Tobacco Billboards

* Whether there should be tobacco billboards near schools and playgrounds, or whether there should be any outdoor advertising of tobacco at all (“Supreme Court Will Review Bans on Outdoor Cigarette Ads,” Jan. 9), is but a subset of a much more substantial question: Should there be billboards--ugly, intrusive, landscape- and cityscape-cluttering, narrow-interest-serving monstrosities--at all? Our shared environment belongs to all of us, not just advertisers. Why do we think all these wonderful calendar photos of European cities and countrysides look so beautiful? These places have few or no billboards. Rural Britain, which I’ve visited, is a wonderful, enchanting place, despite the small land area and dense population of that country, in part because billboards and outdoor ads are banned.

As an experiment, why don’t we in the U.S. set a sunset date for the billboards and then see what our cities look like and how we feel about it?

GREGORY WRIGHT

Sherman Oaks