PD Editorial: Spare motorists from advertising on state highway signs

California is running a budget surplus, so why are state lawmakers and the Brown administration scrounging for pocket change with a hairbrained idea to sell advertising space on state highways?

Advertisers crave eyeballs, preferably in the heads of people who cannot escape their sales pitch. If it's somewhere people must be day after day, so much the better. Repetition does strange things to the brain, and eventually a massive cheeseburger with more calories than anyone needs starts to look good.

State lawmakers are considering a proposal to turn motorists trapped in highway congestion over to those advertisers. They aren't thinking about old-fashioned billboards, though. Instead, officials want to sell advertising on state-owned digital highway signs, the ones that usually inform motorists about delays ahead or missing kids.

State law currently bans advertising on digital billboards in public rights-of-way along freeways. Assembly Bill 1405, which has cleared the state Assembly and is making its way through the Senate, would exempt 25 of the state's 904 information signs for a pilot program.

A Caltrans report released in March concluded such advertising could raise millions. The pilot project, for example, could generate $10 million worth of ad sales. Caltrans suggests targeting high-volume traffic corridors to maximize revenue, specifically the Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento regions.

The $10 million, coincidentally, is about how much the pilot program is expected to cost. Advertising on old-school, yellow-text signs with which drivers are familiar wouldn't be very enticing. Instead, the state would buy fancy high-def digital signs to deliver messages and full-color advertising when there isn't an Amber alert or more pressing information.

This isn't the only additional commercial incursion into motorists' visual space during Gov. Jerry Brown's tenure. Since he returned as governor nearly eight years ago, his administration has nearly tripled the number of digital billboards allowed along highways. Those, at least, are private. This new program would be public.

Sharing important information with motorists makes sense, and maybe a digital display could convey the message better. But as an advertising forum, potentially with messages flipping over every few seconds, it could only distract drivers from the road. We ban motorists from using digital devices in the name of safety - looking at screens leads to accidents. Putting up bigger screens with flashy ads is contrary to the goal of promoting safety on the highways.

That's assuming people even consciously see them. Americans have become quite adept at tuning out advertising. If people tune out these signs, though, they would miss the ads, sure, but they also would miss the important messages about hazardous traffic conditions when they come up.

And the state might find it hard to control the messages people and companies pay for. Unlike a private publisher, the state has free speech obligations and won't be able to control advertisements as easily as it might like. Even a carefully crafted advertising policy is only one American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit away from causing headaches and court costs.

Yet legislators evidently don't want to be accused of leaving money on the table. Despite a budget surplus projected at $9 billion, they want to sell California motorists' eyes for a few million. That's not chump change, but it's not much in the grand scheme of things.

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