The city of Cracow in Poland banned billboards (and other visual advertising quite aggressively) about 2 years ago. Great outcomes. There are still some workarounds that companies do to put this s..t out in the public (e.g. covers of renovation works can contain up to 50% of advertising area, so we have renovations of just finished buildings only to put the covers with ads).
Now, when I visit another city when there's no such ban I cannot stand this visual garbage.
This should be banned everywhere.
On my visits to Warsaw, I have always been struck by the translucent advertising entirely covering the sides of new-ish office buildings. Now I know how/why this is possible.
Example (hard to find because no-one takes photos of the ugly buildings in Warsaw):
Nah Detroit has some beautiful architecture and really surprised me when I visited last year. Also being on a river and next to a lake is a nice feature. I've been to plenty of more depressing places in the US
Mostly any ex-steel based industry town in the rust belt except Detroit, only because it has been the focus of overt development to directly impact its image as a wasteland. Not sure what took its place.
In Bucharest in the last years the mayors fought back quite successfully against those all-covering billboards. However enjoy it while it lasts - we just had local elections and the old mafia got back in office, so I bet the billboards will be back very soon (and cables hanging off every pole and expensive concrete wastelands and and and).
Really? I thought the old area along the west bank of the Vistula was nice. I didn't see much of the rest of the city, but most cities are uninspiring outside of their central areas.
It's corruption. On paper it's probably construction or renovation and there is some fraudulent deal between inspection department in city hall and marketing agency. Fuck you, Coca Cola.
When travelling through Poland then the contrast of visual pollution by billboards and other advertisements has been very big, between for example Estonia, Latvia, the nordic countries and Poland.
In Poland basically everything is covered in huge adveretisements, "Kantor" here and there, car repair shops, etc. On bus stops all the walls are covered in them and there is even something on top of it, facing the road.
Drinving there is tiring, the brain just gets tired from it.
> Driving there is tiring, the brain just gets tired from it.
I moved away from Poland a decade ago, and each time I come back I get distracted like crazy as a passenger in a car. My brain doesn't know what's happening for the first hour until I realize what's up.
Literally every 50m there's a billboard on a road, billboard on someone's house, billboard on a fence. From big companies (telcos etc.) through all kinds of local businesses ("Selling X", "buying Y", "repairing Z").
>We think its part of slavic culture or something.
It isn't. It's the same, or worse, in Romania.
It's just rabid unregulated capitalism of the post communist countries, gone wild, where everything is about making as much money as possible any way you can, which means advertising everywhere so you can influence people to spend their money with you. Romania is now IRL what the internet looks like without ad block.
The ads for gambling and betting are the most nefarious, to the point it's becoming a societal issue.
I have no idea about them, a lot of people think they're fronts for money laundering. Alternatively, dunno... I guess gamblers are also addicts of sorts? Plus I imagine they drink, abuse their bodies so they need regular medication?
Up here in Lithuania we used to make fun of your billboards 20 years ago. But now it's getting worse and worse here too. While you seem to have rebounded from the lowest point.
This is so wonderful. One instantly goes from feeling like a consumption robot to feeling human, just from looking at the pics. I wish this was everywhere.
A true classic. It looked extra cheesy when he advertised for Huawei.
The man is a sellout and it has a kind of charm, because he knows his place: He is a just football player on the verge of retirement and he wants to squeeze the juice for the last drop.
I remember his silhouette of size of entire building printed on scaffolding covering entire facade of a multi-storey building and advertising Huawei. Now Iga Świątek is slowly taking over, recently she popped out in payment terminal when I was trying to touch in the debit card. Get the fuck off, greedy girl. Please don't force me to watch you bloody face.
> (e.g. covers of renovation works can contain up to 50% of advertising area, so we have renovations of just finished buildings only to put the covers with ads).
Actually finetuning the policies and regulations may provide the right incentive to both promote regular upkeep of buildings as well as funding them. Example: Ads over scaffold are only allowed every 5 years during renovations.
There put scaffold up just to hang advertising?!? That is so incredibly expensive, how can it be worth it? I had recently some shutters installed at my home (second floor) and the most expensive part was the scaffold…
Moreover, if it's the _only_ advertising opportunity in the space, it's nominally higher value than it would be in a city with a large billboard presence.
Mixed blessing of the coming AR (augmented reality) adscape is that virtual ads projected into our eyeballs will be cheaper and more targeted/effective than meatspace billboards.
AR “metaverse” stuff did not take off on the last hype cycle, and even Apple's VR headset does not sell. If AR is “coming,” it is coming rather slowly.
AR is "coming" in the same way smartphones were coming for years (decades?). Then iPhone happened and the rest is history. Technology needs to reach a level where it becomes obviously useful (for AR - low weight, cool form, not tiring,...)
And now only rich corporations have the money to show off their big signs.
Lots of smaller companies had to hide theirs, but ones like IKEA or MAKRO
did manage to evade it, and will probably continue to evade it happily. Also
some billboards are now empty, and are still covering up the tree line, because nobody wants to spend another cent giving the amount of money everyone had to pay up for this.
I've actually moved out from Cracow shortly after this legislation, not directly because of it, but this surely contributed to the decision. The direction Cracow is heading to is clear -- you will have nothing and you'll be happy.
I really dislike ads and I use adblock & umatrix like crazy. But:
1) Ads in cities are not penis enlargement ads nor mortgage ads. They are about what services are in which location in the city,
2) It's not really about ads, but about advertising in general, meaning you don't even get to show off the logo of your company. If there's a building standing in Cracow, it can't have any logos on it. Unless the company is rich, then it may have their logos. Good thing that Cracow in general doesn't have any tall buildings (well, just one).
For me it's socialism at its finest. Forbid the poor, allow the rich. From ideological stance I prefer seeing ads, because I dislike socialism more than I dislike ads.
> 1) Ads in cities are not penis enlargement ads nor mortgage ads. They are about what services are in which location in the city,
Not the case anywhere I have been. Some will be for local businesses, most are for national or international behemoths. Pretty much the same as with ondline ads on so-called respectable sites.
It is sad to see the correct reply grayed out.
This kind of regulation is known to breed corruption & abuse, tilting the field heavily towards the highest spenders. Can only be enacted when ideology trumps well established knowledge & experience.
Zürich resident here. In this specific case the abuse is even pretty openly stated :(
> The Supreme Court’s ruling cements a decision to remove more than three-fourths of its once-standing 172 billboards from the town, keeping the remainder available for culture and sports ads.
By "culture and sports ads" they surely mean adverts by the government for its own subsidized services. Local government is a huge spender on billboard advertising around here, often for its own state run sports or events (invariably stuff that's popular with lefty civil service types like obscure dance performances).
Lately they also love to paint trains and trams in garish colors, in an open advert for diversity ideology:
Die Farben und Formen des neuen visuellen Auftritts widerspiegeln die Buntheit und Diversität des gesamten ZVV-Netzes.
... and they don't seem to have a problem either with all the posters that get glued everywhere advertising May Day, Feminists for Anarchism and so on.
The idea cantonal governments have a problem with "visual pollution" is kind of absurd, really. If that's actually the motivation then step one would be to stop buying billboard space with taxpayer money, stop flooding the city with rainbows, clean up all the pro-Gaza graffiti and go entirely without any of that for a few years. Once they've proven they have the discipline to clean up the sort of visual pollution they themselves tend to like, then they might have a moral leg to stand on for banning other forms of advertising.
You might not be recognizing them as state adverts, because Switzerland has the largest amount of government advertising of any place I've ever been. By far. If you can't see that you're either unfamiliar with other places or not recognizing the ads as coming from the state. Recall that the definition of the state also includes government-owned companies like SBB, ZVV, EWZ, ZKB. Adverts by any of these companies is an advert by the state. That's a generously narrow definition: it's not including advertising for parties or referendum positions, which saturate billboards any time there's an upcoming vote, nor advertising by state subsidized industries like farming.
Here are some examples.
Walk down to Bellevue. Start to walk along the lake to the China Garden. You will walk past some of the most prime advertising real estate in the city. There are several billboard signs in a row right at the top corner of the lake. Highest footfall of anywhere in the city outside of Bahnhofstrasse itself. When I did this yesterday every single ad was by government, for government. For example, one of them is currently advertising the government-run Native American Museum:
Walk down the lake and you'll encounter more such billboards, all showing government ads. In fact I don't think I've ever seen a non-state advert on any of these places.
Go to a Filmfluss event. It starts with 10 minutes of ads. On Saturday when I went to a showing with my wife, I counted and around half of the ads were by the state. Amongst others: multiple recruiting ads for the Stadtpolizei, ads for ZKB, multiple ads for EWZ, ads for state-funded cultural events etc.
Get on the train or tram. Look at the billboards inside the carriage. Many of them will be ads for the SBB's own services or offers, or recruiting ads for drivers (especially popular at the moment), or the Gemeinsam Vorwarts campaign. These are all state advertising.
If you see all this and really think it's very little then I don't know what to say. Go spend some time in other places of comparable size and pay close attention to how many ads are by the state or state owned companies. It will be lower.
GP has several examples of the government itself contributing to visual pollution. Including for purposes that don't match the interests of many citizens.
I don't thinkg this should mean that ads can't be banned but the government should absolutely be called out for planning to continue its own ads.
Except that vast majority of Zurich is covered by commercial ads and they're massively visually distracting in a way the "government ads" they're trying to call out aren't.
I love the idea of acoustic and visual hygiene, fighting the acoustic and visual pollution. The flaw is in human nature and the attitude "but _we_ are allowed, _our_ case is different". If the enforcers will be local authorities, they will be unable to resist displaying out their message. If there is at least one CHF and one person in the promotion and marketing department, the idea will pop out. Hey look at the bright side, at least they didn't cover the tram's windows!
> Hey look at the bright side, at least they didn't cover the tram's windows!
They did though, if only partially. While the parts overlapping the windows are not 100% opaque, in my experience such ads do significantly worsen the viewing view from inside the vehicles.
Not sure why this is greyed out, every point is true.
There was even a situation a few weeks ago where a guy went to the office with an axe and attacked someone. The guy wasn't even a football hooligan I think.
I don't care about your political shenanigans pis/po/twojastara/whatever. Oligarchs do in Poland whatever they want while poor Polish idiots only think about buying another 25 sqm apartment and a newer German car.
40 of potatoes, duh.
The escapades of Wisła/Cracovia baboons are not normal. As long as anyone is randomly asked "which team do you support" the football is to be eliminated from the city.
> The escapades of Wisła/Cracovia baboons are not normal. As long as anyone is randomly asked "which team do you support" the football is to be eliminated from the city.
#2 was hostility to private car transport (neglection of road infrastructure, introduction of car-free zones will surely happen soon). Traffic jams are the default state of things, and it's a waste of life.
#3 is that it's a tourist city; a good place to visit, pay money and go home. Not a good place for me to live every day (I've lived there for 15 years, and if you're a happy citizen then good for you). Most of the people here are not from Cracow itself. Warsaw suffers from the same problem.
I was conducting 4 years ago a polling survey for a political party in Oslo nocking on doors and asking people opinion of recent or planned changes in the city. I was surprised how many car owners supported bans on parking on the streets and making bicycle lines instead. It decreased traffic jams.
Basically, people started to park in big parking garages with good connections to main roads. Surely it required more time to walk. But then one spends much less time finding a place to park. And traffic from/to small roads were a significant contribution to jams.
It's funny seeing the behavioral differences in communally oriented societies vs idiosyncratic societies. This kind of proposal would never work in USA or India, but I could see it work in Japan and Korea.
Introducing car free zones before public transit is good enough to replace cars is such a strange move.
A friend of mine lives in a car free zone but public transit stops at 23:00. He is just supposed to stay inside his home at night I guess. No parties for him.
That's what taxis/ubers are for. It's not economically viable in every City to have public transport running empty all night just for a few people who like to party yet live far away from the party scene.
It's not really economically viable to take a taxi to your night-shift warehouse job. That is around 70% of your daily wage going towards transportation.
How many people are doing nightshifts as part of the total employed population who mostly do day shifts?
Unfortunately the same economies of scale apply to them as well. You can't have city wide public transport run 24/7 because a very small amount of the workforce works during the night.
And night shifts tend to be set in order to overlap with public transport schedules (10pm-6am) so that's not such a big problem.
Technically everything is possible, you can even fly people to commute to the space station, the questions is why some places consider night routes to be economically viable and some not, but that doesn't change the fact that public transportation night routes are a loss maker for the company.
I guess it depends on how much the local government is willing to subsidize public transport, since otherwise daily price tickets will have to go up for all travelers to subsidize the few night travelers.
Here in Austria we also don't have night routes during the week in cities that are not Vienna even if some people still need to travel during the night, but the transport companies can't run at a loss, so it's either the state pays for it(via higher taxes for everyone) or the day travelers will pay more for it, there's no free lunch here, someone still needs to pay for the unprofitable night service which is a loss maker. How Santa Monia does it I don't know but it doesn't change the fact the night services are loss makers everywhere and public transportation in general is only profitable at massive scale often relying on public subsidies to stay afloat even in the US.
Also public transportation costs are not apples to apples comparable between countries. Maybe it works in the Santa Monica, since fuel is dirt cheap or maybe they subsidize a lot and maybe they can pay bus drivers peanuts or something I don't know, but here in Austria running public transport is very expensive (unions, pensions, strict work hours, great workers benefits, infrastructure, maintenance, running costs, etc), especially in cities other than Vienna, so the routes are pretty shit and night routes non existent in order to not loose money, so most people rely on private cars or taxis for commutes out of hours. Improving that would come at increased costs and ticket prices are already maxed out and so are taxes.
> #2 was hostility to private car transport (neglection of road infrastructure, introduction of car-free zones will surely happen soon). Traffic jams are the default state of things, and it's a waste of life.
So you want more cars and at the same you moan about traffic? o_O
If you claim that traffic jams are was of life then even more you should be anti-cars...
If you want to book a visit through NFZ and you can't, because there are too many people wanting in queue, do you want to eliminate people so the queues are smaller? No? But why? You should be anti-people so that the queues are smaller!
Polish society mentally is at the stage where car is the status symbol and part of their identity. Amplified by the fact that they're historically unable to construct their own car. Nobody is giving up their Mercedes/Volvo/BMW/Audi in a lease 1k EUR per month to walk around or drive bicycle around the city. Especially that employment regulations promote taking a lease for a car and having company's car is the ultimate benefit. Plus the obnoxious trend of huge SUVs and American-style pickups. People move out to the outskirts, buy more cars and bigger cars and then... they commute daily to the city.
As a non pole living in Poland I think you are being unfair. The car mentality is not new, nor is it evil by itself. On the contrary it is supported by the reality that inner-cities are unbearably expensive and people need to live in the suburbs just like in the US. It is no irony that the same phenomenae has similar consequences. It is not people who are bad or stupid, on the contrary.
In Wroclaw they added hundreds of KM of bike lanes....crisscrossing normal roads. I would like to take my children by bike to their kindergarten but I dont want me or them to die.
So indeed i take my car, which i regret not being a damn fat SUV because i cannot damn stand being shaken out of my bones anymore. The roads are the German coblestone type and they are not crap because of the potholes. That is already a taken, no. The whole roads have severe long period troughs and hills that together with the pot holes make the experience a nightmare. Sprinkle that with tramlines, activated or not and I am currently considering moving out. The trams and buses work well but politicians and well meaning people often forget you need the car for things like the supermarket? I have a family of several so i cannot just take the tram or by bike for groceries. Oh my, i need a car. The sin, we are all "patola"[1] :).
And this is not just in the city proper, the surroundings' roads are awful as well. I just damaged my rim and tire driving on a normal road 40Km/h while doing this gas guzzling hobby of taking my children to a local forest.
I am a bit upset writing this because all these people in power in Europe dont have traditional families and exist in their own heaven on earth where they are independent in a very pure state. When i was 20 or if I would be a single I would get it, but with a family, please take your silly ideals elsewhere(this is for the mayor Jacek Sutryk who is unironically a bachelor).
Portugal is a bit better in that the left leaning well-doers preach but people are too real to let things get ridiculous. The talking heads sometimes fantasize about bikes everywhere but then the cities are hilly and old so it is unfeasible to add bike lanes.
