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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It just has no connection to reality.