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Comment by miklosz | Hacker News Reader

The city of Cracow in Poland banned billboards (and other visual advertising quite aggressively) about 2 years ago. Great outcomes. There are still some workarounds that companies do to put this s..t out in the public (e.g. covers of renovation works can contain up to 50% of advertising area, so we have renovations of just finished buildings only to put the covers with ads). Now, when I visit another city when there's no such ban I cannot stand this visual garbage. This should be banned everywhere.

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On my visits to Warsaw, I have always been struck by the translucent advertising entirely covering the sides of new-ish office buildings. Now I know how/why this is possible.

Example (hard to find because no-one takes photos of the ugly buildings in Warsaw):

https://www.businessinsider.in/thumb/msid-70660934,width-640...

It's corruption. On paper it's probably construction or renovation and there is some fraudulent deal between inspection department in city hall and marketing agency. Fuck you, Coca Cola.

Wow, that photo is taken on film, I bet.

That photo looks like the 90s though...

I've had the same experience in Bucharest.

The Paris of the East? Strange.

Warsaw is the most visually depressing place I have ever been to.

Really? I thought the old area along the west bank of the Vistula was nice. I didn't see much of the rest of the city, but most cities are uninspiring outside of their central areas.

You should visit Bucharest. Or, I imagine, Detroit :-p

Nah Detroit has some beautiful architecture and really surprised me when I visited last year. Also being on a river and next to a lake is a nice feature. I've been to plenty of more depressing places in the US

Mostly any ex-steel based industry town in the rust belt except Detroit, only because it has been the focus of overt development to directly impact its image as a wasteland. Not sure what took its place.

Maybe Gary, Indiana? It's pretty crappy.

Ok, so that I don't disparage the good name of Detroit anymore, can you give me some names of those bad places? :-D

Gary, Indiana

In Bucharest in the last years the mayors fought back quite successfully against those all-covering billboards. However enjoy it while it lasts - we just had local elections and the old mafia got back in office, so I bet the billboards will be back very soon (and cables hanging off every pole and expensive concrete wastelands and and and).

When travelling through Poland then the contrast of visual pollution by billboards and other advertisements has been very big, between for example Estonia, Latvia, the nordic countries and Poland.

In Poland basically everything is covered in huge adveretisements, "Kantor" here and there, car repair shops, etc. On bus stops all the walls are covered in them and there is even something on top of it, facing the road.

Drinving there is tiring, the brain just gets tired from it.

We think its part of slavic culture or something.

>We think its part of slavic culture or something.

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.

Same deal here in Chicago compared to the West Coast city where I previously lived

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

To that point: https://imgur.com/UWqa8jX

Why the pharmacies? I noticed the same thing visiting Vegas, half the shops on the strip are pharmacies

I have no idea about them, a lot of people think they're fronts for money laundering. Alternatively, dunno... I guess gamblers are also addicts of sorts? Plus I imagine they drink, abuse their bodies so they need regular medication?

In Vegas they sell beer, wine, and spirits. They’re also filled with general items.

Only two from the same chain? Laughs in Brazilian

https://x.com/choquei/status/1661450590474362887

Bravo!

> Driving there is tiring, the brain just gets tired from it.

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

Damn, I identify with that photo a lot. Portugal is truly honorary Eastern Europe.

Up here in Lithuania we used to make fun of your billboards 20 years ago. But now it's getting worse and worse here too. While you seem to have rebounded from the lowest point.

It's not like that in the countryside. But in the cities, especially among the major inbound roads, yikes.

Try a drive in Pennsylvania.

> should be banned everywhere

Totally agree. Particularly vexed by New York letting Sidewalk Labs put these billboards across our streets [1].

[1] https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/u...

They are probably paying the city revenue.

> are probably paying the city revenue

They absolutely are.

At least that one isn't blocking the footpath unlike what we've been dealing with in Sydney:

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

This is so wonderful. One instantly goes from feeling like a consumption robot to feeling human, just from looking at the pics. I wish this was everywhere.

https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/11sbctl/krak%C3%B3w...

Hopefully you like looking at the face of Lewandowski because it's all over the place.

A true classic. It looked extra cheesy when he advertised for Huawei.

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 remember his silhouette of size of entire building printed on scaffolding covering entire facade of a multi-storey building and advertising Huawei. Now Iga Świątek is slowly taking over, recently she popped out in payment terminal when I was trying to touch in the debit card. Get the fuck off, greedy girl. Please don't force me to watch you bloody face.

If it's not her, it will be somebody else. The system is the problem, not specific people.

