The American state of Vermont has banned billboards since 1968. It makes spending time in the state extraordinarily pleasant.
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.
I have a hard time accepting the "in part" even, and sort of align with "the only reason it's expensive is because of the closeness to SV".
But yes it is very nice. And yes billboards would make it less nice.
Large numbers of high paying jobs are necessary for high housing prices except in tax havens like Monaco.
One summer a job was across the our small lake, a 40 minute drive by car, but maybe 10 minutes by boat as the crow flies. Sure, I got wet during rain and wavy days, but clothes get dry, and it sure was convenient.
I often wondered, if the job was in SF itself, do people take boats to get to work? If so, why not? I presume docking costs? The place I worked had their own dock, so ... "sure, just tie up over there every day".
https://www.goldengate.org/ferry/schedules-maps/
https://www.blueandgoldfleet.com/sausalito/
I don't know of anyone using or having used a private boat to make the commute.
He was OK but apparently the was a lot of boat theft in that area too.
At another job, the project manager lived in WA but worked in Palo Alto. He flew (commercial) in early Monday, with a small apartment to live in during the week, then take off mid-afternoon Friday to be back in WA with his family for the weekend.
<https://marinmagazine.com/community/history/history-of-a-hig...>
At least one billboard, along 101 at the highway cut between San Rafael and Larkspur, survived until the late 1970s or early 1980s, but was burned down in what has been described as the closest an act of arson has come to earning an award of commendation by the Marin County Board of Supervisors.
More recently, a "flower billboard" was created, and in 2010 removed, along US-101 in Novato:
<https://www.marinij.com/2010/08/24/controversial-flower-bill...>
(That article also places the county-wide ban more recently, in the 1970s.)
They are incredibly obnoxious. I’m surprised if they don’t case car crashes.
Fucking blinding.
I got stopped at a roadblock even before LED's, the highway patrol officer said "I wasn't sure you were going to stop, you nearly ran over [X] over there" and my reply was, "Your lights are so bright, and blue, and right here on the road, that I can't see a thing. I'm glad I didn't."
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.
To prevent "ambush marketing", the IOC demands control over advertising in the area around the games. Given what a big deal it was for a city like Atlanta to get to host the games, this was one of the few times when the public was going to win despite the money and influence of the advertising industry. To its credit, Atlanta has mostly stuck by those Olympic era billboard laws. The biggest exception probably is the huge video board next to the Ernst & Young building but it replaced a much more modest video sign that had already been there.
Being a large city, Atlanta has the resources to fight court challenges against the well funded advertising industry. Several of the suburban and exurban communities I lived in had citizens and governments united in their hatred of billboards but they lacked the resources to prevent them as the billboard companies have lots of experience with bleeding local governments dry in court, sending a message to other local governments to not even bother trying to oppose them. Big cities however can do better... if they wish to.
Los Angeles, you have an opportunity in 2028. Will you take advantage of it like Atlanta did?
I was shocked by the number of "One call, that's all" accident attorney billboards in LA and FL when I drove through them several years ago.
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.
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”.)