[1] Patola is a derrogative name from pathological [family]. It is used to insinuate you come from a dysfunctional, often alcoholic family. Very common insult in Poland which I am fascinated about. I wonder if this insult exists in other Slavic countries.
I don't understand how you ended up and why would you live in Wrocław. I ended up there one winter when the city was notoriously in media for having among the worst air in the country and evacuated after trial period. The ruling "elite" is an awful corrupted clique holding multiple public offices each, police regularly beats random people to death. Exclusively outsourcing and nearshoring jobs with miserable salaries, with established cliques in every workplace. The real estate prices skyrocketed yet thousands of "poor" Ukrainians and people from Causasus somehow can afford living there.
> On the contrary it is supported by the reality that inner-cities are unbearably expensive and people need to live in the suburbs just like in the US.
Noone is forcing people into suburbs (which are awful in itself) but people feel the need to have detached house with garden (as a status, just like car…)
> Noone is forcing people into suburbs (which are awful in itself) but people feel the need to have detached house with garden (as a status, just like car…)
Sure. How dare people not afford 1.2 million PLN( 304k$) so that 4 people (2 adults + 2 children) can live in a 80 sqm apartment[1].
The theme in these answers are very common, the majority of people wanting comfort are wasteful and vain. I guess back in the day of Gierek's(communist times) buildings were the right fit.
Yes, because thanks to dumb housing market becoming "investors eldorado" instead of doing more dense residential building that doesn't require creating "subursbs" and dumb urban sprawl.
You are aware that it's possible to create relative big departments in such scheme, right?
Yes and I recommend you Wrocław city museum for a showcase of beautifully thought out plans that never went anywhere even when Wrocław was Breslau. It is the reason I was touched by such a mundane topic that I would not otherwise be interested in.
One of the reasons such plans did not go ahead is that it required a state that can expropriate left and right and amounts of capital not available to localities, even in cities like Wrocław.
Those kind of grand plans only work if there is a national drive that imposes it, or most likely after a war. This is true in Poland Portugal or anywhere developed and desirable.
Man, Kraków is very car centric by any reasonable measure. There are huge multilane roads cutting through the city in all directions. There is zero enforcement on speed and pollution limits. It's very dangerous to move around if you're not inside a car.
Cars are just too space inefficient as inner city transportation. Traffic jams are the result of car centric choices incentivizing everyone to drive not the other way around.
Grenoble also banned all ads in 2014 and put in a lot of trees. It is truly an audacious move, yet completely rational. My dream is to also ban parking of cars in neighborhoods and most car traffic, cars can be parked along the edges in solar covered parking spaces. Add car sharing, better public transportation, urban agriculture, community gardens and parks: soon you'll have an efficient paradise of a city.
Unfortunately mayors of cities in the Netherlands do not have sufficient power to change rules like these, its the state which makes these rules. This is why we won't see such a thing in my country. There are progressive cities where it could fly, but overall the Netherlands has become extremely conservative.
The majority of people in The Netherlands drive their car to get to work. They don't want to have to walk 10 minutes to an edge parking or city hub. If we want to lower cars in neighbourhoods, or want people to get rid of cars, our public transit system needs to be come a lot better first. If public transit was a good option to get to work for people, more people would use it.
For me going to work is either a 20 minute car ride, with parking right in front of my house and right in front of work. Or it is a 10 minute walk, 45 minute bus ride where I likely have to stand and then another 5 minute walk. And I can't work past 20:00 because that's my last bus. Make it so public transit is less than 20 minutes, goes 24/7 and picks me up within 5 minutes walking of my home and I will use it.
And no I don't even live in a village. Population of 140.000 people and I work in a city of 300.000.
> The majority of people in The Netherlands drive their car to get to work
I was curious about the statistics for this, and it looks like barely not to me, according to this data: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/figures/detail/84710ENG (the CSV you can download is much more readable than the table in the webpage)
0.44 trips/person/day travelling to/from work total in 2023, 0.21 of those by car. 2023 is the first year where that is the case though.
Edit: If you go to the Dutch version of the data it includes another category for cars (commuting as a passenger in a car) that the English data omitted, with 0.01 of the trips. Moving it from "majority not-by-car in 2023" to "rounding errors mean the data doesn't say which is in the majority": https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/cijfers/detail/84710NED
> Inwoners van Nederland legden in 2022 gemiddeld 7,4 kilometer per dag af om van en naar het werk te gaan. Ruim 70 procent van de reizigerskilometers van en naar het werk werd met de auto afgelegd, meestal als bestuurder. De trein werd gebruikt voor 10 procent van deze kilometers, de gemiddelde afstand per treinverplaatsing van en naar het werk was 42,8 kilometer. Fietsen was goed voor 29 procent van de verplaatsingen van en naar het werk en voor 8 procent van de afgelegde afstand voor dit doel. De gemiddelde verplaatsingsafstand op de fiets was 4,7 kilometer. Minder dan 0,6 procent van de totale afstand om van en naar het werk te gaan werd te voet overbrugd.
Google Translate:
> In 2022, residents of the Netherlands traveled an average of 7.4 kilometers per day to and from work. More than 70 percent of the passenger kilometers to and from work were covered by car, usually as a driver. The train was used for 10 percent of these kilometers, the average distance per train trip to and from work was 42.8 kilometers. Cycling accounted for 29 percent of the trips to and from work and for 8 percent of the distance traveled for this purpose. The average distance traveled by bike was 4.7 kilometers. Less than 0.6 percent of the total distance to and from work was covered on foot.
So if you remove the 15% WFH, I'm not awake enough to math that out but car travel is the overwhelming majority and bicycle commute is still negligible.
Really Japan is probably the gold standard but people find comfort because the Netherlands is Western and thus familiar. Despite having little dedicated biking infrastructure to speak of, bike rates are estimated in Tokyo at a very healthy 13%.
> If we want to lower cars in neighbourhoods, or want people to get rid of cars, our public transit system needs to be come a lot better first.
No, you can also start by imposing restrictions on cars.
> If public transit was a good option to get to work for people, more people would use it.
The people that live in the city center probably already use public transit because, for them, public transit is probably a faster commute. That means that the cars congesting the center are driven by people that live in the periphery or even suburbs outside of the city.
So these people will want those nasty cars out, because they actually live there, and they will vote them out.
You can never accommodate the people from the suburbs, unless they have a station right next to their door and their office and a train coming every 5 minutes, a car will always be faster. They live in someone else's municipality, so the mayors can just ignore them.
People in the periphery are more delicate, but usually they are also tired of congestions, and it's much easier to make at least minor improvements to public transit for them.
But again, you can restrict and make improvements in parallel, and the improvement will almost never be perceived as matching the restrictions anyway.
> No, you can also start by imposing restrictions on cars.
Getting people into public transit by making car ownership worse is how you get unhappy people. That is just unproductive and destructive. Make public transit better, that is how you get people out of cars and happy.
> The people that live in the city center probably already use public transit
No they don't. The 74% of The Netherlands lives in a city yet 66% of people commute to work by car. That goes to show that even for people living in cities, going to work by car is still the preferred method. I'm one of them, in the example I gave above it was three times faster to go to work by car.
> because they actually live there, and they will vote them out
That is elitist "fuck you I got mine" mentality. Rich people in city centers able to afford expensive houses will make it harder for poor people in the affordable neighbouring cities to move around and get to work.
Part of making public transit better is making the car experience worse, necessarily. Because you need to take up time, and space, for PT. Unless you put all your trains underground, and build bike lines in an alternative (but parallel) universe. If you want an equal playing field, meaning both are given equal consideration, then naturally the car experience will be worse.
The inverse is also true. The public transport experience is bad now because the car experience is optimized.
> Make public transit better, that is how you get people out of cars and happy.
This is fantasy, you cannot snap your fingers and make this happen, nor are the people in charge incompetent. Never has a city "simply" made PT better at a pace that allowed for significant car reduction without making car users unhappy. Again, car users will always complain, unless the PT takes them less time to commute, which is physically impossible to accommodate for all car users.
> That is elitist "fuck you I got mine" mentality.
No, car users have the "fuck you I got mine" mentality: they have a short commute because they are rich enough to pay for car space in the city, and want a perpetual right to this.
> Rich people in city centers able to afford expensive houses will make it harder for poor people in the affordable neighbouring cities to move around and get to work.
Rich people live in the outskirts in big houses, but want to able to steamroll with their car right into the city center, regardless of the impact to people living in the center and along the way to it.
I can assure you that in The Netherlands, the rich people live in the cities. Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht, The Hague. You need to earn in the top 5% if you want to buy a place there. The people commuting into the city by car provide the services for the people living there. Police officers, healthcare workers, sanitation workers, teachers. Those people don't live in the city and with their work schedules often can only go by car.
You're confusing the ultra rich that live in penthouses in the financial district, with the rich that commute from the suburbs or wealthy periphery into the center.
> Police officers, healthcare workers, sanitation workers, teachers. Those people don't live in the city and with their work schedules often can only go by car.
They absolutely can go by PT, or relocate, as it has been proven by all the cities that successfully have restricted cars.
We cannot increase density in cities anymore, cars are not the solution because they simply don't scale and are not actually accessible to poor people.
Do you even live in The Netherlands, making such bizarre statements?
The top 5% earners are not the ultra rich. To even afford a 50 square meter apartment somewhat near the center of Amsterdam you need to be at least an engineer, lawyer or doctor earning six figures. Those people do not live in suburbs, that is where the people earning modal income live.
Is this some sort of American way of thinking you are projecting onto my country?
And where should those essential workers relocate to? They already live as close to the city as their lending/renting capabilities allow them. And no they can't all use public transit otherwise they likely would be using it already.
And yes we can increase density. Amsterdam only has 3700 people/km2. The metropole only has 900 people/km2.
You have a distorted view of what "modal income" is. If you can afford to live in the suburbs and drive one car (per worker) into the city, then you are rich. The poor live in the periphery and walk, use PT, or carpool. Then, the ultra-rich can afford to live in penthouses in the financial district and will always weasel a way in to be able to drive (or get driven) in a SUV, they are irrelevant to the discussion.
You are relatively rich and want to have your way with your car and driving, and are using the poor as a bad excuse.
What do you think will happen, that the system will collapse? Trains and buses spilling with people, no essential workers, police and healthcare unavailable, chaos, anarchy?
No! Everything goes on normally in cities that have restricted car traffic. Because restrictions are gradual. If a job offer in the city center becomes less competitive (considering time and money), then it will attract different workers from better locations. And same for housing.
> And yes we can increase density. Amsterdam only has 3700 people/km2. The metropole only has 900 people/km2.
Sure, if you want to make everything worse, you can keep dialing it up until it's too late. See any other major city in the world. There's an upper limit of what is acceptable, there not really a limit in decentralizing.
You don't need to buy a place to live in the cities. In Amsterdam, 70 percent of the places are for rent and over 2/3 of those are in the social sector (almost 50% of the total), meaning that there is a cap on the rent.
Can you provide a single study where people living in cities that reduced car dependency were "unhappy"?
Every single survey I've seen across Netherlands, Slovenia, Switzerland and Germany showed big support AFTER the changes were made (but a lot of hand wringing like yours BEFORE they were made).
The people that are usually unhappy are the ones that want to drag their SUVs in front of people living in city apartments and leave them there.
Who did they survey? The rich people living in the center of Amsterdam that can afford to not own a car? Or the poor people living in Purmerend that now have a worse commute than before?
Of course the people living in Amsterdam will answer the survey positively. It's not those people that are impacted. It's the poor person working at IKEA that now has an extra 30 minutes of commute because they imposed parking restrictions near their job. The rich Amsterdam city center person shopping at IKEA can take the metro because they can afford to live such a lifestyle.
Let's be real: you are not the poor person, you just want to ride your car for whatever reasons.
Poor people will chose a job that is nearer, rents and salaries adjust to job opportunities - it's a good thing to decentralize, we cannot keep concentrating more jobs and dwellers around already problematic zones.
Let's be real: you've never been poor. I have. When you're poor you don't "choose a job that's nearer". You get whatever you can take. If that's 2 hours commute each way, so be it. You need to eat and pay rent (at least in the US where there's not much in the way of welfare). The rich and poor alike drive, but the rich can live close to work and the poor often can't. The very poor take the bus if it's available and just eat the extra time commuting, which in my city is usually 3x the time driving. The bus is also a safety issue, my friends have been robbed waiting for the bus and after getting off the bus, driving is safer in this regard.
Yes I have been poor, probably more than you, and I have chosen any job that's near to survive. Before starting my career in IT, I once had my car wrecked and consequently lost my job. I had to take another job nearby and commute by bicycle. If you talk about poor people benefiting from car centric cities, then you are delusional either about what "poor" really means, or about the reality of relying on a car when you're poor.
Don't be absurd. If the poor person somehow could find no jobs closer than a 2 hour commute away, they should buy a second home closer to the job. This isn't rocket science.
>You can never accommodate the people from the suburbs, unless they have a station right next to their door and their office and a train coming every 5 minutes, a car will always be faster.
That's really not universally true. If I'm going in and out during commuting hours and drive to the commuter rail station, it's about a wash whether I take the train into the city or drive depending upon where I'm going and what local subway connection/walk I need to do.
It's pretty much useless outside of commuting hours though given limited train schedule and the fact that driving is faster at those times than rush hour. So I'll basically never take the train for an evening event.
You guys are lucky in the NL that you have the _option_ to bike, drive, public transport. Maybe driving is still the fastest but the others are still treated as first class citizens.
In the US you couldn’t realistically bike anywhere nor does public transport go everywhere. Not to mention the 10 minute walk to the bus stop is probably much worse, especially outside of big cities.
“ In the US you couldn’t realistically bike anywhere nor does public transport go everywhere.”
This does, of course, depend entirely on where in the US you live. People commute by bike year round in Minneapolis, and it’s a stereotype for people in New York City to not have driving licenses because they take transit everywhere.
I'm unfamiliar with Minneapolis - sounds pretty amazing if there's a strong bicycle culture there, but not if "people" only means <1% of commuters. Bicycle enthusiasts live everywhere and are willing to make difficult or risky trips; we can't judge a city by whether or not hardcore bicyclists can survive there.
NYC is an extreme outlier, we love to see it, but about 98% of the US doesn't live in the area served by NYC transit. I am sure the population of Minneapolis is much smaller, too.
The vast majority of the US is prohibitively difficult to traverse by any mode except car. (Actually, it's usually a highly frustrating and dangerous experience by car, too.) I see reports of more than 60% of the population living in suburbs, which are, as a general rule, designed to discourage non-car travel.
NYC is also an outlier in that there's really no cultural expectation that you own a car and drive. As an adult professional, I'm not sure there's any other US city where I would choose not to do so simply because friends and activities are so often structured around owning a car and certainly being able to drive--even if there's decent transit. You can work around it to some degree (and I know a couple people who do) but I doubt I'd choose to.
In San Francisco it's common to not own a car, since parking is expensive and often not available and insurance is high also. At one point in the mid-90s I vaguely remember the ticket for parking illegally was less than the average parking space, until the city realized it. But SF is very small, so public transit/Uber/etc gives you many options to get around. Where I live now, if you have no car you go nowhere.
SF does have somewhat lower car ownership than the average American city. I know a couple in SF who don't own one. Though I'd observe that, in addition to muni and some cycling, they lean heavily on Uber, Zipcar, and conventional rentals so they're carless mostly in the sense that they don't own one and have to park it but they certainly use and drive cars in some form on an ongoing basis.
I will honestly take 20’s and dry over 40’s and wet. Until it gets in the deep negative numbers, I’ve never found cold to be a reason not to ride. You create heat when you ride, so comfort is easy to manage through layers.
I don't think they're designed explicitly to discourage non-car travel. It's quite easy to ride a bike around the suburbs and kids in particular do it all the time. It's just that as a function of everyone wanting a quarter acre lot and cul-de-sacs, the neighborhoods themselves take miles to navigate and then you have to get to a main thoroughfare or possibly even a freeway to then commute 10+ miles to work or to get groceries or see a movie or whatever you might want to do. Try riding a bike 15 miles with 2 kids in tow while picking up groceries on the way back home from some after-school activity or sport. It's just not feasible.
