And now vital backup has arrived: a ruling from the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upholding the city's earlier attempt to regulate billboards.
City Hall needs to build on that momentum and adopt a drastic battle plan to keep our neighborhoods from being overrun by technologies that didn't exist when the court case began.
Los Angeles was caught flat-footed once before. The gasoline price spikes of the 1970s drove many independent filling stations out of business, which led to a glut of available land on prime corner locations. Before local governments figured out the effect of this economic shift, street corners all over the city had been overtaken by mini-malls.
As with the transition from corner filling stations to strips of convenience stores, the proliferation of electronic billboards is the result of a combination of factors. Advertisers are looking for new ways to penetrate the consciousness of consumers (especially captive audiences in cars and on buses). Developers and property owners claim they need the billboard revenue and now frequently direct their architects to incorporate billboards into building designs. New technology makes it possible for signs to be brighter and to change images every five to 10 seconds. A new type of LED-embedded glass will make it possible for the whole side of a high-rise building to throb with electronic images.
But the digital advertising trend is just the latest chapter in the city's long, troubled history with billboards. As major financial donors to local political campaigns, the billboard companies can get City Hall's attention. They generally have succeeded in watering down government regulation, making Los Angeles the nation's worst big-city example of billboard blight.
When the City Council tried to regulate billboards in 2002, the outdoor advertising companies sued. That led to a 2006 settlement negotiated by the city attorney's office and approved by the council that gave the industry carte blanche to convert 840 existing billboards into electronic displays.
