Orlando may enter billboard swap program
Aiming to eliminate billboards along the city’s main streets and in pedestrian-friendly districts, Orlando is set to allow them to be swapped out for digital signs.
The City Council is slated to approve what it’s calling the Digital Billboard Exchange Program on Monday, through which companies could erect changing digital billboards in exchange for tearing down single-subject signs along major arteries.
“The idea is that we’re reducing sign clutter overall in the city by concentrating where it makes sense,” said Chief Planner Jason Burton.
However, anti-billboard advocates argue digital signs can distract drivers, making the roads they loom over less safe, and the city could have required more billboards torn down in each swap.
“The biggest thing is safety,” said Bill Jonson, a Clearwater City Council member and president of Citizens for a Scenic Florida. “If people are looking at the billboard, it’s as bad as a cellphone or texting because your eye is held to the billboard, especially if it’s changing.”
Burton said the city has protections in place to make digital billboards as safe as possible, such as limiting how frequently they can change — no faster than every eight seconds — and prohibiting moving images.
Jason King, spokesman for Clear Channel Outdoor, one of Orlando’s major billboard companies, called the program a “natural evolution” of an earlier effort that city officials say resulted in 22 static billboards coming down.
“In addition to being a revenue driver helping local businesses meet new customers, digital billboards have proven a vital community resource and are used for real-time missing children alerts [AMBER Alerts] and by highway safety authorities,” he said in an email.
City code generally prohibits digital billboards, but this would provide an exception. In addition to reducing the number of billboards overall, it aims to shift them toward major roadways and away from neighborhoods.
The program identifies eight corridors where digital billboards could be erected, including Colonial Drive, Orange Blossom Trail, John Young Parkway, International Drive and Semoran Boulevard.
To build a digital billboard in one of those areas, companies would be required to remove four times as much advertising space worth of static billboards, with at least half of it in the same corridor.
The city also has specifically targeted 16 static billboards in its main street districts for removal, which Burton jokingly called a “hit list.” If one of those billboards is being torn down to be replaced with a digital sign on a major artery, the swap-out ratio falls to 3-to-1.
He said the goal is twofold: to reduce “visual clutter” in the city’s shopping and dining districts, like Ivanhoe Village and College Park, and encourage development on underused lots where billboards currently stand.
In Mills 50, billboards in the cross-hairs include one near Colonial Drive and Mills Avenue, behind the Walgreens. Another is just north of Weber Street, between Wally’s liquors and Rise Above Tattoo.
If approved, the program would also allow animated, projected images on walls and sidewalks downtown. Currently, projected ads and art must be static.
Moving images, Burton said, could make downtown streets livelier.
“These things make it a little bit more exciting after dark… [they] add to the vitality and actually add a little bit of architectural detail on surfaces where there might not be,” such as blank walls, he said.
Academic studies have produced mixed findings on the safety of digital billboards, while one released by the Federal Highway Administration in 2013 found drivers were not more likely to be distracted by them.
A 2015 report by researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham found the presence of digital billboards was correlated with increased crash rates, but stopped short of saying the signs caused those crashes.
“[The] topic is complex because while one can see the connection between digital billboards and distraction, it is not easy to establish a clear link between digital billboards and traffic safety,” the study’s lead researcher associate professor Virginia Sisiopiku said in an email.
Other local governments have adopted similar exchanges.
Pasco County in November agreed to allow four digital billboards in exchange for Clear Channel removing 28 static ones, according to the Tampa Bay Times, while St. Petersburg in 2012 approved six digital billboards in exchange for 83 static billboards.
Travis Jarmon, of St. Petersburg’s Citizens for a Scenic Florida affiliate, said St. Pete’s example shows Orlando could have set its ratio higher. Digital billboards are in demand, while static ones are passé, he said.
“Static billboards are sort of a dinosaur. They’re slowly going away,” he said. “Folks don’t drive down the street anymore thinking, ‘I wonder where the nearest McDonalds is.’ … They look it up on their cellphone.”
Burton said a more-demanding policy could mean fewer swaps. According to the Times, Tampa also required a 4-to-1 ratio for its program.
“I think the city of Orlando really wants to embrace this technology and reduce the number of billboards, so that’s why we set the ratio where we did,” he said. “We’ve sort of figured out a happy medium for our market.”