> It's quite easy to ride a bike around the suburbs and kids in particular do it all the time.
First, I don't agree. Most of the suburbs I've lived in or near have extremely low bicycle traffic, even though kids do it sometimes.
But more importantly, where are those kids going? Usually either nowhere, or to another suburban house. They're probably not getting groceries or otherwise leaving the residential area.
busses are so bad here to be honest. a lot of metropolitan cities solved this problem by having frequent and efficient bus lines connecting to major train/tram/metro lines. Randstad is one big metropolis without a coherent public transportation planning.
I moved here from Istanbul 12 years ago. the progress there was positive in this timeframe while in Randstad it was backwards to be honest. public transportation became more expensive and unreliable. busses are often empty and they seem to compensate this by increasing prices and cutting down the frequency, so it becomes less reliable for people to use it..
my commute to work is 15 km. it's 20 min by car without traffic but post-Covid traffic is so bad that it's 50 mins in average (1 hour+ on Tuesdays). bus is 30 mins with 1 connection but often I miss the connection and wait 15 mins, so it's 45 realistically. both are bad options, so I cycle instead in half an hour with my e-bike. if it's bad weather I take the car because busses are not on time so I can't plan being at the office for a meeting or so. plus, bus is much more expensive than my not so fuel efficient old car. go figure.
Yes prices are problematic. The above mentioned 20 kilometers to work is a 5 euro bus ticket. A bus full of people should not cost 25 cents per kilometer per person. It's slightly cheaper than my car but it should be a lot cheaper because so many people share one vehicle.
Let's assume a driver's salary of 18 €/h. A rule of thumb I've heard is that vacation, sick days, social security etc. etc. approximately double that cost to the company, so 36 €/h. 20 kph average speed is already a somewhat generous value for a regular non-BRT city bus line, but let's use it for simplicity's sake, which gives 1,80 €/km driver's costs.
Another rough value of thumb for city buses is that they use roughly about 30 l/100 km, which adds about 0,50 €/km, so 2,30 €/km for driver + fuel.
A regular city bus holds about 100 passengers, and an average utilisation figure as averaged across the whole day and all routes might be somewhere around 20 %. So an average of 20 passengers per bus at all times, which means 11.5 cents per kilometre for driver and fuel. Now add-in capital cost for the bus itself, maintenance and other ancillary stuff and unfortunately 25 cents per kilometre isn't all that much all of a sudden.
(If you can read some German, somebody did a more complete modelling of costs at https://prof.bht-berlin.de/fileadmin/prof/jschlaich/200811_F..., and with some assumed fictitious but presumably plausible values ended up at 3,26 €/vehicle-km for a city bus operation in 2008 – and both (driver) pay and fuel have increased above inflation since then.)
> Make it so public transit is less than 20 minutes, goes 24/7 and picks me up within 5 minutes walking of my home and I will use it.
Agreed! Except for the 24/7. I mean, when it comes to commuting, you need public transport to end late enough for you to stay late, but you don't need it at midnight.
> The majority of people in The Netherlands drive their car to get to work.
Not the majority of city-dwellers in the Netherlands, I'm sure.
> They don't want to have to walk 10 minutes to an edge parking or city hub.
2-minute bike ride then. And I say that as someone who's lived in the Netherlands, albeit only for a few years. It was _such_ a joy to be able to commute without a car (which I am again stuck with these days).
>Agreed! Except for the 24/7. I mean, when it comes to commuting, you need public transport to end late enough for you to stay late, but you don't need it at midnight.
Friday and Saturday public transit should at least run pretty late, unless you want people who don't want to pay for taxis driving home after drinking and partying.
Tangentially, this line of thinking has become very commonplace in the US.
People will wait in drive-thru lines that take twice as long as parking and walking in for coffee, food and even school/daycare/camp dropoff/pickup. It's baffling to me but, on the upside, I'll gladly pick up their slack and be in/out twice as fast.
Public transportation is not wide spread or serious but even in the places where it is an option (NE corridor), people often rather spend an extra 20/40/60 mins in a vehicle (theirs or a rideshare service) than use public transportation.
In an individualistic country like The Netherlands people will typically pick what is best for themselves. You need to give them a better alternative if you want to influence their decision making.
Nobody is trading a 20 minute drive for a 60 minute bus trip in order to create a better neighbourhood. Get that bus trip down to at most 30 minutes and people might reconsider.
> people will typically pick what is best for themselves. You need to give them a better alternative if you want to influence their decision making
Or remove/penalise the more convenient (but harmful) alternatives. We shouldn’t kid ourselves, we’re going to need sticks as well as carrots if we want to avoid disaster
You may be listening to the media a bit too much. The concept of 'climate' is increasingly used in a similar way as 'social justice' in some political discussions – as a broad idea to justify various authoritarian policies.
The government deciding how to use tax money is not authoritarian. Making people and companies responsible for eating the cost of automobiles isn't authoritarian either, if anything I'd say it's the opposite.
A big part of the reason why automobiles are so successful is that the cost are externalized. If oil companies and automobile manufacturers were forced to pay the cost of climate degradation they'd starve. But they're essentially on a type of welfare - where the people, and gov, eat those costs instead.
If we're playing welfare anyway, we might as well use it for public transit. And, as an aside, climate change is a real thing. It's not even up for debate. And yes, in order to solve a problem, you need policies. The "try nothing and hope it works" approach has been our approach forever and surprise! It doesn't work.
People do eat the cost of automobiles, what are you talking about? There is a federal gas tax, there are toll roads, there are property taxes, there are license and registration fees, there are even speeding fines, parking fines, etc etc. Cars also have an extremely positive impact on economic activity. They've enriched the lives of people, empower them to live in more affordable locations with higher standards of living, get access to goods shipped in from outside the state and outside the country at cheap prices, get access to overnight delivery on any food, product, or service, access to alternative schooling, medical care, ambulance services, fire rescue, police coverage, etc. etc.
The climate has not degraded, it has warmed slightly. It is not even as hot today as it was in the early Holocene. The earth has actually greened from the CO2 fertilization affect, increasing the leaf area index on one quarter to one half of earth's surface over the past 35 years (https://www.nasa.gov/technology/carbon-dioxide-fertilization...).
There are far less deaths from natural disasters today than there was 100 years ago (in large part thanks to automobiles enabling people to evacuate and emergency responders to be activated).
Welfare is paid for by the same tax payers that are paying for gas tax, property tax, income taxes, etc. By no means should they be forced into some ideologue's vision for how "a perfect society" should work.
Yes exactly. People, you and me, eat the cost of automobiles. NOT the automobile manufacturers or the oil industry. We take most of the cost, they've externalized it to us, i.e. they are on welfare. Just in a roundabout way.
If you put those costs on them instead of us, they would be in very hot water. And they may be motivated to change their business practices.
And I won't comment on the urgency or scale of the global climate. It's not worth an argument.
> You need to give them a better alternative if you want to influence their decision making.
Exactly! Offering compelling alternatives is the only way to change behavior in a way that's a win-win for both you and the people who prefer the option you don't.
I don’t actually think urbanism is antithetical to convenience, it’s just another form of achieving convenience by having more amenities close by (“15 minute cities”). I personally live in NYC despite being fully remote, because of how accessible literally everything is, it’s instant gratification paradise.
Extremist approach will never win any popularity and sway masses in such direction, so if you want to position some push for greener cities from extremist or even eco-terrorism perspective (so popular among young in western Europe these days), good luck seeing any results that would make you happy and actually achieve anything you wish for.
World is more complex mixture of various people than just similarly-minded people. Number of examples in the past where people feeling righteous and above the rest imposed pretty harsh things on general population. Not the way we should be heading.
We have serious issues with ecosystem, but even removing 100% of the cars alone won't solve any of those (plus it won't ever happen) so let's be a bit more smart.
Didn't say bus, I meant public transit overal. Living and working in two cities of that size there should be faster public transit between them.
Either that or better city planning so you don't end up with two cities of 140k and 300k but instead have one city of 440k with better interconnects between neighbourhoods and more light rail.
They don't want to walk because cars make walking less pleasant, more difficult and more dangerous. Everywhere you look things are made slightly easier for cars and slightly harder for everyone else.
> The majority of people in The Netherlands drive their car to get to work. They don't want to have to walk 10 minutes to an edge parking or city hub.
Not if that walk is through a car neighborhood, but if it’s through a neighborhood where there are almost no cars, good sidewalks, trees and grass?
Also, aren’t many neighborhoods already somewhat like that in the Netherlands, with limited on-street parking? Even if there’s a parking garage under an apartment building, it likely already is a 5-10 minute walk to get there.
I understand, but your points aren't really relevant for a number of reasons:
First, it is a dream, you have to do something to make it work. You are describing the status quo, I want us to move to something else. After decades of neoliberalism, even embraced by the centre-left party, we have eroded our actually quite decent public transport facilities. There is no reason it has to stay this way.
Second, I'm not talking about people commuting to work with public transport vs cars, even though it would be nice to get people out of the car into a much more efficient system. I'm talking about our neighbourhoods, the places where people actually live. I'm talking about going outside your house and not as a first thing having to face the noise, danger, pollution, ugliness, etc. of parked cars and cars moving on the road.
The neighbourhood could be a place where children play on the streets, where there is space to meet each other, with room for trees and other vegetation. If you just move all the tin out of the neighbourhood and to the edges on big solar covered parking lots, then it is easily done. It will create a lot of space and very little downsides. Of course we can't just rebuild all cities, but we can use this design for new ones.
I'm really not talking about parking along the edges of the city, so that you have to take a bus or bicycle in order to get to your car. I want people to park just on the edges of a block or neighbourhood (like 500 to 5000 people, depending on density). You should be able to walk to such a parking lot within 5 min. You would still be able to get to your house for things like groceries and stuff, just not park there. And disabled people would get an exception. Just this relatively simple change will reduce traffic immensely.
Third, it may feel now like you are entitled to be able to park in front of your house and drive to it by car. Everybody must naturally accommodate your wishes in this respect, because this is what the majority wants. However, if we change that and take that away from you, it will not take a lot of time before that changes. And then people will start to feel entitled to be able to have their children play on the streets again, and to enjoy such these carless spaces. In the same way, smokers used to feel entitled to be able to smoke in restaurants, in the train and even at the office. Things can and do change.
For the people who meticulously maxed out the total amount of minutes they are willing to commute, so that they really can't bear to add 2 x 5 minutes of healthy walks a day: they will eventually move jobs closer to home or vice versa, so we eventually again hit the same average of daily travel time which has been stable since medieval times. Reduced emissions is just a bonus.
Really, why are we not doing this? The Netherlands is often seen as a country which has their act together around transportation, but it could still be so much better. Cars are still way too dominant and there are way, way too many of them. We just don't have the space.
> My dream is to also ban parking of cars in neighborhoods and most car traffic, cars can be parked along the edges in solar covered parking spaces.
Some individuals, particularly those with disabilities or mobility issues, may find it challenging
It's not that simple. Your car increases your freedom, but everybody else's cars decrease it. As a resident who does not have a car, cars impede my freedom to bike and jaywalk, they are unsightly and reduce visibility, they take up space that could be used for bike lanes, greenery, benches or terraces. It would be far more pleasant if there were far less of them.
I believe that Japan bans on-street parking and that you are not allowed to have a car unless you can prove that you have dedicated parking for it. That seems like a good model to me.
Are those residents paying for the total cost of that parking? The space consumed, the opportunity costs averted, the safety cost of more cars driving through dense areas with pedestrians and cyclists?
If they are then that freedom is a valid choice. If they aren't, then they're being subsidized by public amenities, and the public can decide how those amenities should be used.
Not through direct usage tax, but probably through local taxes. And cycling and pedestrian infrastructure generally costs less per person-mile of capacity than car infrastructure.
Those streets and sidewalks were created through public action, the public decided or elected people who decided that that was a good allocation of resources.
Just like we decide that parking in some places is a good allocation of resources.
Changing our minds on which thing to allocate resources to isn't an affront to our freedoms, when done in a way that is democratic or representative.
The town deciding to build a park on some land instead of selling it to a developer to build a mall isn't an oppression of the mall builder's freedoms. It's just a choice.
Personally I find having choices in how to move around is an increase in personal freedom. Needing to own, insure, maintain, and fuel a car to participate in a community is a financial burden, and a burden on those who have to deal with cars and traffic while trying to do things like walk across a giant parking lot to get between two locations that should be reasonable to walk between.
Casting all decisions that do anything to take away public infrastructure for cars as a reduction in freedom is ridiculous.
1. I see kids in public transit all the time, including kids around age 10 taking trams by themselves. It’s also common to see groups of kids out on bikes or in a park. It’s more independence, not less.
2. I’ve seen a full range of disabilities on transit as well. Plus, isn’t it better for the disabled if it’s easy for them to drive since the roads and parking are mostly free of able-bodied people?
3. If you’re in the countryside, you can still drive when you need to. You can park at the edge of a city and take quick efficient transit to whichever internal part of the city you’d like. Also, living somewhere inconvenient like the countryside is a choice, and that inconvenience should be considered when looking for a place to live
4. I travel for work and have never needed a car. If you do, see the answer above for those in the countryside, that applies too
We can all make cities better without being 100% binary. Cars can be the exception rather than the rule, though
Your dream sounds like a nightmare. I can only imagine what it would be like for the very elderly or anybody on crutches.
Cars are very convenient and rapidly developing countries more populous than any European country have been embracing them as their economies grow richer for a reason.
It's actually better. Because disabled parking is still a thing.
Also you can easily find a parking space, because it's somewhat expensive. But that means I can go downtown on a Saturday, easily find parking for a few hours, do my shit and drive home. Yes it costs 10-15usd for 2 hours of parking. But that's a small price to pay.
Reducing everyone's ability to drive greatly increases the people who actually need to drives ability to do so.
The comment I replied to included, "also ban parking of cars in neighborhoods and most car traffic". Read my sibling comment and the issues should be very clear.
The part you quoted doesn't say cars are banned... Banning roadside parking in neighborhoods is already done in many places pretty commonly and it's fine. "Most car traffic" is vague but implies that those in need would still have their cars.
Ah yes, the _very elderly or anybody on crutches_... the people who have more to gain from using good public transportation than having to drive a two tons vehicle on streets filled with living kids.
Seven of my eight great grandparents were still alive while I was in high school and two of them lived with us. We didn't make them drive. We drove them to restaurants, church events, doctors, etc.
When I drove my great grandmother to a restaurant as a teenager in Colorado, I'd park right by the restaurant in a handicapped spot, grab her walker from the back seat and help her hobble into her favorite restaurant. It was a meaningful part of her week in later years.
There's absolutely no way it would have been feasible on public transit, even if we'd had the world-class 2024 Taipei Metro I regularly use now.
When I lived in Tokyo and in Japan in general I saw old people walk all the time. In fact the irony is, they are the ones that need to walk most. Physical inactivity accelerates senescence. Only young people can get away with not walking.
Of course there's extremely ill people and when it comes to transport policies there's always exceptions for that kind of commute, but the approach to elderly mobility right now is completely backwards. We should be encouraging modes of transport that keeps the elderly moving and autonomous.
I live in a neighborhood with a fair share of 50+ adults, and there are no sidewalks leaving the neighborhood, and few in the area. I could walk to the grocery store, I could walk to a convenience store, but I can't do so safely.
I'd be thrilled if we started making sidewalks a reality.
Hawaii also has a billboard ban. It was really jarring moving back to Illinois after getting used to not having them. It seems pretty clear that the negative impact of billboards far outweigh the benefits so I'm always hoping more places outlaw them.
There is a ban on billboards in Marin County (on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco).
Legally speaking, billboards are only banned within 500 yards or some other distance from the highway with the most traffic (where billboards would be most valuable, namely, US 101) but actually there are no billboards anywhere in the county and this has been the case since the 1960s (according to an old newspaper article). My guess is that the community has some way to exert "informal" (not based on formal governmental processes) pressure on landlords. Real estate prices are very high here in part because it is a very attractive landscape with plenty of hills and greenery and bodies of water, so maybe most landlords perceive that billboards have the potential to depress prices and keep the occasional landlord who contemplates erecting billboards in line somehow.
