A Swiss town banned billboards. Zurich, Bern may soon follow

The man is a sellout and it has a kind of charm, because he knows his place: He is a just football player on the verge of retirement and he wants to squeeze the juice for the last drop.

I find it extremely hard to believe that someone would personally want to see more ads.

Do you believe physical advertisements represent that some sort of specific political system is in place?

It isn't. It's the same, or worse, in Romania.

It's just rabid unregulated capitalism of the post communist countries, gone wild, where everything is about making as much money as possible any way you can, which means advertising everywhere so you can influence people to spend their money with you. Romania is now IRL what the internet looks like without ad block.

The ads for gambling and betting are the most nefarious, to the point it's becoming a societal issue.

I moved away from Poland a decade ago, and each time I come back I get distracted like crazy as a passenger in a car. My brain doesn't know what's happening for the first hour until I realize what's up.

Literally every 50m there's a billboard on a road, billboard on someone's house, billboard on a fence. From big companies (telcos etc.) through all kinds of local businesses ("Selling X", "buying Y", "repairing Z").

A relevant meme that is on point: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EvoPf6OWYAMC0Sd.jpg

https://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/ridiculous-electron...

I moved here from Istanbul 12 years ago. the progress there was positive in this timeframe while in Randstad it was backwards to be honest. public transportation became more expensive and unreliable. busses are often empty and they seem to compensate this by increasing prices and cutting down the frequency, so it becomes less reliable for people to use it..

my commute to work is 15 km. it's 20 min by car without traffic but post-Covid traffic is so bad that it's 50 mins in average (1 hour+ on Tuesdays). bus is 30 mins with 1 connection but often I miss the connection and wait 15 mins, so it's 45 realistically. both are bad options, so I cycle instead in half an hour with my e-bike. if it's bad weather I take the car because busses are not on time so I can't plan being at the office for a meeting or so. plus, bus is much more expensive than my not so fuel efficient old car. go figure.

No, you can also start by imposing restrictions on cars.

> If public transit was a good option to get to work for people, more people would use it.

The people that live in the city center probably already use public transit because, for them, public transit is probably a faster commute. That means that the cars congesting the center are driven by people that live in the periphery or even suburbs outside of the city.

So these people will want those nasty cars out, because they actually live there, and they will vote them out.

You can never accommodate the people from the suburbs, unless they have a station right next to their door and their office and a train coming every 5 minutes, a car will always be faster. They live in someone else's municipality, so the mayors can just ignore them.

People in the periphery are more delicate, but usually they are also tired of congestions, and it's much easier to make at least minor improvements to public transit for them.

But again, you can restrict and make improvements in parallel, and the improvement will almost never be perceived as matching the restrictions anyway.

In the US you couldn’t realistically bike anywhere nor does public transport go everywhere. Not to mention the 10 minute walk to the bus stop is probably much worse, especially outside of big cities.

edit: Meant twice, not half.

I was curious about the statistics for this, and it looks like barely not to me, according to this data: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/figures/detail/84710ENG (the CSV you can download is much more readable than the table in the webpage)

0.44 trips/person/day travelling to/from work total in 2023, 0.21 of those by car. 2023 is the first year where that is the case though.

Edit: If you go to the Dutch version of the data it includes another category for cars (commuting as a passenger in a car) that the English data omitted, with 0.01 of the trips. Moving it from "majority not-by-car in 2023" to "rounding errors mean the data doesn't say which is in the majority": https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/cijfers/detail/84710NED

Agreed! Except for the 24/7. I mean, when it comes to commuting, you need public transport to end late enough for you to stay late, but you don't need it at midnight.

> The majority of people in The Netherlands drive their car to get to work.

Not the majority of city-dwellers in the Netherlands, I'm sure.

> They don't want to have to walk 10 minutes to an edge parking or city hub.

2-minute bike ride then. And I say that as someone who's lived in the Netherlands, albeit only for a few years. It was _such_ a joy to be able to commute without a car (which I am again stuck with these days).

Not if that walk is through a car neighborhood, but if it’s through a neighborhood where there are almost no cars, good sidewalks, trees and grass?

Also, aren’t many neighborhoods already somewhat like that in the Netherlands, with limited on-street parking? Even if there’s a parking garage under an apartment building, it likely already is a 5-10 minute walk to get there.

