RICHMOND--
You've probably seen them, the relatively new electronic, or LED, billboards. You can't miss them.They're bright--brighter than the sun in the daytime--they flash a new advertisement every few seconds and they look like Times Square uprooted and set beside the highway.
And if two bills in the General Assembly pass, the ones you see will be all that are ever allowed in Virginia.
Sen. Patsy Ticer, D-Alexandria, and Del. Joe May, R-Leesburg, have introduced legislation to impose a moratorium on building the LED billboards. The bills would not ban the ones already in existence.
Ticer says she put in her bill at the behest of Scenic Virginia, an organization that lobbies for beautification of the state's roadways.
Ticer and Scenic Virginia's position is that the LED billboards may be dangerously distracting to drivers. They want the state to hold off on allowing more of the flashy signs until two new studies into their effect on drivers can be completed.
"They're dangerous, the ones that are flashing so many messages," Ticer said. "They take your attention off the road."
But outdoor advertising groups say there's no proof that the signs are dangerous; that in fact, two studies already completed show they're no more dangerous than any other distraction to drivers.
"There have been numerous studies, in particular Virginia Tech has done a study, and their conclusion was that it was accident-neutral," said lobbyist Tom Pappalardo, who represents the Virginia Outdoor Advertising Association. "Most studies that we find show that there is no direct link to the new digital boards. Unfortunately there are people who just don't like billboards, and they try to stop the progress and stop them from doing business."
Scenic Virginia, and its parent group Scenic America, are definitely anti-billboard. It's one of the top issues on Scenic America's Web site.
But Scenic Virginia's Leighton Powell says the LED billboards pose a problem with safety, not just aesthetics.
Powell says those studies Pappalardo cites were commissioned by the billboard industry itself, and that peer reviews by other groups have found the studies suffered from "bad science, faulty methodology."
She cited reviews by the Maryland State Highway Administration, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, and the Transportation Research Board of the National Academy of Sciences.
So her organization wants to get the results of two studies just commencing, one by the Federal Highway Administration and the other by the Transportation Research Board. The FHA study, at least, isn't due to be finished until the end of next year.
Powell acknowledged that no current studies have found the flashing billboards to be dangerous to drivers.
But, she said, "You can make a reasonable inference that they are unsafe, because of the data that's been collected in other studies" that shows anything that distracts a driver for more than two seconds can be dangerous.
"The LEDs were built to distract you," she said. "Their whole purpose is to keep your eye off the road and [make you] look at them."
While billboards have been around about as long as people have been driving, the LED billboards are a relatively new phenomenon. Powell, with Scenic Virginia, says a Virginia Department of Transportation employee told her there were only about 50 to 60 of them in Virginia, including some in the U.S. 1 and U.S. 17 areas of southern Stafford County.
They're pricier than a traditional, paper billboard: a quarter-million dollars just to build a one-sided LED billboard, Powell said.
They can also show many more advertisements than a traditional billboard, since the ads change every few seconds, making them more like enormous TV screens. It's easier for companies to change or update an ad on the billboards--instead of having to physically go out and have someone paper over an old billboard ad, the electronic billboards are run by computer. And their flashing lights are definitely eye-catching.
Part of Powell's argument against the boards is their very costliness. When the state or a locality wants to tear down a billboard to make way for something else--such as a road--the government has to pay for the value of that billboard, she said. For a traditional billboard, that can be in the range of $20,000, plus the lost ad revenue. For an LED board, it could be closer to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
"You're actually buying down a business," Powell said. "How can the state ever justify spending that?''
Pappalardo, though, said the bills are solutions in search of a problem.
"There's been no outcry of accidents, causative accidents," he said. "It's unfair. There's no need for a moratorium because there's no outcry or evidence these are causing any accidents. It's just a way of stopping industry from doing business."
Chelyen Davis: 804/782-9362
Email: cdavis@freelancestar.com