Also as an exception to the general rule, bus shelters (structures owned and maintained by the city or the county to keep the rain and the sun off people waiting for a bus) near US 101 have ads on them (4' by 6' or so) and the buses themselves do, too, or at least they used to--it's been a few years since I noticed.
At least one billboard, along 101 at the highway cut between San Rafael and Larkspur, survived until the late 1970s or early 1980s, but was burned down in what has been described as the closest an act of arson has come to earning an award of commendation by the Marin County Board of Supervisors.
More recently, a "flower billboard" was created, and in 2010 removed, along US-101 in Novato:
When I was a kid, I lived on lake which was connected to Lake Ontario.
One summer a job was across the our small lake, a 40 minute drive by car, but maybe 10 minutes by boat as the crow flies. Sure, I got wet during rain and wavy days, but clothes get dry, and it sure was convenient.
I often wondered, if the job was in SF itself, do people take boats to get to work? If so, why not? I presume docking costs? The place I worked had their own dock, so ... "sure, just tie up over there every day".
When I was a kid in Miami, I read about people commuting to work by jet ski. This was before they replaced the Rickenbacker Causeway drawbridge with the William Powell Bridge, and the commute from Key Biscayne into Miami could be delayed and backed up, as boats had the right-of-way.
I had a friend who lived in New Jersey in a water front property - he used to ride a jetski over to New York to stop for a drink at a bar in a marina. The issue was you had to pay marina fees to be allowed to dock there, so while it was fun it was actually a pretty pricey way to get to NY (and you'd be wearing damp clothes) - but he still thought it was a lot of fun.
He was OK but apparently the was a lot of boat theft in that area too.
There are people who live waaaaay out there and commute to their Silicon Valley job via a light airplane like a Cessna, quarterly, monthly, weekly, probably even daily. "Commutes, uh... find a way"
I knew one of those too. I consulted for a company across the street from the Palo Alto general aviation airport. The doc/pubs manager lived some place north of Sonoma. She would fly in, walk across the street, and go to work.
At another job, the project manager lived in WA but worked in Palo Alto. He flew (commercial) in early Monday, with a small apartment to live in during the week, then take off mid-afternoon Friday to be back in WA with his family for the weekend.
And resort/premium retirement areas like Aspen. I'd also argue that although jobs helped create a lot of the "elite" cities, once they were created, there's a fair bit to keep people in their orbit if not in the city proper even if employment opportunities become less of a consideration.
The benefits of billboards are a zero sum game, it's absurdly easy for the benefits of a ban to outweigh them.
Here in Germany regulation of outside ads has zero novelty value, it's so much a given that I don't know anything about the history of it. And it turns out the benefits of a ban are much bigger than just more pleasant views, because the ad spend does not simply disappear. Much of it gets channeled into event sponsoring, sports clubs and the like, in short things that actually improve life for all instead of just providing some more passive income for property owners. It's a total no-brainer if there ever was one.
I got stopped at a roadblock even before LED's, the highway patrol officer said "I wasn't sure you were going to stop, you nearly ran over [X] over there" and my reply was, "Your lights are so bright, and blue, and right here on the road, that I can't see a thing. I'm glad I didn't."
Yes travelling can really create a sense of what you have, or lack.
Where I live there are very few billboards. I rarely see them. When I travel (especially to the US) it's very jarring. They are very visually polluting.
This pretty much mirrors my experience: I live in Washington, and when I drive down the freeway, I see nothing but trees and mountains. When I go back to Minnesota to visit family, I'm bombarded with billboards -- often political or religious content. I don't miss that at all.
One of the nice side effects of hosting the Olympics was the ban on new advertising billboards in the downtown core of Atlanta. There are a few old signs that were grandfathered in but it's close to impossible to get new billboards added. One of the nice side effects of having a tornado rip through downtown a decade later was that it destroyed some of the grandfathered in billboards which the city did not allow to be replaced despite crying from the billboard companies.
To prevent "ambush marketing", the IOC demands control over advertising in the area around the games. Given what a big deal it was for a city like Atlanta to get to host the games, this was one of the few times when the public was going to win despite the money and influence of the advertising industry. To its credit, Atlanta has mostly stuck by those Olympic era billboard laws. The biggest exception probably is the huge video board next to the Ernst & Young building but it replaced a much more modest video sign that had already been there.
Being a large city, Atlanta has the resources to fight court challenges against the well funded advertising industry. Several of the suburban and exurban communities I lived in had citizens and governments united in their hatred of billboards but they lacked the resources to prevent them as the billboard companies have lots of experience with bleeding local governments dry in court, sending a message to other local governments to not even bother trying to oppose them. Big cities however can do better... if they wish to.
Los Angeles, you have an opportunity in 2028. Will you take advantage of it like Atlanta did?
Not entirely, but it impose some very important limits on any signs near highways, such as requiring them to be advertising something that's available from the same property under them.
That effectively blocks the most spammy and egregious forests of signs, because one can't just purchase a small rectangle of near-highway grass and start auctioning space above it to a large shifting pool of national bidders.
Don’t drive I-5 by Fife much, eh? Okay, you did say “usually”.
Redmond has an outright ban on billboards. That’s how I know where the Redmond/Kirkland border is (there’s a billboard on 124th St.) Now if they if they’d just follow King County on those fucking political signs. (King County says “not on public right-of-ways”, Redmond says “where ever you see a patch of grass”.)
It used to be true that near the FL/GA border you'd see billboards advertising "TOPLESS DANCERS" for 50 miles on either side of the fine establishment buying these billboards. The sheer number of them was almost a parody of billboards in a way.
Various localities have similar bans. I'm aware of at least one with strict signage controls, shopping centers generally have an directory near the entrance(s) and that's about it other than the signage on the stores themselves.
My old office was decorated with a picture of an art installation which was a house painted entirely white, even the palm trees. Someplace east LA. But in front there was a bus with a huge Marvel whatever advert pasted on the side passing by.
I have always wondered how a world without marketing would look. I think marketing has a net negative effect. I also think that maybe you cannot eliminate all marketing but you can easily eliminate most of it just by controlling the spending of big companies, so it's possible. I have no ethical problems with eliminating it, as I consider it a form of manipulation and falsehood spreading, and anyway I don't consider companies have a right to free speech, or any real rights for that matter.
So I'm curious. Suppose you're starting a new small business. You're selling a quality product but nobody knows about you. How do you propose they find out?
A product which needs help beyond its own merits to make a sale likely doesn't meet most people's definition of quality.
Genuinely fantastic products spread like wildfire on their own, without paid promotion.
I'd love to live in a world where there's no advertising and so therefore the only products available have to be genuinely fantastic.
I can't see a downside - just as many products will still be needed for just as many people, so it shouldn't affect the economy negatively.
What would happen is we would evolve faster and have more safety, reliability, productivity etc. The lack of useless junk polluting the planet would be yet another positive.
> A product which needs help beyond its own merits to make a sale likely doesn't meet most people's definition of quality.
How does the customer know anything about its merits if they've never heard of it?
> Genuinely fantastic products spread like wildfire on their own, without paid promotion.
What if it's not world changing product, it's just a new normal competitor in an existing market whose product is 2% better than average? Or is exactly average, but it costs slightly less? Don't we still want these things?
> I can't see a downside - just as many products will still be needed for just as many people, so it shouldn't affect the economy negatively.
An obvious downside is that it gives an even bigger advantage to incumbents with a known brand.
>How does the customer know anything about its merits if they've never heard of it?
They buy it and try it out. How do you think most things sell? It isn't advertising! When I go to the supermarket, I know they have food and home supplies. If you sell one of those things, get it on a shelf. My supermarket literally has tiny batch products from local cottage industry. If I need hardware, I know I can get it at lowes or Home Depot. I didn't need any advertising to know that a place that says "Hardware store" on the sign will sell hardware!
>What if it's not world changing product, it's just a new normal competitor in an existing market whose product is 2% better than average? Or is exactly average, but it costs slightly less? Don't we still want these things?
This will entirely occupy all conversation of most normal people. People LOVE to talk about their shit that is slightly better than the same shit you buy. People LOVE to tell friends and family and strangers about this product they bought that is just slightly different.
>An obvious downside is that it gives an even bigger advantage to incumbents with a known brand.
Which is why Coca-Cola still advertises right? Because advertising only helps those just getting started in selling a brand new product?
Not sure why you so desperately try to find some moral justification for advertising, having the skin in the game like many in HN?
Its literally manipulation of those who have money to spend them on product they otherwise wouldn't, has absolutely 0 relationship on quality on the product (in extreme cases it goes directly against it). Word of mouth, unbiased reviews (yes, they cost something to keep the interference away but save you tons of money and time down the line). Its 2024, we are more connected than we probably should be. Manipulation always = lies, it doesn't matter how you wrap them around. We all have moral compass (barring sociopaths/psychopaths et al), and we all have opinion on such behavior.
Sure its like nuclear armament, once one does it many feel they also need to do it. But its purely emotional business on both ends (customers and companies feeling the need to pay for ads), where literally the only person truly winning is the advertiser (something about selling shovels during gold rush). Mankind as it is only loses, I don't see any way its morally justifiable. Even having less services say online available for free ain't a losing proposition if you look at long term damage of advertising.
> Its literally manipulation of those who have money to spend them on product they otherwise wouldn't, has absolutely 0 relationship on quality on the product (in extreme cases it goes directly against it).
This is an extremely strong claim. Certainly you'd concede that some ads contain truthful information. Like there exists at least one ad that is true. So then how is it "manipulation" for someone to post that information in a public space?
We jumped from "billboards are ugly" to "ads are categorically evil," and based on some pretty strong assumptions.
> Word of mouth, unbiased reviews (yes, they cost something to keep the interference away but save you tons of money and time down the line).
Okay, so how do you get the first person to buy your product if advertising is illegal? The base case would seem to require it. Same goes for "independent reviews." How do you find the independent reviewer? And this is ignoring getting a critical mass of customers for word of mouth to even work.
> This is an extremely strong claim. Certainly you'd concede that some ads contain truthful information. Like there exists at least one ad that is true.
Conversely, I find this a weak claim. If most major uses of something are negative, one minor positive use does not trump the negative.
And even if a billboard is 100% factual, that does not necessarily means it’s a net positive to have constant visual pollution for something you may not even buy.
One caveat being, some high quality things really do get drowned out or conceptually polluted by loudly advertised crap. It's a tangly problem that's for sure
Word of mouth, to start. If there's no marketing, consumers in general will understand that they need to seek out products that they want and need, and will eventually find your new product.
A side bonus is that this will eliminate a lot of useless garbage. Without advertising to manipulate people into buying things they didn't need and otherwise would not want, companies that sell junk will fail.
At any rate, finding customers within the constraints of the law (including a hypothetical advertising ban) is not society's problem, it's the company's problem.
If you have two customers and you need a thousand customers to cover your fixed costs, you're out of business before this has time to be effective.
> If there's no marketing, consumers in general will understand that they need to seek out products that they want and need, and will eventually find your new product.
What you're really implying is that somebody is going to set up a website or search engine for people to find products, and then marketing would be replaced entirely by SEO and payola.
> Without advertising to manipulate people into buying things they didn't need and otherwise would not want, companies that sell junk will fail.
The assumption here is that the companies selling junk aren't the incumbents. What mechanism is going to exist to help people identify what is and isn't junk that can't or doesn't exist already?
>If you have two customers and you need a thousand customers to cover your fixed costs, you're out of business before this has time to be effective.
Spend your marketing budget on your fixed costs.
Also, is your product direct-to-consumer? Because if it isn't, there are established channels to sell it to distributes, and if it is, you're likely a big part of the problem (since marketing of direct-to-consumer products is not usually a tool to let people know about new quality products).
We already have those things. To the extent that people can use them to get the good product instead of the junk one, don't they already do it?
And, of course, we know that these things are often corrupted. One of the major problems is that people want this most for products that are expensive, but manufacturers only send free/pre-release test samples to reviewers they think will publish a favorable review.
To do it right you need the reviewer to not have this dependency on the manufacturer for access, so they need money to buy the product themselves. Which is what you get with Consumer Reports, but they (haha) aren't funded by advertising, and then people on a tight budget forego subscription and don't know what to buy.
That's really two different classes of products. You want to read a review before you buy a car, but by and large people actually do that already.
Low cost items don't need that because this isn't going to be the only sandwich or bottle of laundry detergent you buy this decade, so it's as easy to take a chance on it once and try it yourself as to read a review which may or may not be biased, and then if it sucks you don't buy it again.
Somehow you have to get your product in front of (and probably give it away) to the people doing the independent reviews and product testing. That's marketing.
There are probably some exceptions in well-defined markets with a limited number of products like automobiles but those are actually companies that, in general, spend a lot on marketing and advertising.
> If you have two customers and you need a thousand customers to cover your fixed costs, you're out of business before this has time to be effective.
The obvious answer is that you chose a risky business to go into.
There as a time when if you sold tiny hinges to mount stamps in a stamp collecting book there would be a Philatelist Monthly magazine or such that would be your target market where you can advertise.
The only thing that would achieve is that a "word of mouth" businesses would pop up. People would sign up, product place stuff in regular talks about weather near the office coffee machine. You would visit your parents and they would told ask you to buy some stuff you don't need because they would get a cut. Would you prefer that? I surely wouldn't.
People have no idea how the world works, yet want to design laws and would like to force other people to act according to their preferences. It's so egocentric it's unbelievable.
A world without marketing would still allow for products to be registered, reviewed, rated, and for people to talk about it. It would still allow you to have a website and a newsletter that people can opt into. The only restriction would be that you cannot pay for better visibility, reviews or references from influencers.
So the way I imagine it would work is that you would register your product into an official registry (free of charge). Then if I need something specific I can search the registry for what I need, and your product might pop up, with links to your website, your videos, as well as all reviews and ratings. There could be a subsidy system that makes unreviewed products cheaper. If your product is really awesome, the awesome reviews should, in principle, suffice to make your business thrive.
Of course, whatever the system in place is, there needs to be work done to make sure it cannot be cheated: if people can pay to prop up their product, they will. But it shouldn't be necessary to pay to make people aware of a product that could improve their lives. Surely it should be possible to set up some kind of discovery system.
> A world without marketing would still allow for products to be registered, reviewed, rated, and for people to talk about it. It would still allow you to have a website and a newsletter that people can opt into. The only restriction would be that you cannot pay for better visibility, reviews or references from influencers.
These are all forms of marketing, but not specifically advertising. I think what OP meant to say is "a world without advertising."
I don't know about you but I'm still not finding out about them, they have to compete with more established businesses for ad space.
I have gotten precisely one piece of marketing communication that had a positive value in my entire life and it was from an online restaurant supplier. One. Solitary. Closer to forty than I am thirty.
I just don't think the value proposition that you're talking about actually exists.
If you're a new business and you're any good and you do effective marketing, in a couple years you're an established business. Then you see their ad and you say "well yeah but they're an established business." Now they are, but at one point they weren't. And at that point they weren't buying as much advertising because they didn't have as much money, but if they hadn't bought any they'd be gone instead of established.
I also kind of suspect that big companies buy a lot of advertising specifically to outbid their smaller competitors on the ad slots, because the ROI is much higher for the company that wouldn't have been the customer's default, so the bigger company isn't buying the slot to build awareness, they're buying it to keep their challenger from doing that. And then most of the ads you see are for big companies.
And I'm saying that their marketing has had a negative impact on my life, I don't want it, and if your case represented a true and effective strategy then at some point I would have been exposed to it. Sorry, that it would have happened more than once.
Why would you think it would have happened more than once to you? By definition small businesses are small. They might run ads and only find 100 more people who want their product. There could be a million small businesses doing this in the US and the average person might not experience it happening to them even once.
> If you're a new business and you're any good and you do effective marketing, in a couple years you're an established business.
This is massively burying the lede here. Doing 'effective marketing' costs a large amount of money. Where is this marketing budget going to come from with a fresh business that hasn't begun to sell products at scale yet?
>Doing 'effective marketing' costs a large amount of money.
Yes. It requires an investment. Setting up a website. Maybe going to and speaking at relevant events. Sending out press releases. Etc. If you're going to setup a business and just not tell anyone, you probably shouldn't bother. And, in general, telling people and promoting your business is marketing even if you don't classically advertise.