First, it is a dream, you have to do something to make it work. You are describing the status quo, I want us to move to something else. After decades of neoliberalism, even embraced by the centre-left party, we have eroded our actually quite decent public transport facilities. There is no reason it has to stay this way.

Second, I'm not talking about people commuting to work with public transport vs cars, even though it would be nice to get people out of the car into a much more efficient system. I'm talking about our neighbourhoods, the places where people actually live. I'm talking about going outside your house and not as a first thing having to face the noise, danger, pollution, ugliness, etc. of parked cars and cars moving on the road.

The neighbourhood could be a place where children play on the streets, where there is space to meet each other, with room for trees and other vegetation. If you just move all the tin out of the neighbourhood and to the edges on big solar covered parking lots, then it is easily done. It will create a lot of space and very little downsides. Of course we can't just rebuild all cities, but we can use this design for new ones.

I'm really not talking about parking along the edges of the city, so that you have to take a bus or bicycle in order to get to your car. I want people to park just on the edges of a block or neighbourhood (like 500 to 5000 people, depending on density). You should be able to walk to such a parking lot within 5 min. You would still be able to get to your house for things like groceries and stuff, just not park there. And disabled people would get an exception. Just this relatively simple change will reduce traffic immensely.

Third, it may feel now like you are entitled to be able to park in front of your house and drive to it by car. Everybody must naturally accommodate your wishes in this respect, because this is what the majority wants. However, if we change that and take that away from you, it will not take a lot of time before that changes. And then people will start to feel entitled to be able to have their children play on the streets again, and to enjoy such these carless spaces. In the same way, smokers used to feel entitled to be able to smoke in restaurants, in the train and even at the office. Things can and do change.

For the people who meticulously maxed out the total amount of minutes they are willing to commute, so that they really can't bear to add 2 x 5 minutes of healthy walks a day: they will eventually move jobs closer to home or vice versa, so we eventually again hit the same average of daily travel time which has been stable since medieval times. Reduced emissions is just a bonus.

Really, why are we not doing this? The Netherlands is often seen as a country which has their act together around transportation, but it could still be so much better. Cars are still way too dominant and there are way, way too many of them. We just don't have the space.

They even said mayors of "cities". Not mayors of villages, mayors of towns, mayors of rural areas.

2. I’ve seen a full range of disabilities on transit as well. Plus, isn’t it better for the disabled if it’s easy for them to drive since the roads and parking are mostly free of able-bodied people?

3. If you’re in the countryside, you can still drive when you need to. You can park at the edge of a city and take quick efficient transit to whichever internal part of the city you’d like. Also, living somewhere inconvenient like the countryside is a choice, and that inconvenience should be considered when looking for a place to live

4. I travel for work and have never needed a car. If you do, see the answer above for those in the countryside, that applies too

We can all make cities better without being 100% binary. Cars can be the exception rather than the rule, though

I'm a low-vision US citizen, and our piss-poor public transit here is a massive problem for me.

If they are then that freedom is a valid choice. If they aren't, then they're being subsidized by public amenities, and the public can decide how those amenities should be used.

I believe that Japan bans on-street parking and that you are not allowed to have a car unless you can prove that you have dedicated parking for it. That seems like a good model to me.

Ah yes, the _very elderly or anybody on crutches_... the people who have more to gain from using good public transportation than having to drive a two tons vehicle on streets filled with living kids.

Also you can easily find a parking space, because it's somewhat expensive. But that means I can go downtown on a Saturday, easily find parking for a few hours, do my shit and drive home. Yes it costs 10-15usd for 2 hours of parking. But that's a small price to pay.

Reducing everyone's ability to drive greatly increases the people who actually need to drives ability to do so.

Where I live there are very few billboards. I rarely see them. When I travel (especially to the US) it's very jarring. They are very visually polluting.

Legally speaking, billboards are only banned within 500 yards or some other distance from the highway with the most traffic (where billboards would be most valuable, namely, US 101) but actually there are no billboards anywhere in the county and this has been the case since the 1960s (according to an old newspaper article). My guess is that the community has some way to exert "informal" (not based on formal governmental processes) pressure on landlords. Real estate prices are very high here in part because it is a very attractive landscape with plenty of hills and greenery and bodies of water, so maybe most landlords perceive that billboards have the potential to depress prices and keep the occasional landlord who contemplates erecting billboards in line somehow.

