Mary Houser, Communications Dir. Billboards have been called visual pollution, sky trash, litter on a stick, and the junk mail of the American highway, said Meg Maguire, president of Scenic America. Nothing destroys the distinctive character of our communities and countryside faster or more thoroughly than uncontrolled signs and billboards. In the United States today, there are more than 500,000 billboards on federal highways alone, and that number is increasing by 5,000 to 15,000 each year. Hundreds of thousands more line the streets of our cities and towns.
Billboards are cheap to build and profitable to operate.
They often are on the leading edge of ugly, sprawling development, said Maguire. The presence of billboards in a formerly pristine area encourages other kinds of blight and inappropriate development. Tens of thousands of trees on public property are destroyed annually to improve the visibility of privately-owned billboards. Fighting Billboard Blight is the essential tool for those who want to reclaim and protect the beauty of their communities. Scenic America is a national, nonprofit organization based in Washington, DC whose mission is to preserve natural beauty and distinctive community character.