You won't have the money to buy such billboards anyways. Also it would be more efficient to do semi-targeted advertising by buying space in related places: magazines related to your product, sponsor spots in youtube videos, ads in specialty stores, etc. Start small by targeting an audience likely to be interested, not by mass-advertising in a spray-and-pray fashion.
Example: I found out about JLCPCB from sponsor segments on electronics youtube channels, when they started their offering. Granted this is not a small business (the company behind JLC is a behemoth), but it is a Chinese company unknown in the west, that only did B2B before. They advertised directly to audiences that might be interested.
> Also it would be more efficient to do semi-targeted advertising by buying space in related places: magazines related to your product, sponsor spots in youtube videos, ads in specialty stores, etc.
Those are all still marketing. Whether they're better than billboards depends on what the product is.
> You won't have the money to buy such billboards anyways.
Billboard space is available starting at on the order of $1000/month. This is well within the reach of a small business for a one month campaign and the dynamic billboards will even sell space on an interval of 15 minutes.
The fixed billboards in the most expensive cities are all Coca Cola and McDonalds because those cost the most and that's who can afford them, but the proposal is "ban all marketing" not "ban all marketing by multinational corporations".
Well, when was the last time someone saw something like that advertised on billboards? Can’t remember ever seeing anything like it on a billboard outside SF which is a very weird special case
Partial answer: A lot of products people buy are not directly from the maker, but some store. So instead of marketing directly to consumers, the maker can just go and pitch to the store owner, who then carries the product. If there are enough stores out there (not a world full of Walmarts), then most makers will find many stores to carry their product. People go to the store, browse and buy.
> A lot of products people buy are not directly from the maker, but some store.
How does this account for high streets becoming ghost towns in the UK? It seems like running bricks & mortar stores in the UK isn't financially viable.
Wasn't especially my observation last time I was in London. But it's fair that a combination of online purchases and (maybe?) changing tastes/priorities have taken a hit on at least some categories of B&M retail overall.
Your product can be listed somewhere, discovered, word of mouth... The thing is you cannot pay to promote it. I agree it would be a challenge to solve, maybe some kind of compromise could be achieved.
In a free market your product, if it is truly better than competitors, will sell more. Because consumers will research products based on merit, and consumers can tell somehow which product is higher quality, and they can do it instantly.
As you can see, we have never lived in a free market.
The same way humanity has done for thousands of years? Word of mouth and reputation. This isn't a new problem, what's new is the ubiquitousness of advertising and the amount of money that gets pissed away on marketing.
So what ends up happening is that local businesses don't get any of the marketing opportunities which get bought out by big businesses with a large ad spend budget.
If it's not 1905, you put up a website and let people search for your product. Modern marketing doesn't seek to inform, after all. It doesn't work to make a product discoverable. Does Ford Motor Company really need to spend that $400 million annually? Would anyone soon forget the existence of the F150?
i like the trap laid here. "But NoMoreNicksLeft, you have to pay for search rankings!" ban that, too. Ban SEO. If i make a page that has my product offerings on it, it should compete on my copy, not SEO or how much i spent at google, bing, FB, etc. This is a solvable problem with specifically search technology, but also as a society we also have access to more people to ask for recommendations, to see other people talking about some new toy (or whatever) they bought.
As far as search engines go, the search provider can wholesale ban everyone who even accidentally games the system. Put your widget catalog on a web page, be honest about your products and/or services, and you should be fine. I will repeat that, because i think this is the part that gets marketing graduates in a tizzy - be honest about your products and/or services. If you gotta lie about what you offer or can do, then i really could not care less if your business survives; there's already enough dishonesty in our society.
edit to add: i actually logged in on my computer to reply to another comment you made (they should just buy a house closer to the job) which was very good.
How might one practically ban SEO? The moment a search engine uses information on a web page to determine relevance, the operator of the website can modify its presentation to bump up its rankings. There's plenty of room even within the strictest possible bounds of "being honest", and being the first result on the biggest search engine is valuable enough that you'll still get an underground SEO industry, legal or not.
Also, search providers know that users will get mad if they can't access popular websites, so there's no way they'll cut those websites off at a whim just for "accidental gaming", not unless they're compelled from above. And then you have the usual issues with corruptible officials deciding which companies are good and which are verboten.
From a legal standpoint, this seems far easier than banning advertising of any form. Which, if you'll remember, has (some) constitutional protections within the US. In contrast, it's a bit more difficult to claim such a thing about SEO. We regulate the activities of business all the time, and SEOing just doesn't seem expressive in the ways that "free speech" are.
From a practical standpoint, I do not have a clue. It seems as if this would just drive the worst of it overseas, where it is not possible to investigate or to prohibit effectively. I'll await the other guy's answer, maybe he has something more clever than I can come up with on a Friday at 5pm.
How often have you discovered a quality product through advertising, rather than through reviews, personal recommendations, or just being present in a store? I have a hard time remembering even a single case.
You know what, how about this: A corporation gets to spend let's say up to 5% of its total budget on advertising in the first two months of its existence, as long as it has a new product that is exclusive to the company and as long as the company is advertising exclusively for itself and for the new product, and as long as the corporation is financially and structurally independent from established corporations. Any loopholes that let Coca-Cola take advantage of this are systematically closed, the intent of the law is clearly communicated, and the FTC fines any established corporation trying to work around it.
This advertising is only legal to put in free versions of media that have paid ad-free versions, and to opt-in newsletters organized by product (so that people can pay to keep it out of their lives but if they're curious about innovations in a space or just want to know what's coming out they can get a slight discount for it).
This also gives an advantage to new companies, which is probably a good thing, though could of course be abused by a billionaire with fly-by-night companies, at which point we'd have to patch that loophole. Maybe with my favorite idea of "ownership disclosures", where the majority owner(s) of any given corporation has to be disclosed on product labels, so that you know if you're buying from Nestle or Unilever even if they want to obfuscate that fact.
A lot of marketing is not falsehood spreading. It’s literally just trying to get the word to potential customers that a thing exists that might be useful to them. Most b2b marketing is like that.
I agree that marketing where they have an attractive person just show something is manipulative though.
This is just so wide of the mark in my experience, especially B2B where the sales and marketing tactics are just, well, awful.
What I have observed is that almost without fail, I find out about really good, high quality products and services from friends and colleagues, through more general word of mouth, by reading reviews, and by research, not through ads.
In fact, it is so noticably true that what is being advertised to me is rarely what I want that I use advertising as a negative signal. If I recall seeing ads for something, I will consciously avoid buying it and that usually works out for the best.
So I conclude advertising is mostly important for duping people into buying things they don't really want or need, that are more than likely nothing special, and that society would benefit greatly from a ban on advertising.
One of the sponsored results is for an electric skid steer that I didn’t know existed. This is genuinely useful to know for small jobs.
Another sponsored result is for a delivery rental service that can bring them anywhere. Also good to know for jobs where I don’t want to go to an equipment rental place in the city to haul it myself to a site 150 miles away.
A separate example is that lots of airports have 3rd party off airport parking that is cheaper. A billboard on the highway to the airport that says “off-site aport parking $20/day, $80/week with 24/7 shuttle service every 15 mins” is literally all just useful information about a way to save money using a third party at a convenience cost that you wouldn’t think to look into.
Well, if you try to run your own business of any type, you suddenly realize why there's need for marketing. Things don't sell themselves. Nobody beats a path to your door even with the best of mousetraps.
... because your competitiors are using ads to manipulate your potential customers into buying from them instead of you. Do you think people would just stop eating because restaurants/grocery stores were not allowed to advertise?
I would stop eating because I wouldn’t be able to sell my products and won’t have money to go to restaurants! Like most of the people who don’t work for employers (so they could outsource their marketing efforts to corporations), and have to market their efforts.
You are right that advertising employs other manipulative tactics besides just deception. The other tactics are just as bad and most ads are straight up deceptive.
I don't think so. For me the real test is whether or not someone is giving me a monetary incentive. The very act of having to pay someone to say something increases the probability of it being a lie
For me the real test is whether or not someone is trying to persuade other human beings towards a certain action. An action that is favourable for you.
This can be monetary of course. But this could also be ballot vote on election day. This could be a change in behaviour of people to drive less cars, but take the train instead. Or convince people that advertising should be banned for large corporates.
Marketing is the art and science of achieving behavioural changes to your benefit.
> For me the real test is whether or not someone is trying to persuade other human beings towards a certain action. An action that is favourable for you.
I think the test for me, at least for the kind of marketing/advertising that should be banned, is the passiveness of it.
If, while going through my day, I am interrupted by your billboard, banner ad, spam email, promotional app notification, street marketing person, etc. in an attempt to manipulate me into action, that is the thing that should be illegal.
If I walk into a shop and say "I'm looking for a camera", invite a business in to pitch for work, call somoene up for a quote, directly enter a query like "buy camera uk" into a search engine, etc. then I think that is ok. I have asked to be sold to, and I am mentally prepared for the fact of that happening (notwithstanding that certain techniques should maybe also not be allowed).
Yes, we are always trying to have some effects on other people's behavior, but I don't think most people would say it's marketing. And maybe most important, quantity is a quality on itself. So, me as an individual trying to persuade another individual is a total different game than a big corporation trying to persuade millions of people. To give a more clear cut example, me having a look on the street is very different to mass surveillance.
The difference is that people come to the comment section here to read opinions on the subject of the article. People don't go on a highway drive just to learn about what lawyers and and casinos are available. I'm sure you can also understand the difference between a catalogue listing on-topic producs and unprompted signage.
Karma will you get more status and increase the likelihood of posts being upvoted. There are many guides online how to rank on HN in order to market your startup.
HN comments have influenced my thinking and my subsequent actions quite heavily in the past years.
The line you’re drawing is super thin and only theoretical.
I kind of wonder how far you want to go with these sorts of things.
Would controlling things like this bleed into adjacent social controls, like how HOAs will prevent any house from looking too different? Or possibly take on other dimensions, like sponsored in-real-life product placement and word-of-mouth?
Regular people living their lives like to make arbitrary changes to their houses, which is why HOA rules are contentious.
Regular people aren’t paid to advertise as they go about their day. It’s not very comparable.
And I’ve never heard anyone suggest that word of mouth recommendations should be banned... That’s kind of an insane idea that isn’t even remotely possible.
> I have always wondered how a world without marketing would look.
We would all be standing there at the entrance of the supermarket exchanging awkward looks not knowing what to do until an old lady shows up and we grab a cart because she did. Then we follow her around the store pretending not to be looking, buying the same products. When everyone has paid and the old lady is long gone we have conversations about what to do with the things we've just purchased.
Oh man, I thought it was completely obvious what marketing is.
It takes effort to bridge the gap between users and manufacturers. We are used to the company doing the work and picking up the bill but the customer has as much need to figure out what solutions are available.
Having the company search the customer only barely works. It works but very poorly and only to some extend. The potential client feels bothered by the noise of endless offers and spends very little time on them. In stead of dangling your garden set in their face until one of them bites you can put it in a store next to the other garden sets.
Because pushing barely work products are limited to that what is instantly obvious.
Customers may also gather and inform themselves. They might willingly go to a conference and sit though lengthy presentations. In stead of screaming at you that I offer an email service a presentation is more about what sets it apart [say] its scripting interface.
If stores and conferences are still considered marketing the customer will have to put in more work to stay informed. They would tend more towards objective side by side comparison making the company more about the product than about marketing.
The pun of my joke was that customers are not stupid. They can find the breakfast cereal aisle and pick something entirely by themselves.
I thought it was obvious since the screaming contest is enormously frustrating. An overpriced mediocre product will allow for the largest budget which is most likely to win - so that is what you have to make? lame
I live in the greater Johannesburg area of South Africa, the area I'm in is probably amongst the very highest economic contributors of the country, and while sitting still in traffic there is no where one can look without some advert being in view, it's dystopian and depressing.
Even worse though, there is this amazingly fancy huge electronic billboard and then all around it (like most streets here) everything is, if not messy from litter, just generally scruffy, unkept plants / grass, weeds growing on the verge of the road, streets not swept, etc.
Technically, the depressing mess is the fault of the local government which is generally incompetent, but considering that they already charge these billboard companies for the rights to show these adverts there, they could just make another part of the deal for the rights is that the billboard companies are obligated to ensure that part of the road is kept neat.
It wouldn't be the primary reason for the brain drain here, but definitely just one more reason that people give up on the country.
(The reasons why skilled middle-class people are fleeing include: Crime, corruption, constant load shedding (it's been better as of late, but it remains to be seen if it's gone for good), we pay a significant amount of income tax, and then also 15% VAT on practically everything (on top of the import fees for most things). Despite the amount of taxes the middle class pays, government education, healthcare and policing are not to be relied on, so we also need to pay for private versions of those too. The bottom line is we get terrible value for money for the taxes we pay.
I consider my taxes to be largely charity to the majority of the population which is in poverty and don't pay taxes, so I do feel absolutely aggrieved with the apathy, incompetence or corruption of our government which results in very little of that money being used where it should be.)
Ehhhh.... Why can't the government keep the road neat? Isn't that the government's job?
The problem with including a stipulation in the contract, for the private company to keep it neat, is its hard to objectively monitor (Unlike say the money paid for advertising), which will therefore 100% become a way to extort the private companies.
The optimal solution will just be 'pay off the government inspectors & spend as little on actually keeping it neat as possible'.
People need to understand a government policies is like a software program, its not trivial to just 'add a feature'. An extremely corrupt government, is like hardware that flips bits randomly all the time, so please don't make it do even more things.
SA has massive brain drain but still better than many countries producing talent by many metrics.
I've looked at the visa process before and it looked as if getting PR is nightmarishly difficult compared to other talent seeking nations like Taiwan or Australia. I don't understand it.
If you issued liberal visas and an ak47 to fend off the carjackers id think hard about getting on the next flight.
Truly a breathtaking beautiful country and I hope things look up for you soon.
Companies are still waiting for augmented reality to become a thing so that they can correct this problem and place ads on every available surface within your field of view no matter where you are.
I don’t really watch sports, but whenever I catch sight of a football game on TV, I’m amazed at how colorful and vibrant on field ads are, almost as if they were computer graphic generated or something.
They have on their websites some neat examples. For example Supponor literally replaces the ads in the live stream (see the hockey example on their front page).
Not sure if it's the same two companies, but you can find an impressive result video here:
I imagine it's just a matter of time. Sponsor block for removing sections of ads embedded in videos is already a thing. Making the blocking spatial instead of just temporal is not far removed.
In soccer they actual are. the ads are injected to the sideboards beside the playing field, so that if you watch the same game on different channels, they have different ads depending on their avg viewers.
I watch a lot of football, I watched >90% of games at the Euros on UK TV, I've never seen a pitchside advert on TV that wasn't showing the same as what you would see if you were sat in the stadium.
I don't watch football, but in hockey they project digital ads onto the ice and parts of the plexiglass around the rink during the broadcasts that aren't there IRL. They are often vibrant and look out of place, it's quite possible that's what you were seeing.
They are typically superimposed yes. It's extraordinarily easy with football, the field is essentially a premade green screen with completely standardized index points (the yard markers). What's funny is what happens when it starts snowing on the field, which is not rare with the NFL's schedule.
You should checkout F1. they now have e-ink on the side of the cars and the ads are dynamic and catch your eye. I would be curious to find out if it's some exotic type of e-ink tech they use to keep it lightweight (as in .. as light as a decal or paint)
Do you have a link ? I was not aware of that, the only thing I can find is that McLaren ran some tests to replace in-cockpit ads with a small eink screen, but nothing on the side of the cars.
also to clarify, I just called it "e-ink" because I didn't know what it was, it just looked like e-ink based on how it seems to change (flicker and then transition to new image). I have no idea what it is :D
One of the many reasons AR will probably never go anywhere. It has some pretty neat applications, but then a ton of horribly dystopic ways to monetize it. And greed all but guarantees that the latter will drown out the former. Kind of like what happened to VR where anti-competitive exclusivity deals, profit motivated pricing (as opposed to a loss leader market to drive adoption) and all this other sort of nonsense went a long way towards killing the ecosystem before it even got off the ground. It was a like bait and switch, but they forgot the bait.
