Beauty and the Billboard

I think that I shall never see

A billboard lovely as a tree.

Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,

I'll never see a tree at all.

--Ogden Nash,

Song of the Open Road

The Highway Beautification Act of 1965 was one of Lady Bird Johnson's pet projects. Inspired by visions of landscaped and uncluttered thoroughfares, she spearheaded the drive that resulted in a law banning billboards along major rural highways. Skimpy funding slowed down the billboard purge until 1971, but since then some 265,000 have been taken down and another half million slated for removal. Now Lady Bird's accomplishments may well be undermined by legislation expected to emerge from the House Public Works Committee sometime this week.

Ironically, the sponsor of that controversial bill is Lyndon Johnson's former friend and fellow Texan, Representative Jim Wright. Sympathetic to the billboard lobby, Wright has proposed several "beautification" amendments to the 1974 Highway Construction Act that take the teeth out of earlier legislation. The 1965 law prohibited signs within 660 feet of the right of way. Advertisers responded nimbly by placing jumbo signs just beyond the 660-ft. limit; they were even more unsightly than the smaller signs adjacent to the road. To counter this violation of the spirit of the law, the Senate Public Works Committee recently reported out a bill extending the ban to the Limits of legibility. The amended House version, however, provides for control of signs beyond the 660-ft. Limit only if they are "erected with the purpose of their message being read from the main traveled way." As critics of the amendment have pointed out, advertisers could easily slip a billboard between the Lines of this vaguely phrased loophole. For example, they could ostensibly erect it for the benefit of motorists on a secondary road, but place it so that it was easily visible from the nearby interstate route.

The House bill would also permit six "directional" signs per mile--three facing each side of the highway. As the amendment is worded, "directional" is an umbrella term covering "rest stops, camping grounds, food, gas and automotive services, lodgings, natural wonders, scenic and historic attractions." The American Institute of Architects contends that by defining directional so loosely, the bill legitimizes 80% of the signs outlawed by the 1965 Act. John Francis, highway beautification coordinator for the Department of Transportation and the bill's most vociferous critic, estimates that it could result in the proliferation of more than a million billboards along interstate highways.

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