Also as an exception to the general rule, bus shelters (structures owned and maintained by the city or the county to keep the rain and the sun off people waiting for a bus) near US 101 have ads on them (4' by 6' or so) and the buses themselves do, too, or at least they used to--it's been a few years since I noticed.

They are incredibly obnoxious. I’m surprised if they don’t case car crashes.

Here in Germany regulation of outside ads has zero novelty value, it's so much a given that I don't know anything about the history of it. And it turns out the benefits of a ban are much bigger than just more pleasant views, because the ad spend does not simply disappear. Much of it gets channeled into event sponsoring, sports clubs and the like, in short things that actually improve life for all instead of just providing some more passive income for property owners. It's a total no-brainer if there ever was one.

Not entirely, but it impose some very important limits on any signs near highways, such as requiring them to be advertising something that's available from the same property under them.

That effectively blocks the most spammy and egregious forests of signs, because one can't just purchase a small rectangle of near-highway grass and start auctioning space above it to a large shifting pool of national bidders.

https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=47.42.040

Don’t drive I-5 by Fife much, eh? Okay, you did say “usually”.

Redmond has an outright ban on billboards. That’s how I know where the Redmond/Kirkland border is (there’s a billboard on 124th St.) Now if they if they’d just follow King County on those fucking political signs. (King County says “not on public right-of-ways”, Redmond says “where ever you see a patch of grass”.)

Regular people living their lives like to make arbitrary changes to their houses, which is why HOA rules are contentious.

Regular people aren’t paid to advertise as they go about their day. It’s not very comparable.

And I’ve never heard anyone suggest that word of mouth recommendations should be banned... That’s kind of an insane idea that isn’t even remotely possible.

Please consider that your worldview may be warped.

What I have observed is that almost without fail, I find out about really good, high quality products and services from friends and colleagues, through more general word of mouth, by reading reviews, and by research, not through ads.

In fact, it is so noticably true that what is being advertised to me is rarely what I want that I use advertising as a negative signal. If I recall seeing ads for something, I will consciously avoid buying it and that usually works out for the best.

So I conclude advertising is mostly important for duping people into buying things they don't really want or need, that are more than likely nothing special, and that society would benefit greatly from a ban on advertising.

I have gotten precisely one piece of marketing communication that had a positive value in my entire life and it was from an online restaurant supplier. One. Solitary. Closer to forty than I am thirty.

I just don't think the value proposition that you're talking about actually exists.

Genuinely fantastic products spread like wildfire on their own, without paid promotion.

I'd love to live in a world where there's no advertising and so therefore the only products available have to be genuinely fantastic.

I can't see a downside - just as many products will still be needed for just as many people, so it shouldn't affect the economy negatively.

What would happen is we would evolve faster and have more safety, reliability, productivity etc. The lack of useless junk polluting the planet would be yet another positive.

Advertising is a net negative on human evolution.

Example: I found out about JLCPCB from sponsor segments on electronics youtube channels, when they started their offering. Granted this is not a small business (the company behind JLC is a behemoth), but it is a Chinese company unknown in the west, that only did B2B before. They advertised directly to audiences that might be interested.

A side bonus is that this will eliminate a lot of useless garbage. Without advertising to manipulate people into buying things they didn't need and otherwise would not want, companies that sell junk will fail.

At any rate, finding customers within the constraints of the law (including a hypothetical advertising ban) is not society's problem, it's the company's problem.

So what ends up happening is that local businesses don't get any of the marketing opportunities which get bought out by big businesses with a large ad spend budget.

Obviously we need to stop companies from paying them off, but that's not impossible.

As you can see, we have never lived in a free market.

So the way I imagine it would work is that you would register your product into an official registry (free of charge). Then if I need something specific I can search the registry for what I need, and your product might pop up, with links to your website, your videos, as well as all reviews and ratings. There could be a subsidy system that makes unreviewed products cheaper. If your product is really awesome, the awesome reviews should, in principle, suffice to make your business thrive.

