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Show BILLBOARDS Road Safety Fight Started WASHINGTON. The sporadic war against the nation's billboards by America's nature lovers and others is about to get underway again. It will be sparked by the American Ameri-can Automobile association, with 10 million members, which has decided de-cided to launch once again the campaign it dropped when the war started and, once again, outdoor advertising interests are rallying to buck it. The National Roadside council, one of the oldest organizations in the anti-billboard fight, is gathering gather-ing new ammunition through highway high-way surveys. Originally the fight of the anti-billboard anti-billboard groups was just against billboards. Now, billboards are seldom mentioned. The new line is to work for general roadside protection pro-tection and improvement to promote pro-mote motoring safety, highway efficiency effi-ciency and to protect property values val-ues as well as save the scenery. This is the general theme of the AAA program which seeks adoption adop-tion by all states of highway zoning plans. Formidable Foes One reason for this is that the outdoor advertising people have put up such a consistently successful success-ful fight against any curbs on their business that they are recognized as formidable antagonists. The U. S. public roads administration adminis-tration is taking no part in the contest, con-test, although it is providing billions bil-lions of dollars to help finance the state's construction of the national highway network. The viewpoint of the public roads administration is that it has no legal right to insist that states pass legislation designed to restrict outdoor advertising in order to get Federal road aid. The research staff of the public roads administration, however, has provided state highway, officials with facts about highway reading matter. One of the research chiefs, David R. Levin, recently reported these sample statistics: (1) On U .S. 1 north of Philadelphia Philadel-phia a motorist traveling at 50 miles an hour passes one highway sign every second. (2) Between Baltimore and Washington 2,450 commercial signs and billboards are peppered along 30.5 miles (3) On 300 miles of XT. S. 1 outside out-side of towns in Florida were counted 1,000 billboards, 6,000 signboards sign-boards and 14,000 signs on trees and business places. Danger Cited "In addition to aesthetic considerations, consid-erations, the billboard is a danger wherever it obstructs sight distance below the minimum established standard," Levin said. Many states, counties and towns have adopted some form of restrictive restric-tive regulations to prevent billboards bill-boards from becoming a menace. And the outdoor advertising people have often voluntarily cooperated with local officials to prevent erection erec-tion of signs that would obviously constitute a hazard. Actually, there appears to be no strong proof as yet that highway, advertising is closely linked with highway safety. The most recent publication on the subject is a progress report by a Michigan commission. com-mission. It concluded that, of the advertising signs, "only those which were illuminated, including neon and flashing neon, showed any appreciable ap-preciable association with accident locations." |