Lol that’s the last name of one of my Polish coworkers. Super common name I imagine.

> (e.g. covers of renovation works can contain up to 50% of advertising area, so we have renovations of just finished buildings only to put the covers with ads).

Actually finetuning the policies and regulations may provide the right incentive to both promote regular upkeep of buildings as well as funding them. Example: Ads over scaffold are only allowed every 5 years during renovations.

There put scaffold up just to hang advertising?!? That is so incredibly expensive, how can it be worth it? I had recently some shutters installed at my home (second floor) and the most expensive part was the scaffold…

The marketing budget for a billboard / poster campaign is in the millions; they have to spend it somewhere or they’ll get less next year.

Moreover, if it's the _only_ advertising opportunity in the space, it's nominally higher value than it would be in a city with a large billboard presence.

Can't scaffolding be reused though? If it lasts for years, and can be reused, then there's probably standard amortisation approaches for it.

Oh yeah, I meant the renting of scaffolding is super expensive.

Currently in Krakow, this city is absolutely gorgeous for the eastern bloc. Now I understand why.

Mixed blessing of the coming AR (augmented reality) adscape is that virtual ads projected into our eyeballs will be cheaper and more targeted/effective than meatspace billboards.

I hope there will be a ublock origin AR edition.

AR “metaverse” stuff did not take off on the last hype cycle, and even Apple's VR headset does not sell. If AR is “coming,” it is coming rather slowly.

AR is "coming" in the same way smartphones were coming for years (decades?). Then iPhone happened and the rest is history. Technology needs to reach a level where it becomes obviously useful (for AR - low weight, cool form, not tiring,...)

And that's pretty much the whole reason why Facebook/Meta can't be trusted with this stuff. :(

And now only rich corporations have the money to show off their big signs. Lots of smaller companies had to hide theirs, but ones like IKEA or MAKRO did manage to evade it, and will probably continue to evade it happily. Also some billboards are now empty, and are still covering up the tree line, because nobody wants to spend another cent giving the amount of money everyone had to pay up for this.

I've actually moved out from Cracow shortly after this legislation, not directly because of it, but this surely contributed to the decision. The direction Cracow is heading to is clear -- you will have nothing and you'll be happy.

What were other reasons?

3.5k EUR per meter for a flat in commie block perhaps? Cheap outsourcing jobs where you're old reaching a mere 40? Aggressive football hooligans?

Not sure why this is greyed out, every point is true.

There was even a situation a few weeks ago where a guy went to the office with an axe and attacked someone. The guy wasn't even a football hooligan I think.

https://www.wprost.pl/kraj/11746912/krakow-wtargnal-z-siekie...

> 3.5k EUR per meter for a flat in commie block perhaps?

Thank Koalicja Developerska and PiS for inflating property market... but meh "investors"

> Cheap outsourcing jobs where you're old reaching a mere 40?

40 of what?

> Aggressive football hooligans?

When? Kraków is quite safe, especially compared to other places in Europe..

I don't care about your political shenanigans pis/po/twojastara/whatever. Oligarchs do in Poland whatever they want while poor Polish idiots only think about buying another 25 sqm apartment and a newer German car.

40 of potatoes, duh.

The escapades of Wisła/Cracovia baboons are not normal. As long as anyone is randomly asked "which team do you support" the football is to be eliminated from the city.

> The escapades of Wisła/Cracovia baboons are not normal. As long as anyone is randomly asked "which team do you support" the football is to be eliminated from the city.

Are you stuck in the '90s? Ffs...

People in Kraków get cut with machetes and still hear "za kim jesteś" in 2024. Football baboons should fuck off from the city.

Price per meter when buying a flat was #1.

#2 was hostility to private car transport (neglection of road infrastructure, introduction of car-free zones will surely happen soon). Traffic jams are the default state of things, and it's a waste of life.

#3 is that it's a tourist city; a good place to visit, pay money and go home. Not a good place for me to live every day (I've lived there for 15 years, and if you're a happy citizen then good for you). Most of the people here are not from Cracow itself. Warsaw suffers from the same problem.

Polish society mentally is at the stage where car is the status symbol and part of their identity. Amplified by the fact that they're historically unable to construct their own car. Nobody is giving up their Mercedes/Volvo/BMW/Audi in a lease 1k EUR per month to walk around or drive bicycle around the city. Especially that employment regulations promote taking a lease for a car and having company's car is the ultimate benefit. Plus the obnoxious trend of huge SUVs and American-style pickups. People move out to the outskirts, buy more cars and bigger cars and then... they commute daily to the city.