Of course, whatever the system in place is, there needs to be work done to make sure it cannot be cheated: if people can pay to prop up their product, they will. But it shouldn't be necessary to pay to make people aware of a product that could improve their lives. Surely it should be possible to set up some kind of discovery system.

This advertising is only legal to put in free versions of media that have paid ad-free versions, and to opt-in newsletters organized by product (so that people can pay to keep it out of their lives but if they're curious about innovations in a space or just want to know what's coming out they can get a slight discount for it).

This also gives an advantage to new companies, which is probably a good thing, though could of course be abused by a billionaire with fly-by-night companies, at which point we'd have to patch that loophole. Maybe with my favorite idea of "ownership disclosures", where the majority owner(s) of any given corporation has to be disclosed on product labels, so that you know if you're buying from Nestle or Unilever even if they want to obfuscate that fact.

Enough people that it eventually becomes unavoidable for the rest. See: all the other horrors of modern civilization that you cannot avoid without becoming a hermit.

There are far more clever and profitable ways to monetize MR than to shove ads in your face wherever you look.

I very much doubt a modern company would take an approach this dumb when they could likely make much more money doing something much more subtle.

- https://www.uniqfeed.com/our-solutions/football/

- https://supponor.com/

They have on their websites some neat examples. For example Supponor literally replaces the ads in the live stream (see the hockey example on their front page).

Not sure if it's the same two companies, but you can find an impressive result video here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/blackmagicfuckery/comments/uf0re1/d...

Good lord!

Where on earth do you live where this dystopia is commonplace?

One goes to a restaurant to relax. I'd be puzzled to say the least if the restaurant owners sought fit to try and sell me crap during a meal.

I guess anything that's invides my brain without my consent (so all billboards, bus-stop LEDs, etc) is annoying ads.

Now, if you see a product ad in a magazine related to the filed that makes more sense (and I'd love to go back to the internet where ads were based on page context and not user tracking data btw)

But I do enjoy the lack of billboards.

There is legislation to grant permission to place some ads in exchange of, say public toilets to use your example.

But removed billboards from buildings or external area weren't taxed or had any positive result to society.

Europe is so backwards on their public toilet investments.

Problem solved.

[1] https://taz.de/Toilettenvertrag-sorgt-fuer-Wirbel/!5431891/ [2] https://www.berlin.de/rbmskzl/aktuelles/pressemitteilungen/2... [3] https://www.rbb24.de/panorama/beitrag/2024/07/107-oeffentlic...

They've even sued TV networks and movie studios for digitally painting different ads over their actual ads in movies and broadcasts.

50+ years ago, the idea of advertisers harvesting your personal data and trading it behind your back to tailor ads for you was completely alien.

Both might lie but it depends on which lie you like to believe as to which form of advertising you find better.

In addition to that by far most things people would want to put in public spaces isn't explicitly designed to upset you like ads are. Why do we allow companies to plaster public spaces with veiled insults?

Because other things in public don't manipulate me into thinking a certain way in order to take money from me. People that attempt to do that are labeled as grifters and scammers, and the legal system deals with them. Why should it be different for ads?

You wouldn't attack another person for their clothes. Because it's on and belongs to a person.

Banksy wouldn't give a damned if you painted over his art. Because it's not on person and belongs to no person. Same as the ad space and the abandoned building he painted over.

He attacked those who legally contributed negatively to public spaces. No one's car is doing that, and if they were, kids would just scribble "Wash Me!" over it and you would be there clapping, oblivious to this conversation until pointed out.

I would hope that you aren't arguing in such bad faith that you can't see that advertising is another thing entirely.

People need to have the capacity to find things.

Today we have the internet, and search engines.

If people want something, they can look.

In this way, all parties consent, otherwise advertisements are harassment.

I wish there was a low friction microtransaction for services which seems to be the main (only?) thing that advertisement allows that would other wise not exist. The technology exists to do this so banning advertisements does not appear to be a net negative to me. Before the pandemic many food deliver services were not viable, now they are (at least where I live), we could have done that without a pandemic but it required something big to force through the change. I see banning certain kinds of ads as one of those big changes but without the pandemic, maybe it'll change habits enough to enable microtransactions.

