Curbing Highway Ugliness : Billboard-control measures to advance roadside beauty

Spring has sprung, the grass has riz, where last year’s careless drivers is.

--Burma Shave road sign, circa 1950s.

Billboards sort of went straight downhill from there, as did the politics of “outdoor advertising”: A loophole in Lady Bird Johnson’s pet project, the 1965 Highway Beautification Act, has so far fed $200 million from public coffers to billboard owners.

Pending federal legislation would bring the law more into keeping with Mrs. Johnson’s original beautification goal.

The act was intended to stop the proliferation of billboards along federally funded highways. The signs are supposed to be restricted to commercially zoned areas. But owners of illegally positioned boards must be reimbursed by the government for the cost of the sign and lost potential income when they relocate them.

Worse yet, until recently, billboard owners, whether in compliance with the act or not, were free to cut down trees growing on public land that clutter the motorist’s view of their advertising.

Many of the doomed trees were planted with tax dollars in accordance with the very same legislation!

But now there are bills before both U.S. and California lawmakers to permanently halt tree-cutting for the exclusive purpose of making billboards more visible. And dozens of U.S. legislators have endorsed measures to end the Byzantine imbroglio. Both the House Billboard Control Act and its Senate counterpart, the Visual Pollution Control Act, prohibit new signs along certain highways and interstates and would give local governments control over removing existing billboards.

They should consider the technique of amortization, the standard procedure used for compensating advertisers until 1978: Sign owners would be allowed to leave a billboard in place long enough to earn back its cost and some profit.

We are paying advertisers not to block our view of America’s natural wonders. It’s time to rescue both Mrs. Johnson’s dream of uncluttered scenery and millions of dollars in public funds.