Once the tech is worth it we'll have uBlock, Ad Nauseum, and eventually Vanced apps. I'll help friends and family, but sadly have learned my lesson about helping the general public utilize such things.
> There are far more clever and profitable ways to monetize MR than to shove ads in your face wherever you look.
There are, but the problem with ads (and surveillance) is, they're purely additive on the margin. Any of the clever and profitable thing you do to monetize MR, you can get a bit more money if you also put in ads. Then the competition puts more ads. Rinse repeat, eventually ads overwhelm the experience - but not before you make bank.
That's the cancerous nature of advertising. It metastasizes to every new medium, feeds on it, and ultimately consumes it.
Really? Seems like ad funded “free” tech products have been the most successful in gaining wide adoption. I’d argue the opportunity for greed in AR makes it more likely to go lots of places, although we may not like them in the long run.
My argument would be that we don't really know which tech products would be successful, because any attempt to create a better product is immediately crushed by a "free" ad supported alternative.
The ad model yields worse product and are actively killing off any attempt to improve, because the majority of people don't understand the downside of financing products using ads, rather than direct payment.
The ad funded model is only successful if you view the world solely in terms of profit. I think Windows is a good example, the product doesn't improve when Microsoft loads the install up with ads and telemetry, but it is more profitable, and therefor more successful, if you're a stockholder.
That would require brain implants or implanted lenses or some such, and no one would ever leave that platform open enough to be constantly tracked, and constantly barraged by it. Who would do that to themselves?!
And really, for it to be all encompassing, you'd need everyone to have to use such systems, such as forcing everyone to have such devices to log in to services, or even order food, or pay for things, and no one would force people to have a device to even pay for things, or eat.. I.. um, oh right, smartphones.
(I firmly suspect that within 25 years not only will brain implants -> visual cortex happen, but that if you don't have one you won't be able to work effectively, you won't be able to identify yourself effectively, and you probably won't even be able to pay for things)
mcmcmc: Nowhere did the GP state that AR would be inescapable. Yes, I know. I stated it. See above?
My whole point revolves around the fact that I believe, just as with smartphones, that people will be severely hampered without said tech. That it will effectively be a requirement to have such tech. Statements such as "But you can just...", fail to realise just how much is dependent upon it. In many respects there are NO workarounds without a smartphone, there are jobs that require you to own one, there are tasks/things you do in life that absolutely require it, and if you don't have one?
Often you cannot find a work around, or the work around is literally a monumental task, thus people simply capitulate.
This is what brain implants and AR will be like in 25+ years.
Nowhere did the GP state that AR would be inescapable, just that ads would be inescapable in AR. I’d imagine high tech contact lenses would be a preferable approach to a seamless interface for most people who aren’t born with this stuff already at mass adoption.
Enough people that it eventually becomes unavoidable for the rest. See: all the other horrors of modern civilization that you cannot avoid without becoming a hermit.
I want the opposite. Someone needs to make AR glasses that selectively look for ads and remove them in real time. I would pay $$$ for such a feature. It doesn't even seem impossible with current technology either. Image recognition has gotten really good.
Something I like to do, to keep my personal space a tiny bit more ad-free:
when on a flight, bus-ride or similar, where you have ads placed right in front of your eyes (mounted on the back of the seat in front of you), it's usually possible to slide the cardboard with the printed ad out, sideways, simply flip it and put it back. Enjoy a nice, calming, white rectangle for the rest of your trip.
Reading comments it's amusing to see people, seems like, brainwashed into not being able to function without ads...
Well, for once - maybe making more informed decission when buying stuff (starting with "do I even need that" instead of emotional impulse buying becasue hot chick/guy told them to)
Where do you draw the like between information of a product and advertising? technical data sheets, pictures of a product, or talking to potential customers are potentially advertising.
Can you show your product in a trade magazine? Can you list your business in a phone book?
> Where do you draw the like between information of a product and advertising?
I guess anything that's invides my brain without my consent (so all billboards, bus-stop LEDs, etc) is annoying ads.
Now, if you see a product ad in a magazine related to the filed that makes more sense (and I'd love to go back to the internet where ads were based on page context and not user tracking data btw)
>I guess anything that's invides my brain without my consent (so all billboards, bus-stop LEDs, etc) is annoying ads.
Consent is interesting framing due to it's interactions with public commons and shared spaces.
Does one give consent by entering the common space? How much consent does one give by entering the common space?
My opinion is that public spaces can have rules, and you consent to anything that falls within those rules by entering them. For example, Everyone is consenting to billboard because they choose to drive on the highway instead of staying home. The way to withdraw consent is to change the rules, and can not be done unilaterally.
I think this framework can also explain the difference between a magazine, which is essentially a private space. You consent to the rules of the magazine when you choose to open and read it.
I think it would be pretty bogus if I published S1artibartfasts newsletter to my subscribers, and some third party thought they had the right to ban me placing ads because they didnt consent.
The internet is an interesting mixture of these different spaces. Google serach results make sense as a private space, so they can show as many ads as they want. nobody is forced to go to google.com.
A webpage is clearly private, but is the world wide web a public or private commons? that I am less sure about.
> Consent is interesting framing due to it's interactions with public commons and shared spaces.
>
> Does one give consent by entering the common space? How much consent does one give by entering the common space?
Interesting take. Though the thing is - the balance of power in this public, shared space is highly tilted (I have loads of money and therefore can dump crap everywhere). As seen everywhere people _DO_ prefer clean public space without noise and ads but pushing such laws is difficult... because of lobbyist with track loads of cash…
>the balance of power in this public, shared space is highly tilted
I dont really buy that. People have all of the power, and all the control the space. The real barrier in my mind is voter apathy and indifference.
Switzerland has a politically engaged population and strong referendum system. People vote like 5-6 times a year referendums on issues exactly like this
That may be also true, but I'd say Switzerland is an outlier in this regard.
Quite often the apathy is a direct result of years of historical events where voting doesn't change anything i.e. not living in proper democracy or if so, the process tilted in a way than the vote is often wasted (for example relatively high election threshold) or often citizen initiatives (gather x thousands signatures) being voted down by the current government...
Unfortunately making vote obligatory would not "fix" the problem as coertion to vote would make people even more annoyed and they would vote out of spite…
--
On the other hand, money can influence people into voting certain way even if it's not in their best interest (good example is Brexit vote…)
More often than not those making such comments are themselves involved in the ad industry or have been in the past. It's just another example of men being able to comprehend something being bad when their salary depends on it.
And for different topics too. Corporations need to understand that the only reason they are permitted to exist is to benefit the public. If they are a net negative there is no reason we cannot or should not get rid of them.
Worked out very well in clearing the city of advertisements or in improving the quality of life of its people because they see less public advertisement?
In Berlin the largest bill board provider (Wall GmbH) also builds public toilets. Thanks to them they are much more plentiful around parks. Forcing them to go out of business would take those with them.
Could Berlin not buy the public toilets from the billboard provider and pay to operate them? Why are we relying on an advertising business for public toilets? They’re…public?
Well, it could buy them. If they had money left to spend. But Berlin pays for a lot of public services already because it is operated by politicians who cater to the same public that favors removing bill boards. As a result e.g. they just bought all privately operated power plants for billions. They also heavily subsidize public transport tickets because it is popular. And they employ a large public staff in the city‘s administration but still cannot maintain a good quality of service despite all the billions spent (you wait weeks for appointments).
Berlin is a text book example of how turning everything into public goods and spending a lot of tax money is not necessarily in the interest of the citizens IMHO.
Germany actually has an extremely small public sector at 12.9% of all people in the workforce. Compare to neighboring countries like the Czech Republic (15.4%), Poland (23.6%) or Denmark (30.2%).
Are you saying that Berlin is an outlier in Germany, then? My perception (looking from outside) has always been that their public sector is just completely understaffed.
Berlin has a work force of about 2.2 million people. 305k of those work for the public sector. That’s about 13.8% so above Germany’s average. However, it’s not only important how much people work for the government but also how much it pays them. And Berlin pays much better salaries than other eastern German states. 24 years ago salaries in Eastern Berlin were increased to match those payed to western Berlin employees (instead of meeting in between). So for many years the city payed waaay more than its surrounding German member state to its staff. This financial issue is amplified by the fact Berlin now has to pay much higher pensions on average for its retired personnel.
Not that I am saying your argument is wrong, but I'd be wary of comparing such vaguely defined stats across countries. What does and doesn't count as public sector is going to vary wildly and so will how much of publicly funded work is done by direct employees vs. contractors. Statistics can lie as easily as they can give you useful info.
All of Berlin‘s district heating plants provide heat AND electricity. So the government owns a huge share of all electricity producers in this city now, too (about 60 % of the total production capacity).
Whether this constitutes a monopoly is beside the point. Berlin paid 1.4 billions is does not really have (after it sold it 20 years ago when it had even less money and could not sustain a profitable business operation) and which does not solve a problem we really have. And now it will need to invest even more money to future-proof this acquisition.
Because they're expensive and Berlin doesn't have money. They were also coin operated and thus frequently broken into and out of service because of that. They mostly have contactless pay now, which has disadvantages as well because its less accessible (especially for children and senior people).
Berlin’s economy is unique for a major capital. Berlin is one of the weaker states economically in Germany. Mostly an effect of the division when most major industry left towards a place where the Soviet Army is not 5 minutes away and the city might be cut off from supplies at any moment. It’s been getting better but only recently the GDP per capita of Berlin rose above that of Germany overall.
This was radically different before World War 2. In 1938 Berlin made up 10% of GDP (and Germany was bigger back then). Major companies like Lufthansa and Deutsche Bank were headquartered in Berlin. It was the center of the new Electrical industry being home of both Siemens and AEG.
Berlin has the disadvantage of historically being an enclave of Western Germany in the communist GDR, very hard/expensive to supply as a result and always at risk of the commies forcibly annexing it. No large (and thus: tax-paying) company wanted to set up its headquarters there for that reason, and additionally as it was an enclave there was no place for industry to set up production facilities.
Nowadays, Berlin has a shit ton of "startups" HQ'd there, but they pay barely any taxes compared to production industry heavyweights.
Berlin can afford to have free public toilets when significantly poorer cities can. And yes, not charging for use can actually reduce the overal operating cost more than what you would have gained from the fee.
Exactly: here in Japan, public toilets are all over the place: train stations, public parks, or frequently just random places in the city, on the street. And they're free, of course.
The bathrooms in Japan are crazy to me. Depending on where you are the toilet might be the most luxurious experience your ass has ever had, or sometimes it's a literal hole in the ground and not even toilet paper is provided.
I've never had a problem finding a toilet there when I needed one, but I kept kleenex in my back pocket because I never knew what to expect.
I still prefer the holes in the ground to pay toilets.
You have to go to really rural places to find the squat toilets these days, or maybe some poorly-maintained park. All new bathrooms these days have western-style toilets.
One thing to watch out for, however, is that many bathrooms have no way to dry your hands, even in very nice bathrooms in fancy buildings, so you should bring a small towel with you. Some bathrooms don't even have soap, though this is pretty rare in my experience, but a lack of drying towels or hand dryers is somewhat common.
They generally throw it away in the place where they're opening it. Usually, you don't open stuff up until you get home, and I would hope you have a trash can there.
The big factor for foreigners is that people don't normally eat and drink while walking down the street; it's generally considered rude. If they stop and sit somewhere and eat or drink there, they keep their trash with them instead of throwing it on the ground like many other countries. If you're just getting stuff from a convenience store, you can usually throw stuff in the trash cans there.
Most stuff I've seen doesn't have an absurd amount of disposable packaging, but that is really common with the gift boxes of sweets that are commonly bought at stations and given as gifts. But these you don't normally eat in public.
You dispose of it where you bought it, or you don't open it until you get home, or you act like a good hiker who is out in the wilderness, and pack up your trash to bring home with you where you can properly dispose of it.
I always found it amazing that Japanese cities manage to stay so clean without public trash cans everywhere. It's a reminder that you have to solve the social and cultural problems first: if people think it's ok to throw trash on the ground, it doesn't matter how many public trash cans you have.
It's also useful to remember that the general lack of public trash bins isn't a long-standing part of Japanese culture: it only dates to the 1990s, when public trash bins were used for the infamous Sarin gas attack. After that, most bins in cities were removed. What's cultural is what happened later: the cities didn't turn into trash heaps, because people simply took their trash home or otherwise waited to find a suitable place to dispose of it.
Where "pay" is pretty much just a symbolic amount. Same reasoning why shopping carts often have a 1€ deposit. The price is close to zero but makes a big psychological difference to actually being zero.
Relatedly, offering stuff for free on ebay/craigslist/whatever turns up some incredibly entitled choosing beggars. Offering it for a token amount gives you very different results.
ahahah that's beautiful. So it's all good because they built public toilets? Like when big companies have programs for the disabled, that makes it all good all of a sudden, we forget all about the other stuff? Damn...
You are laughing. But the city of Berlin was not able to provide this service. Spending a day in the park or on the playground with kids and needing a rest room meant either hiding in a bush, going home early or to the next restaurant where you had to pay a fee, usually (bc they provided a rest room to hundreds of people daily).
Yet many other cities are able to provide free public toilets, including ones much much poorer than Berlin. Perhaps it's not really a matter of Berlin not being able to do it themselves.
No, ads and toilets are separate in Berlin since 2019 [1]. Wall won the contract for the new Toilettenvertrag [2] by the city. The city says now what and where to build. Before that, toilets were only built where it was profitable for a billboard. Now the city can make the toilets even free [3] and the toilets are ad-free.
São Paulo is ridden with crime, poverty and homelessness, the traffic is atrocious, the air is terrible, the public transport is built for a city 10% the size and the infrastructure is stuck in the '70s.
Didn't the city come close to running out of water? ... per ChatGPT: "The most notable crisis occurred between 2014 and 2016 when the Cantareira water system, one of the main sources of water for the metropolitan area, reached critically low levels."
Running low on water in São Paulo would be a huge disaster.
Places with billboard bans don't ban all ads, if the bathrooms aren't billboards they aren't banned. If the bathrooms are huge billboards next to parks then yeah, you'll have to find other bathrooms and that seems fine.
And I'm sure the mega rich also donate a lot (in absolute terms). That doesn't mean the current levels of wealth inequality are good for society. The term for this is whitewashing bad behavior with good deeds.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
I wonder what Banksy thinks of online advertising, which goes far beyond "taking the piss".
At its best, your personal data is harvested and traded behind your back to tailor ads specifically for your demographic—and increasingly for you personally—and deliver them when you're most vulnerable.
At its worst, it is all of the above, plus used by anyone who wants to influence how you think about political and social issues, ultimately corrupting democratic processes and destabilizing governments. It is the perfect medium for propaganda.
In either case it is the most insidious form of psychological manipulation we've ever invented. I hope that we eventually collectively sober up about the ways this is harming our societies, and heavily regulate, if not outright ban it. The advertising industry has gone far beyond just promoting a product, and it needs to stop.
I would hope all advertising (including online) isn't completely banned. It is useful at times for learning about products. But that's all it should really do: promote products (or services), and stop using psychological manipulation techniques and being such a cancer on society.
50+ years ago, the idea of advertisers harvesting your personal data and trading it behind your back to tailor ads for you was completely alien.
50+ years ago we were being marketed cigarettes as "Torches of Freedom", promoted by doctors and cartoon characters. We rightfully banned these practices in most of the world because of the product they were advertising, but the deception and manipulation have been an industry staple, pioneered by Edward Bernays a century ago. The internet is simply a new tool they can use to make their work more sophisticated than ever before.
It has also made a lot of people very rich, so I doubt that the advertising industry will accept devolving to a state before psychological manipulation became the norm, and sacrifice billions of dollars worth of revenue. Governments are unlikely to regulate it to that point either, given their symbiotic relationship.
This banning of billboards is a good step, but the real problems are online.