> People move out to the outskirts, buy more cars and bigger cars and then... they commute daily to the city.

And then moan about traffic jams.

As a non pole living in Poland I think you are being unfair. The car mentality is not new, nor is it evil by itself. On the contrary it is supported by the reality that inner-cities are unbearably expensive and people need to live in the suburbs just like in the US. It is no irony that the same phenomenae has similar consequences. It is not people who are bad or stupid, on the contrary.

In Wroclaw they added hundreds of KM of bike lanes....crisscrossing normal roads. I would like to take my children by bike to their kindergarten but I dont want me or them to die.

So indeed i take my car, which i regret not being a damn fat SUV because i cannot damn stand being shaken out of my bones anymore. The roads are the German coblestone type and they are not crap because of the potholes. That is already a taken, no. The whole roads have severe long period troughs and hills that together with the pot holes make the experience a nightmare. Sprinkle that with tramlines, activated or not and I am currently considering moving out. The trams and buses work well but politicians and well meaning people often forget you need the car for things like the supermarket? I have a family of several so i cannot just take the tram or by bike for groceries. Oh my, i need a car. The sin, we are all "patola"[1] :).

And this is not just in the city proper, the surroundings' roads are awful as well. I just damaged my rim and tire driving on a normal road 40Km/h while doing this gas guzzling hobby of taking my children to a local forest.

I am a bit upset writing this because all these people in power in Europe dont have traditional families and exist in their own heaven on earth where they are independent in a very pure state. When i was 20 or if I would be a single I would get it, but with a family, please take your silly ideals elsewhere(this is for the mayor Jacek Sutryk who is unironically a bachelor).

Portugal is a bit better in that the left leaning well-doers preach but people are too real to let things get ridiculous. The talking heads sometimes fantasize about bikes everywhere but then the cities are hilly and old so it is unfeasible to add bike lanes.

[1] Patola is a derrogative name from pathological [family]. It is used to insinuate you come from a dysfunctional, often alcoholic family. Very common insult in Poland which I am fascinated about. I wonder if this insult exists in other Slavic countries.

I don't understand how you ended up and why would you live in Wrocław. I ended up there one winter when the city was notoriously in media for having among the worst air in the country and evacuated after trial period. The ruling "elite" is an awful corrupted clique holding multiple public offices each, police regularly beats random people to death. Exclusively outsourcing and nearshoring jobs with miserable salaries, with established cliques in every workplace. The real estate prices skyrocketed yet thousands of "poor" Ukrainians and people from Causasus somehow can afford living there.

> On the contrary it is supported by the reality that inner-cities are unbearably expensive and people need to live in the suburbs just like in the US.

Noone is forcing people into suburbs (which are awful in itself) but people feel the need to have detached house with garden (as a status, just like car…)

> Noone is forcing people into suburbs (which are awful in itself) but people feel the need to have detached house with garden (as a status, just like car…)

Sure. How dare people not afford 1.2 million PLN( 304k$) so that 4 people (2 adults + 2 children) can live in a 80 sqm apartment[1].

The theme in these answers are very common, the majority of people wanting comfort are wasteful and vain. I guess back in the day of Gierek's(communist times) buildings were the right fit.

[1] https://rynekpierwotny.pl/wiadomosci-mieszkaniowe/raport-cen...

Yes, because thanks to dumb housing market becoming "investors eldorado" instead of doing more dense residential building that doesn't require creating "subursbs" and dumb urban sprawl.

You are aware that it's possible to create relative big departments in such scheme, right?

Yes and I recommend you Wrocław city museum for a showcase of beautifully thought out plans that never went anywhere even when Wrocław was Breslau. It is the reason I was touched by such a mundane topic that I would not otherwise be interested in.

One of the reasons such plans did not go ahead is that it required a state that can expropriate left and right and amounts of capital not available to localities, even in cities like Wrocław.

Those kind of grand plans only work if there is a national drive that imposes it, or most likely after a war. This is true in Poland Portugal or anywhere developed and desirable.

Introducing car free zones before public transit is good enough to replace cars is such a strange move.

A friend of mine lives in a car free zone but public transit stops at 23:00. He is just supposed to stay inside his home at night I guess. No parties for him.

That's what taxis/ubers are for. It's not economically viable in every City to have public transport running empty all night just for a few people who like to party yet live far away from the party scene.

It's not really economically viable to take a taxi to your night-shift warehouse job. That is around 70% of your daily wage going towards transportation.

How many people are doing nightshifts as part of the total employed population who mostly do day shifts?

