Digital billboard as visual pollution and its effects towards traffic road safety

Abstract

Billboard is considered as one of the road furniture. Hence, the design and placement of this billboard is significant for the road user‘s safety. As the world is growing, the marketing industry progresses their advertising boards that leads to the creation of light emitting diodes (LED) billboards that displays full-color imagery. LED billboard advertisement are built with brighter signs which are visible from greater distances. The main purpose of this type of advertisements are to attract the attention of more road users with its electronic displays. However, this increasingly popular technology has created concerns and various complaints from the public about the size and the brightness of the digital billboards. The aim of this research is to study the issues of visual pollution focusing on digital advertising on the roadside which impacts on the drivers‘ visual performance. Methodology is divided into three stages which includes the initiation stage, data collection stage and data analysis stage. Compilation of data is focused on literature search, questionnaire forms and interviews with related authorities. This study has discovered 3 main issues of the roadside digital advertisements which are the high luminance level of the billboard, the glance behavior by the road users and the location of the billboard. In addition, the road users are found to be more sensitive towards the roadside digital advertisements compared to conventional advertisement, and perceived it could be a distraction towards the road users. Hence, the authorities have emphasized on the need for stricter regulation of digital billboards in order to reduce the potential hazards towards the road users. In conclusion, this study is important as to provide a method or course of actions on how this issue could be fixed as well as reducing the concerns of the public towards the danger of this digital billboard.