There's really no easy black-and-white answer to this problem I think. While advertising cigarettes with cartoon characters to get kids interested is obviously disgusting, or having doctors promote them, advertising has its place. Remember "Computer Shopper", the huge magazine back in the 80s/90s where the ads were really the main reason to buy it? Those ads were how people back then bought computer components, because there was no other way of learning what was for sale from where, and how much it cost. Of course, the internet (which Computer Shopper helped make popular and accessible) put the magazine out of business eventually, but before the internet revolutionized communications (including advertising), ads like those were essential if you wanted to find products that weren't available in your local retail stores, or were only available at inflated prices.
It'd be nice if there was some kind of advertising industry code of ethics, but I can't imagine how this would develop, since the people in today's ad industry are obviously a bunch of con artists and sociopaths who lack any ethical standards at all.
I think consent is key. With "Computer Shopper", we gave our consent by picking-up the magazine and reading it. With Google/Bing/etc, we give it by choosing their search. With streaming, we give it by logging-in and watching whatever garbage they have on offer. But with billboards, subway placards, radios and televisions running in public spaces, etc... there is no consent, so those are more like rape.
I disagree that ads bundled with other services imply consent. The EU got it right with the GDPR that consent is meaningless if it is not freely given, meaning not giving consent must have zero negative consequences. It is too easy to manipulate people to act against their own interest by just dangling a carrot in front of them.
I can learn about products I am interested in by enthusiasts of certain areas, comparison tests, searching the web, friends recommendations, entities that collect news of a specific area, Hackernews and other forums, conferences, events (physical or digital) that are just for companies presenting their products in a certain area.
So I don't need to have unasked ads shoved into my face to get to know products I "need" or desire.
When you touch these ads, this will be vandalism and marketing company will dispatch security company on you. Everyone in the ad food chain feels very entitled to litter public space and to violate your attention.
For some wild reason it's basically only permitted for large companies to deface the public space like this. You go try putting some street art out there while the cops are watching, see what happens.
In addition to that by far most things people would want to put in public spaces isn't explicitly designed to upset you like ads are. Why do we allow companies to plaster public spaces with veiled insults?
Usually buildings have private property owners. They agree to putting a bill board on their wall or they don’t. Graffiti sprayers usually don’t ask for permission — and that’s where the difference comes from.
In Europe you don’t usually have huge bill board on buildings. Rather you have lots of advertising columns on the side walks (here in Berlin we call them „Litfaßsäule“ named after the local inventor Paul Litfaß in 1854). You could argue they being a nuisance for sure but before the internet and even before radio and tv it was an important place of public communication. Actually they were an improvement because prior to advertising columns advertisers were wildly plastering anything with posters.
Property ownership does not entitle you to do absolutely anything you want. We live in a society of common spaces, and we need not allow people to own property if they do not agree to our social contract.
"The social contract" is a very well defined and explored concept[0]. It's not a literal contract. Being intentionally obtuse about word definitions isn't going to convince anyone of anything.
I'm sure if you commit a crime the Judge will also let you go if you point out that technically you never agreed to the laws of the country you live in.
> Usually buildings have private property owners. They agree to putting a bill board on their wall or they don’t.
And yet if I agree to have someone stand on my property shouting insults at passers-by I'll get a visit from the police soon enough. This issue isn't as black and white as you make it out to be. Just because the owner of the building the billboard is attached to agrees to have it there doesn't mean no one else is affected.
There's already limits to what you can put on a billboard. Banning billboards isn't some radical new category of thing. it's simply moving that threshold down to "you can put nothing on billboards"
Sure it's perhaps not companies having special privilege, but I think it's equally awful to give "entities with lots of money" special privileges in the public space. Entities with lots of money are the minority, why should they get to dictate what public space looks like for the majority?
If it came to a honest vote on whether people would like billboards or no billboards I think the result is obvious.
It’s not lots of money. Regular people can afford billboards.
A vote of people liking billboards is completely independent of the “oh, the powerful corporations use them” pearl clutching. I would hate billboards if they were just dominated by individuals using them to promote religious and political ideologies.
The only reason their usage is dominated by businesses is because businesses generate returns off of advertising. They don’t have special privilege and they certainly aren’t out of reach of individuals, clubs, non-profits, etc.
Because my street art, my clothes, my face, and my car aren't trying to psychologically manipulate you into opening your wallet, merely by the fact of their presence.
I would hope that you aren't arguing in such bad faith that you can't see that advertising is another thing entirely.
Banksy's answer to this would be so simple, I'm baffled you bothered asking.
You wouldn't attack another person for their clothes. Because it's on and belongs to a person.
Banksy wouldn't give a damned if you painted over his art. Because it's not on person and belongs to no person. Same as the ad space and the abandoned building he painted over.
He attacked those who legally contributed negatively to public spaces. No one's car is doing that, and if they were, kids would just scribble "Wash Me!" over it and you would be there clapping, oblivious to this conversation until pointed out.
> He attacked those who legally contributed negatively to public spaces. No one's car is doing that
Are you kidding? Cars are well known for their negative contributions to public spaces, in the forms of (1) exhaust, and (2) noise.
This is part of why I'm baffled that the solution to electric cars not constantly generating terrible noise pollution is to mandate that they all include and operate noisemakers.
I'm sure you can understand that, while incidental, the noise cars make is important for their use in public spaces not being even more of an unacceptable danger and that simply taking the noise away means the car should not be allowed on public roads. If you can make the electric car at least as safe as existing cars for everyone around it then go right ahead and propose it.
Yes, car noise is annoying but the alternative is much much worse. Not so for ads.
> Yes, car noise is annoying but the alternative is much much worse.
No, it isn't. When you solve a problem, the answer is not to panic and legislate that the problem must never be solved. If you have other problems, work on those.
We already have plenty of technology for dealing with roads that are dangerous. In general, we handle them by preventing pedestrians from using or crossing them, and providing over- or underpasses. This is superior in every way to adding noisemakers to cars. But it's not necessarily the best solution! It's just one that (a) we already have, and (b) is better than what you're calling a superior alternative.
The only reason anyone even considers noisemakers is that they're used to cars that make noise. But a history of doing something the wrong way is a terrible reason to avoid doing it the right way.
The alternative to noisemakers is to completely ban electric cars until there are alternatives to improve bystander safety to equivalent levels. In that scenario you will still have the same noise pollution from cars with real non-simulated miniature explosions so electric carse with noise makers are not worse in that respect. If we did not already have noisy cars then yes perhaps electric cars with noise makers would not be allowed but they would also not be allowed without them.
Because other things in public don't manipulate me into thinking a certain way in order to take money from me. People that attempt to do that are labeled as grifters and scammers, and the legal system deals with them. Why should it be different for ads?
Yes? This is why we have or at least used to have obscenity laws. To prevent real-life equivalents of internet trolls from shitting up the public space.
Unlike billboards, a lot of people enjoy Banksy's "products", and consider them art. Also, they are much smaller and less obnoxious, not placed over a highway or on top of a large building.
For those living in placed with advertisements: I've made a website based on/contributing to OpenStreetMap where one can add advertising items, such as billboards: https://mapcomplete.org/advertising
A few anti-pub groups are using it to map the issue and to lobby against it with data in hand.
A metro station in Prague (JZP) got recently renovated and shortly after the opening, ads were absent. It was a breath of fresh air, finally being in a space without visual pollution. In the following weeks, the metro station was plastered with ads again and people complained.
I can’t remember the details of the story, but it was found out that whoever owned that space (council, city or public transport company?) charged a really small amount for the ad space, to the point where removing it was a very negligible loss in revenue. So they removed all the ads again.
It’s undeniable the most beautiful metro station in Prague. Freshly renovated, cool design and no ads.
>Markus Ehrle, the industry association’s president, said that money would instead “flow to big internet companies like Google or Meta,”
When I saw the headline, I thought 'oh, what a nice idea', but the quote above might have a point and I am not entirely sure how right it is. But I guess there is probably some truth to it.
I hate digital, and especially animated, billboards very very much. It's super annoying and just plain distracting. Maybe just analog billboards might be a good way. So local businesses get a way to advertise themselves. Maybe it has to get some regulation so that big companies won't buy all the ad space? I am not sure.
It steals drivers attention where focus should be 100% on whats happening on the road and around it. Every % of attention stolen is a big win for advertisement, and increases chances of bad accident. Do a bit of statistics on number of drives per day globally, number of accidents, increase that chance even by 1% (which is very debatable but in many cases its much more), and you get nice number of number of deaths and damages done daily by ad business around the roads.
Exactly I already pay for my fare and the government is already heavily subsidizing the transport company using my taxes but somehow I still need to pay with my attention? Fuck that.
On the way from office to home, there's a junction with a HUGE LCD display. At night, the screen is so bright it's very annoying.
It's like being in a dark room and putting your laptop display to max. In front of everyone stopping at the red light. Not sure who's the genius behind it, but I think the ad has opposite effect of people hating the product advertised there.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Advertisement is a pollution, a parasite, a cancer on modern society that we've all put up with for too long.
It makes our physical and online spaces uglier. They waste space. They waste electricity. They waste computational resources. They waste brain space for the people viewing them. The most aggressive advertisers often sell low-quality services/products or outright scams, which harms those least educated and poorest individuals.
They encourage people to spend outside of their means. They make people feel they need a product or else they're lesser or ugly or poor or a bad friend or a bad spouse or a bad parent or whatever it is they're preying on.
And don't even get me started on advertising for medication. The fact that's not illegal is insane.
Although there are many modern-born societal ills, advertising is not one of them, as it's far older than modernity. There's something essential about advertising - not essential as in required or necessary - but essence-ial as in the essence or spirit of advertising has existed for thousands of years.
I think it's important to understand this because, although you can ban the particulars: billboards, youtube ads, and so forth, the spirit of advertising will persist, as Lindy things tend to do, only it will be expressed in different forms.
I'm going to be very blunt: equating modern advertising with whatever the roman merchants did is either incredibly naive bordering on stupidity, or it's arguing in bad faith, bordering on malevolent faith.
Advertising may have existed since ancient times, but nothing like what we have today. With better technology has come the ability to do so far more aggressively than anything that was possible back then.
This Roman stuff is barely advertising. They're talking about the signs on the front of buildings advertising what goes on in those buildings, and a guy who got rich selling garum having a mosaic on the floor of his own home that said that his garum was awesome. The last citation in the article is just bizarre, interpreting graffiti as advertisements for oneself.
The profession of advertising is only recent, and afaik advertising itself didn't really exist at all until the dawn of patent medicines, that since they were all frauds could only differentiate by circulating their dishonest claims as widely as possible.
> I think it's important to understand this because, although you can ban the particulars: billboards, youtube ads, and so forth, the spirit of advertising will persist, as Lindy things tend to do, only it will be expressed in different forms.
So, I think that this is a misunderstanding that it is important to avoid. There was Roman advertising if 1) you think that merchants decorating the inside of their own houses with art referring to the things that they got rich selling is advertising, 2) you think that inns and restaurants having their own names painted on their outside walls, and possibly having names that implied self-praise is advertising, and/or 3) you think that writing graffiti is self-advertising.
I think the idea that advertising is a force that will automatically express itself through other equally intrusive channels if suppressed is a made up story.
> you think that writing graffiti is self-advertising
I wonder what else you think it could be? The vast majority of graffiti works I have seen, whether in person or in books of graffiti art, consist of nothing more than the writer's alias. Some people advertise their persistence, by scrawling their names in as many places as possible; some advertise their athleticism and courage, by writing in spots which are difficult or dangerous to reach; others advertise their artistic skill, writing their names in elaborate style with color and shading; but they're virtually all just writing their names, over and over, trying to build a reputation.
They lie and deceive on purpose and draw a lot of money for it! A lot! That everyone pays but mostly those suffer from the advertismenet and don't see the benefit of it (end user), making a product more expensive than should be.
Yeah, a lot of people in tech have gotten fixated on privacy as the problem with advertisement. You get companies like Mozilla that have come to the conclusion that we need ads but we also need privacy, so maybe we need privacy-preserving ads!
For me, privacy isn't even half the problem with ads. Billboards along highways are dangerous. Ads represent a ridiculous percentage of the paper sent via snail mail today, most of which gets immediately thrown away (or best case, recycled). Ads on web pages prevent me from actually reading the content on the page, and incentivize an insane writing style that I frankly don't want to read even with an ad blocker.
Ads are bad, in and of themselves. Avoiding tracking doesn't solve their fundamental issue.
As G.K. Chesterton put it in 1920 [0]:
> Advertisement is the rich asking for more money. A man would be annoyed if he found himself in a mob of millionaires, all holding out their silk hats for a penny; or all shouting with one voice, "Give me money." Yet advertisement does really assault the eye very much as such a shout would assault the ear. "Budge's Boots are the Best" simply means "Give me money"; "Use Seraphic Soap" simply means "Give me money." It is a complete mistake to suppose that common people make our towns commonplace, with unsightly things like advertisements. Most of those whose wares are thus placarded everywhere are very wealthy gentlemen with coronets and country seats, men who are probably very particular about the artistic adornment of their own homes. They disfigure their towns in order to decorate their houses.
People on HN forget that ads fund lots of things. Ads are why Google is free, Gmail is free, docs are free, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are free.
You are all free to pay for search and subscriptions to websites you follow. (Today paid search is even reportedly better.)
Personally I'm waiting for the micropayment platform that lets me pay a cent or two per paywalled/ad supported article instead, but most people are happy with this tradeoff.
I hear what you're saying and somewhat agree, but as with everything, I really don't think "it's that simple".
First, that you're even using Google search or Gmail is providing Google with data they use for marketing. On top of the data those services take in (what you search for, what you click on in the results, how much time you spend watching one video compared to another, what mailing lists you're subscribed to, etc. etc.) they are provided tracking information from the majority of sites you visit (either directly or aggregated from other services). That allows them to let their customers market directly to you or even provide data to other companies (for a fee) so they can market to you more successfully (than not having that data).
Even when paying for a service, the next step is to add ads back into it.
For example, as a paying customer Amazon Video used to let you just watch the movies/shows they had available. Then they started advertising movies that they didn't have available to stream, but you could purchase or rent them. Then they started adding in ads for content that was available on 3rd party services. Now they have in-content ads that you can pay extra to remove.
They're not the only company doing this, but it was just the first/easiest example I could call up that shows a progression of what a company does when they already have your attention/money.
You can see that Google has become progressively more aggressive in pushing ads in their search over the years. They didn't have ads at first, worked their way up to being the "standard" search engine, then started putting ads between results, eventually getting to where we are today. I can do a search today and the entire first screen of results (1080p, zoom level 100%) is just sponsored results. One usually has to scroll a full page to get to any "real" results, assuming that the top non-sponsored results aren't skewed by "the algorithm", which might include things like whether or not the target page uses GA, has ads that benefit Google, conform to what Google thinks is "relevant" (very loose term) basically.
I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to find an excessive amount of examples where services that started making money with a simple product you could pay for, then turned to subscriptions, then turned to add-ons for the subscription, then just started pushing ads into their service regardless if you're already paying or not.
Strongly agree that it's not simple. I just like to take the contrarian view here, with everyone in this thread dunking on ads.
It's a very complicated trade off, and I'm not sure humanity understands it well enough to act optimally. But the ad based model sure as hell isn't all bad, like people in this thread make it out to be.
It's a valid argument on the internet where we use "free" services that are costly to run, like you described. There is no need for ads in public spaces though. Banning them is fair, it doesn't make good corporations less competitive, they just have to rely more on other methods like product quality and word of mouth, instead of corporate propaganda.
What the fans of advertisment forget how much funds are channeled artificially from the end user into things they absolutely do not need or want, they even loath! It is hugely distorting the economy this way! (money is spent of unwanted)
People gladly pay for things they really need. And people do not need all the things they use but do not pay directly for, but covertly and cowardly is drawn from them under the hood! Lied to and cheated the people are!
People not happy, people are forced to use this way! As there are no micropayment solution built instead of the hugely harmful ad practices.
There's a number of alternative business models that have been employed by organizations large and small for decades. More information can be readily found online which will be better than I could provide.
And I want to be clear that I am not suggesting that alternatives are superior, nor that Google, et al, are obligated to use them. Just that they exist and have been widely and long used. So just to counter the idea that the advertising-supporting model is the only route.
'Free' is relative. Those services are still making money - just with you as the product.