Unfortunately the same economies of scale apply to them as well. You can't have city wide public transport run 24/7 because a very small amount of the workforce works during the night.

And night shifts tend to be set in order to overlap with public transport schedules (10pm-6am) so that's not such a big problem.

I took a bus at 03:00 in the night from Santa Monica Beach to Hollywood. During a week day.

If it is possible in the US of all places, it should be possible in The Netherlands.

Technically everything is possible, you can even fly people to commute to the space station, the questions is why some places consider night routes to be economically viable and some not, but that doesn't change the fact that public transportation night routes are a loss maker for the company.

I guess it depends on how much the local government is willing to subsidize public transport, since otherwise daily price tickets will have to go up for all travelers to subsidize the few night travelers.

Here in Austria we also don't have night routes during the week in cities that are not Vienna even if some people still need to travel during the night, but the transport companies can't run at a loss, so it's either the state pays for it(via higher taxes for everyone) or the day travelers will pay more for it, there's no free lunch here, someone still needs to pay for the unprofitable night service which is a loss maker. How Santa Monia does it I don't know but it doesn't change the fact the night services are loss makers everywhere and public transportation in general is only profitable at massive scale often relying on public subsidies to stay afloat even in the US.

Also public transportation costs are not apples to apples comparable between countries. Maybe it works in the Santa Monica, since fuel is dirt cheap or maybe they subsidize a lot and maybe they can pay bus drivers peanuts or something I don't know, but here in Austria running public transport is very expensive (unions, pensions, strict work hours, great workers benefits, infrastructure, maintenance, running costs, etc), especially in cities other than Vienna, so the routes are pretty shit and night routes non existent in order to not loose money, so most people rely on private cars or taxis for commutes out of hours. Improving that would come at increased costs and ticket prices are already maxed out and so are taxes.

I was conducting 4 years ago a polling survey for a political party in Oslo nocking on doors and asking people opinion of recent or planned changes in the city. I was surprised how many car owners supported bans on parking on the streets and making bicycle lines instead. It decreased traffic jams.

Basically, people started to park in big parking garages with good connections to main roads. Surely it required more time to walk. But then one spends much less time finding a place to park. And traffic from/to small roads were a significant contribution to jams.

It's funny seeing the behavioral differences in communally oriented societies vs idiosyncratic societies. This kind of proposal would never work in USA or India, but I could see it work in Japan and Korea.

> #2 was hostility to private car transport (neglection of road infrastructure, introduction of car-free zones will surely happen soon). Traffic jams are the default state of things, and it's a waste of life.

So you want more cars and at the same you moan about traffic? o_O

If you claim that traffic jams are was of life then even more you should be anti-cars...

If you want to book a visit through NFZ and you can't, because there are too many people wanting in queue, do you want to eliminate people so the queues are smaller? No? But why? You should be anti-people so that the queues are smaller!

Man, Kraków is very car centric by any reasonable measure. There are huge multilane roads cutting through the city in all directions. There is zero enforcement on speed and pollution limits. It's very dangerous to move around if you're not inside a car.

Cars are just too space inefficient as inner city transportation. Traffic jams are the result of car centric choices incentivizing everyone to drive not the other way around.

It is sad to see the correct reply grayed out. This kind of regulation is known to breed corruption & abuse, tilting the field heavily towards the highest spenders. Can only be enacted when ideology trumps well established knowledge & experience.

Zürich resident here. In this specific case the abuse is even pretty openly stated :(

> The Supreme Court’s ruling cements a decision to remove more than three-fourths of its once-standing 172 billboards from the town, keeping the remainder available for culture and sports ads.

By "culture and sports ads" they surely mean adverts by the government for its own subsidized services. Local government is a huge spender on billboard advertising around here, often for its own state run sports or events (invariably stuff that's popular with lefty civil service types like obscure dance performances).

Lately they also love to paint trains and trams in garish colors, in an open advert for diversity ideology:

https://www.bahnonline.ch/27379/mit-dem-zvv-gemeinsam-vorwae...

Die Farben und Formen des neuen visuellen Auftritts widerspiegeln die Buntheit und Diversität des gesamten ZVV-Netzes.

... and they don't seem to have a problem either with all the posters that get glued everywhere advertising May Day, Feminists for Anarchism and so on.

The idea cantonal governments have a problem with "visual pollution" is kind of absurd, really. If that's actually the motivation then step one would be to stop buying billboard space with taxpayer money, stop flooding the city with rainbows, clean up all the pro-Gaza graffiti and go entirely without any of that for a few years. Once they've proven they have the discipline to clean up the sort of visual pollution they themselves tend to like, then they might have a moral leg to stand on for banning other forms of advertising.