What you wanted to say is how influential it is, not important, not the same things, how hugely distorts the economy, distorts it on a grand scale! Not important, it is hugely harmful for the economy and societies, hugely!

Probably you'd mean the promotional aspect, the getting informed of a new product kind of thing which was useful if it was not a misleading shameless lie into the face of the society by willful misinformation and forceful push of unwanted matters!

The profession of advertising is only recent, and afaik advertising itself didn't really exist at all until the dawn of patent medicines, that since they were all frauds could only differentiate by circulating their dishonest claims as widely as possible.

> I think it's important to understand this because, although you can ban the particulars: billboards, youtube ads, and so forth, the spirit of advertising will persist, as Lindy things tend to do, only it will be expressed in different forms.

So, I think that this is a misunderstanding that it is important to avoid. There was Roman advertising if 1) you think that merchants decorating the inside of their own houses with art referring to the things that they got rich selling is advertising, 2) you think that inns and restaurants having their own names painted on their outside walls, and possibly having names that implied self-praise is advertising, and/or 3) you think that writing graffiti is self-advertising.

I think the idea that advertising is a force that will automatically express itself through other equally intrusive channels if suppressed is a made up story.

IMO that's even more ammunition as to why this is a problem. This system has enabled a vast amount of personal data collection and erosion of privacy for the sake of the product being 'free'.

I hope for this too. The free internet has grown wildly but now that it’s infested with bots that fundamentally cannot be stopped (without onerous Real ID controls at least) I want an alternative ad-free web that charges micropennies per post.

First, that you're even using Google search or Gmail is providing Google with data they use for marketing. On top of the data those services take in (what you search for, what you click on in the results, how much time you spend watching one video compared to another, what mailing lists you're subscribed to, etc. etc.) they are provided tracking information from the majority of sites you visit (either directly or aggregated from other services). That allows them to let their customers market directly to you or even provide data to other companies (for a fee) so they can market to you more successfully (than not having that data).

Even when paying for a service, the next step is to add ads back into it.

For example, as a paying customer Amazon Video used to let you just watch the movies/shows they had available. Then they started advertising movies that they didn't have available to stream, but you could purchase or rent them. Then they started adding in ads for content that was available on 3rd party services. Now they have in-content ads that you can pay extra to remove.

They're not the only company doing this, but it was just the first/easiest example I could call up that shows a progression of what a company does when they already have your attention/money.

You can see that Google has become progressively more aggressive in pushing ads in their search over the years. They didn't have ads at first, worked their way up to being the "standard" search engine, then started putting ads between results, eventually getting to where we are today. I can do a search today and the entire first screen of results (1080p, zoom level 100%) is just sponsored results. One usually has to scroll a full page to get to any "real" results, assuming that the top non-sponsored results aren't skewed by "the algorithm", which might include things like whether or not the target page uses GA, has ads that benefit Google, conform to what Google thinks is "relevant" (very loose term) basically.

I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to find an excessive amount of examples where services that started making money with a simple product you could pay for, then turned to subscriptions, then turned to add-ons for the subscription, then just started pushing ads into their service regardless if you're already paying or not.

People gladly pay for things they really need. And people do not need all the things they use but do not pay directly for, but covertly and cowardly is drawn from them under the hood! Lied to and cheated the people are!

People not happy, people are forced to use this way! As there are no micropayment solution built instead of the hugely harmful ad practices.

Now granted they may not benefit -you- directly, they may even make -your- life worse, but -society- as a whole keeps them around.

Personally I'm not a smoker, so cigarette companies (to me) are a net loss. On the other hand enough people see them as a gain so I bow to societies vote.

I spent time in several European cities recently (and in the past), and Zurich was the only place where the amount of graffiti really stood out to me. Maybe there was an expectation that a wealthy city/country wouldn’t have tagging, which made it stand out more. Berlin had a lot of both good street art and tagging, but the tagging seemed more concentrated in specific areas.

The graffiti stood out more to me than billboards, but as an American I’m surely desensitized to billboards.

However, if it did happen, the arms race to prevent ad evasion in real life would be interesting. Glass Earth, Inc. by Stephen Baxter is a good short read along the extension of those lines (though the image of a multibillion satellite communications monopoly using a vast fleet of, uh, 67 geosynchronous satellites hasn't dated well!)