IMO that's even more ammunition as to why this is a problem. This system has enabled a vast amount of personal data collection and erosion of privacy for the sake of the product being 'free'.
It is "worth it for some people" because those people don't understand how they're the product, how it influences what they see if they go on some homepage where their data is being used to manipulate their behaviour, how they lose money because of that manipulation, etc.
It will become worse now with LLMs feeding on their data. Soon it will be cheap to gather this data and use it for all kinds of scoring processes. All those things aim for gaining as much money as possible from those people who use services which seem _free_ to them but actually aren't.
Maybe at that point people will realise that they'd up paying less if they pay for those services....at which point they'll learn about the other cancer: which is companies which need to generate more profit every quarter and who make their services more and more expensive...and so on. #capitalism
> I'm waiting for the micropayment platform that lets me pay a cent or two per paywalled/ad supported article instead
I hope for this too. The free internet has grown wildly but now that it’s infested with bots that fundamentally cannot be stopped (without onerous Real ID controls at least) I want an alternative ad-free web that charges micropennies per post.
> People need to have the capacity to find things.
There's a previous step: People need to know that there is such a thing to find.
Some advertising (I'll call it "base" advertising, though there may be a better term) is just information. "Hey, everybody, there's this new thing called a mobile phone!" "Hey, everybody, there's this new disease called AIDS that you really had better alter your behavior to avoid, because it's deadly."
There's a second kind, which I will call "us" advertising: "Hey, everybody, we have the best mobile phones! Available now at WalMart!"
We don't need the second kind, at all. I'm not sure, but I suspect the first kind is at least somewhat useful.
(You can still probably call it harassment, though. Useful, but still harassment.)
You're missing the largest advertising: lifestyle advertising. It's not "hey everybody, we have the best mobile phone", it's "You will be cool, women will want you, success awaits you with our mobile phone".
The second kind is still information though. Where do they sell mobile phones? At the grocers? At the butcher shop? At the dress shop? At the shoe store? If I had a small store that wasn't Walmart, and wanted people to come to my store that sells cellphones, isn't it also informative to know that my store exists and that I sell cellphones? It's only because people already know about Walmart and that it's an everything store that makes your example seem like it's not informative.
> People need to know that there is such a thing to find.
IMO, finding things, also covers not being aware it existed.
Like you're on amazon searching for something, and they suggest something you might also like, they don't know if you knew about it already. That's fine, still both parties consenting.
> In this way, all parties consent, otherwise advertisements are harassment.
ABSOLUTELY this.
Advertisements use MY bandwidth, MY compute resources, MY time, MY space, to harass me by showing me things I have zero interest in, all the while interrupting what I'm doing, distracting me, and then having the gall to tell me "but think of the poor publishers!!".
They have caused the appearance of an industry that's a pox on all ("influencers") who behave like society owes them the space, time, attention and deference that for whatever reason they think they need.
And for a cherry on top, it makes everything more expensive because WE pay for all of it.
Which means that when we move to dismantle it we should do so carefully, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't move to dismantle it. We've had economies founded on unethical systems before, and we chose to dismantle them in spite of the risks because it was the right thing to do.
That would be like saying your body is full of cancer and you're still alive thus it must be the cancer that's keeping you alive. Where you don't know what could have existed without advertisements.
I wish there was a low friction microtransaction for services which seems to be the main (only?) thing that advertisement allows that would other wise not exist. The technology exists to do this so banning advertisements does not appear to be a net negative to me. Before the pandemic many food deliver services were not viable, now they are (at least where I live), we could have done that without a pandemic but it required something big to force through the change. I see banning certain kinds of ads as one of those big changes but without the pandemic, maybe it'll change habits enough to enable microtransactions.
Like how slavery was back in time, right? Just like we don't enslave people for economic benefit today, we have the choice to act virtuously, independent of the economic impact.
What you wanted to say is how influential it is, not important, not the same things, how hugely distorts the economy, distorts it on a grand scale! Not important, it is hugely harmful for the economy and societies, hugely!
Probably you'd mean the promotional aspect, the getting informed of a new product kind of thing which was useful if it was not a misleading shameless lie into the face of the society by willful misinformation and forceful push of unwanted matters!
The city I live in in So Cal banned billboards and has had limits on business signs for a very long time ago. I have always appreciated the reduced visual noise. It is really obvious when you cross over into the next city over because it is nothing but billboards all over the highway for dispensaries, casinos, ambulance chasing or divorce attorneys, and car insurance. They've been so strict about it that it took about 15 years longer to get an In-n-Out.
I support the idea that citizens have a right to limit their exposure to advertising. I think it is a good decision to prioritize public interests over commercial ones
I'm all for this, I'm in a city not so far away, and there's so many nice areas with tree lined roads, parks, beautiful buildings and then suddenly a giant ugly billboard.
I have noticed they are frequently vandalised, adverts are regularly torn off, and particularly large and ugly one has been removed down the road
Billboards tend to be used by larger companies. I wonder what they do with the newly freed up ad budget. I'm guessing it goes to online ads rather than a reduced ad spend.
They could contribute to society and humanity in general, and find something useful to do. That’s what we all have to do. Society should ask itself why they are exempt from such a duty.
They do contribute to society, and they do useful things. This is evidenced by the fact they are still in business and their customers still give them money.
Now granted they may not benefit -you- directly, they may even make -your- life worse, but -society- as a whole keeps them around.
Personally I'm not a smoker, so cigarette companies (to me) are a net loss. On the other hand enough people see them as a gain so I bow to societies vote.
Not just heroin dealers: contract killers also benefit society according to this logic. They're in business, their customers give them money for a service the customers think is valuable, etc. They may not benefit you directly, and may make your life worse (if you're their target), but bruce thinks they're fine since they do "useful" things and have paying customers!
You're comparing legal to illegal. That's kinda moving the goal posts a bit.
By definition illegal things are things society as a whole have declared impermissible. By contrast cigarettes and advertising are legal, meaning that society has determined them to have value.
Not surprisingly illegal things still happen because there is still demand by some minority for that service. Society as s whole though has decided that the negative effect on others outweighs the positive effect on the few.
Contract killing is not analogous to tobacco companies. Both big tobacco and heroin dealers base their business on the exploitation of addiction, and are a nett detractor of societal value in all ways except one: creating shareholder value.
Strangely enough, I do actually think there's a time and a place to kill, but that's not the norm for hired killers.
People think of advertisements/sponsorships as "free money" to support things that otherwise couldn't be budgeted for (arts, sports, infrastructure), but if you think a bit deeper companies wouldn't pay for ads if they didn't expect a return on it.
If an ad during a sports game pays the teams/league 10 million dollars, that means they expect the audience to spend in aggregate 10 million more dollars on the product. Sure, the company might be making a bad bet, and sometimes they do, but surely it would be better for everyone involved (except the advertisers and advertising company) if the league/teams just charged customers 10 million dollars more (not necessarily 10 million/ticket number per ticket, it could be merch, or perks, or upcharging for the nicer seats, but they do that anyway).
If you think about it, ads are basically a tool to fix broken monetization. But as long as they exist, we'll never address why monetization is so broken, and I suspect people would be more willing to spend disposable income on the things they actually enjoy, instead of the things they see ads for.
When traveling to other countries, and sometimes even just to other major cities, I always enjoyed seeing the different billboards. Often they would be for local businesses that I wouldn't otherwise know about, and they also convey some of the local culture. I enjoy seeing the creative typography to style a foreign language, the appeals to this or that "ideal", the quirky attempts at humor. It always seemed to me to be part of the antidote to the "this city looks like all the other cities" trend of cultural homogenization that seems to be eating the world. Sure, there are also the ubiquitous global or luxury brand ones, but you take the good with the bad like everything else, and even these will often have a different twist based on the country you're in.
I agree, but it's also pretty funny how so many of them have this tiny techie audience and 99% of the people driving past will just be like "wtf is that about, what are all those acronyms?"
(They have a very interesting system, for anyone interested in learning about how politics may be done differently. And it's supported by [or generates?] a culture of significant political engagement within the populace.)
Is this uncommon: Germantown, Tennessee banned (or severely limited?) billboards and loud signage long ago. We had a hard time finding any stores in this town for years.
Fyi, drive through many parts of Canada and billboards often mark political boundries. They are generally banned, except on tribal land where the native community largely governs its own land use.
I don't like billboards much, so I'm fine with dropping them. Although this ban still allows sport advertisement, looks like sport brands will just start advertising every single match and gain exposition on the cheap.
And of course we all can prefer "cultural" advertisement to soft drinks, but
If the intent is to reduce visual pollution, why does the content of the advertisement matter?
Personal story around billboards: When I visited time square in NYC for the first time, I for some reason had this expectation that was created by Hollywood and was so disappointed to see that it’s nothing but a big electronic billboard showcase.
Tangential: I live in a rather rich suburb in the US, there are barely ANY billboards, drive ~10-15 miles away from the city everything is littered with billboards.
Most of them advertise what I can only summarize as "probably spam".
Tt is an interesting corralation and I would hope the state would just ban them.
In some cities (at least in France and Germany), the advertising companies have a deal: they build and maintain bus stops, public toilets and rubbish bins — in return, they get an exclusive right for advertising in these spaces.
In these cases, there will be a cost associated to turning off billboards.
> He wormed his way over to the left-hand, high-speed lane and opened up. At the edge of the skyscraper district, where Wright Skyway angles sharply downward to ground level, Samms' attention was caught and held by something off to his right—a blue-white, whistling something that hurtled upward into the air. As it ascended it slowed down: its monotone shriek became lower and lower in pitch; its light went down through the spectrum toward the red. Finally it exploded, with an earth-shaking crash; but the lightning-like flash of the detonation, instead of vanishing almost instantaneously, settled itself upon a low-hanging artificial cloud and became a picture and four words—two bearded faces and "SMITH BROS. COUGH DROPS"!
> "Well, I'll be damned!" Samms spoke aloud, chagrined at having been compelled to listen to and to look at an advertisement. "I thought I had seen everything, but that is really new!"
There are no billboards in most of Seattle and it is great. There are also very few buildings with signage on them. It gives the place a very different, calming, and aesthetically pleasing vibe compared to cities like SF or LA.
Maine and Vermont did this years ago. Its very nice. Meanwhile, driving through other urban areas in the US, the # of billboards make it seem like a hellscape. At least personal injury and bail bonds industry is doing well!
there are no billboards in vermont and it's great. there's a baseball field by my house with a bunch of billboards behind the fence and it feels like getting saturated with american advertisements whenever i walk by it, like a weird reverse zen anxious feeling, seeing all of those ads after not seeing any for a long time
Just on its surface I find it extremely hard to believe sending a small HTTP GET request to the advertisers webserver and pulling a .webp is anywhere near as energy consuming as:
1. Arranging for the billboard to be built
2. Hiring workers to drive to the site and build it
3. Finding an advertiser to put on the billboard
4. Printing their advert on a canvas
5. Hiring someone to go hang it up
Plus every time a worker needs to drive to the site to perform maintenance.
I can vividly recall visiting Prague in the Communist era and was amazed to see no billboards, it was like stepping back in time.
What amplified the effect for me was that the Communists had done very little development since they'd come to power which meant that not only the old centre of the city but also some of its suburburban parts had remained essentially unaltered since the 18th Century.
No doubt, those who lived there would have noticed changes but to my jaded eyes the city was a time capsule.
It seems I wasn't alone thinking that, the producers of the 1984 movie version of Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus used Prague as a backdrop because it was historically 'pristine' in that it had not been spoiled by ads.
When I returned some years later after the fall of Communism things were very different, there were ads and billboards everywhere. I was both shocked and saddened at what had happened, the billboards had visually polluted the city.
I'd love to see billboards removed but I can't see it happening in the major centers of capitalism anytime soon.
it is very likely that this ban might be prevented by lobbying, as one of the main providers (even visible on the picture in the article) is, let's say "well connected" to our legislative
If they want to limit “visual pollution” they should crack down on graffiti. Zurich is covered in it and it’s really ugly. Local Swiss claimed it’s no worse than other cities, but it was worse than any place I’ve seen.
By graffiti, I assume you mean tags, i.e. not the ones with some artistic value?
I live in Zurich and also wasn't under the impression that it's noticeably worse than elsewhere, but it's certainly an unnecessary eyesore.
There was some reporting on it recently, saying that a major issue are private building owners. Public spots are usually cleaned up quickly. They said the city has some form of very cheap service/insurance offering that building owners can get, which assures that any reported sprayings will be washed off by city workers within x days, but that this service seems to be not widely known. So at least, people seem to be aware of the issue and doing something.
Nothing preventing tackling both issues at the same time, in any case.
Yes, tags, and really anything illegally spray painted on public or private surfaces. No problem if the city or a building owner wants to commission or invite graffiti artists.
I spent time in several European cities recently (and in the past), and Zurich was the only place where the amount of graffiti really stood out to me. Maybe there was an expectation that a wealthy city/country wouldn’t have tagging, which made it stand out more. Berlin had a lot of both good street art and tagging, but the tagging seemed more concentrated in specific areas.
The graffiti stood out more to me than billboards, but as an American I’m surely desensitized to billboards.
Can we please ban advertising from society and into convenient little directory books where everything is categorized? If I want something, only *then* I [still most likely won't] want to see ads.
One cool thing I noticed about my polarized sunglasses is that they block most screens at public places. No ClearChannel ads for me while waiting for public transport!
Not with the attitude! An ad-scrubbing AR filter is certainly thinkable, though probably not actually practical as long as strapping goggles to your face in public is considered the preserve of terminal dorks.
However, if it did happen, the arms race to prevent ad evasion in real life would be interesting. Glass Earth, Inc. by Stephen Baxter is a good short read along the extension of those lines (though the image of a multibillion satellite communications monopoly using a vast fleet of, uh, 67 geosynchronous satellites hasn't dated well!)
Ironically there's an AI filter that's classified you as an ad, and is erasing you from our field of vision as we speak. HN's spam filter is... not a frontier AI, to put it politely. You can email the mods to get your new account whitelisted!
Bottom of my list of concerns, whereas at the top is being surveilled and psychologically manipulated on an individual or group level. I am very sensitive about it...
I'm disappointed that nobody's tried to be properly contrary yet. How about this: adverts are a service. If they work properly, they provide information about new products that interest you. If you didn't want to know about the products, the advertisers didn't want to tell you, so really you have the same goals. The only problem is that billboards aren't targeted. Hence we need to replace billboards with more tracking, face recognition, mood recognition, AR glasses, brain implants, and enable people to be constantly surrounded by enjoyable adverts.
The EU's love of banning things is lazy policy-making. It's better to disincentivize and let markets take care of it. That way you preserve freedom while also encouraging desirable outcomes. Further reading: "Nudge" by Richard Thaler.
This was the result of Swiss direct democracy within the small town in question - essentially, an idea from citizens, voted on by citizens within the relevant area.
So actually more "free" than most countries can even imagine.
Not that I agree with GP but there is a lot more to freedom than "the decision was made by a vote". "Freely chosen policy" is not inherently the same as "free policy", it's just (often) a good ingredient. Of course there are plenty of countries which can't seem to get any aspect of freedom down so your comparison still holds true regardless.
And no, banning things isn't 'lazy', its 'committed'.
Markets are often the right solution, but in many case its not about manipulating marginal prices, its about making a clear statement.
Our towns will be better, our collective living standard will go up without ads. There is not clear way how we can get a market to arbitrate this.
> "Nudge" by Richard Thaler.
That book is way, way over-rated and also just completely wrong and informed at times. Even the best example of 'Nudge' about opt-out organ donor barley hold up in the real world.
Poster above you (in my hnreader) points out Seattle is pretty ad free, so maybe its not just a Swiss (noted as 'not in EU') thing.
If 'lazy policy-making' improves quality of life, why would you be so against it?
Especially in Switzerland, where voting isn't so much about screaming headlines, but more about maintaining/ improving said qol.
Yeah we should definitely let amoral and psychologically manipulative business practices be handled by the magical market! After all, it's worked so great so far in all the places without a billboard/advertising ban where you definitely don't see an ad on every single public surface where an eyeball might eventually land.
Let's also let companies dump toxic waste into our drinking water, the "market" will surely make sure to reward only the good, clean companies.