I love the idea of acoustic and visual hygiene, fighting the acoustic and visual pollution. The flaw is in human nature and the attitude "but _we_ are allowed, _our_ case is different". If the enforcers will be local authorities, they will be unable to resist displaying out their message. If there is at least one CHF and one person in the promotion and marketing department, the idea will pop out. Hey look at the bright side, at least they didn't cover the tram's windows!

> Hey look at the bright side, at least they didn't cover the tram's windows!

They did though, if only partially. While the parts overlapping the windows are not 100% opaque, in my experience such ads do significantly worsen the viewing view from inside the vehicles.

This has to be one of the stranges political segway rants I've seen on this site and that's saying something.

We can't ban billboards on Bahnhofstrasse and rest of the city just because you've seen some graffiti supporting Palestine? What?

> We can't ban billboards on Bahnhofstrasse and rest of the city just because you've seen some graffiti supporting Palestine? What?

Of all the text the op wrote that is definitely a personal and unfair interpretation and not what he written.

His point is clear: If the goal is reducing visual pollution then a state advertisement is just as polluting as a commercial one.

I see very little "state advertisements" in Zurich these days, which is why the whole post is so bizarre.

You might not be recognizing them as state adverts, because Switzerland has the largest amount of government advertising of any place I've ever been. By far. If you can't see that you're either unfamiliar with other places or not recognizing the ads as coming from the state. Recall that the definition of the state also includes government-owned companies like SBB, ZVV, EWZ, ZKB. Adverts by any of these companies is an advert by the state. That's a generously narrow definition: it's not including advertising for parties or referendum positions, which saturate billboards any time there's an upcoming vote, nor advertising by state subsidized industries like farming.

Here are some examples.

Walk down to Bellevue. Start to walk along the lake to the China Garden. You will walk past some of the most prime advertising real estate in the city. There are several billboard signs in a row right at the top corner of the lake. Highest footfall of anywhere in the city outside of Bahnhofstrasse itself. When I did this yesterday every single ad was by government, for government. For example, one of them is currently advertising the government-run Native American Museum:

https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/kultur/de/index/institutionen/n...

Walk down the lake and you'll encounter more such billboards, all showing government ads. In fact I don't think I've ever seen a non-state advert on any of these places.

Go to a Filmfluss event. It starts with 10 minutes of ads. On Saturday when I went to a showing with my wife, I counted and around half of the ads were by the state. Amongst others: multiple recruiting ads for the Stadtpolizei, ads for ZKB, multiple ads for EWZ, ads for state-funded cultural events etc.

Get on the train or tram. Look at the billboards inside the carriage. Many of them will be ads for the SBB's own services or offers, or recruiting ads for drivers (especially popular at the moment), or the Gemeinsam Vorwarts campaign. These are all state advertising.

If you see all this and really think it's very little then I don't know what to say. Go spend some time in other places of comparable size and pay close attention to how many ads are by the state or state owned companies. It will be lower.

GP has several examples of the government itself contributing to visual pollution. Including for purposes that don't match the interests of many citizens.

I don't thinkg this should mean that ads can't be banned but the government should absolutely be called out for planning to continue its own ads.

Except that vast majority of Zurich is covered by commercial ads and they're massively visually distracting in a way the "government ads" they're trying to call out aren't.

It just has no connection to reality.

The train example is extremely visually distracting. You are free to provide examples of your own to underline your point.

You are rather self-righteous for someone that uses words incorrectly.

Interesting, thank you. Especially the point about government being a huge spender where it has reduced regular commerce.

> this surely contributed to the decision

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?

I really dislike ads and I use adblock & umatrix like crazy. But:

1) Ads in cities are not penis enlargement ads nor mortgage ads. They are about what services are in which location in the city,

2) It's not really about ads, but about advertising in general, meaning you don't even get to show off the logo of your company. If there's a building standing in Cracow, it can't have any logos on it. Unless the company is rich, then it may have their logos. Good thing that Cracow in general doesn't have any tall buildings (well, just one).

For me it's socialism at its finest. Forbid the poor, allow the rich. From ideological stance I prefer seeing ads, because I dislike socialism more than I dislike ads.

> 1) Ads in cities are not penis enlargement ads nor mortgage ads. They are about what services are in which location in the city,

Not the case anywhere I have been. Some will be for local businesses, most are for national or international behemoths. Pretty much the same as with ondline ads on so-called respectable sites.

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