Defending digital billboards in Austin v Reagan

You should read the OAAA’s brief to the Supreme Court in the Austin v Reagan case.  The OAAA  brief makes the following points in response to the criticisms of digital billboards by other parties in the case:

  • Off-premise digital billboards do not present unique safety of aesthetic concerns.
  • Digital billboards are subject to extensive regulation.
  • Digital billboards are not distracting or unsafe.

Kudos to the OAAA brief writers for doing their homework.  They discovered that a digital billboard image in an anti digital billboard brief was a mockup and not a real digital billboard:

The exaggerated nature of the attack on off-premise digital billboards is nowhere better underscored than in the APA brief.  The images of distractingly cluttered landscapes it offers all involve indisputable on-premises, not off-premises signs…And the blinding billboard image presented in its Figure 6, labeled “Photo credit: Arizona Capitol Times,” id. at 14 is in fact uncredited on the newspaper’s website and appears to be a mocked up image available for copying from a Serbian website called urozunic.  See https://bit.ly/3kLMDMCE.  That time lapse image bears no relationship to how digital billboards appear in the real world.

Here’s how the digital billboard image was presented in the Supreme Court brief.

Figure used on American Planning Association brief to US Supreme Court in Austin v Reagan

And here’s the page the image was pulled from.

Billboard Insider’s take:  The OAAA brief gives you valuable talking points to make the case for digital billboards in your community.  If you aren’t a member of the OAAA you should be.  They look out for your interests.

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One Comment

  1. If someone were to actually admit that they were in an accident or broke traffic laws because of distraction from a digital billboard, it would say more about their competency as a driver than it would about the safety of digital billboards.