I can't think of a less bad alternative to billboards, so I don't disagree with your claim, but I'll say that I didn't realize how much billboards suck until I spent time driving in Vermont, where they're banned. (I'm originally from Wisconsin, where the freeways have billboards for sex shops, CBD, fireworks, and fetuses every few hundred feet.) The driving experience is so much better without them that I'm pretty confident in saying that their negative externalities are dramatically higher than their economic value and the only reason they exist is that those externalities are externalized.
It's absurd that we're so dedicated to the god of Capitalism that we've had to invent a special term ("negative externalities") to describe the basic premise of ethics - "being selfish is bad".
The "economic value" of billboards shouldn't even be a question. It's self-evident that billboards benefit the owner of the billboard at the expense of everyone else. Nobody looks at an empty patch of sky and wishes there were an advertisement there instead.
That's a pretty dramatic change, as far as billboards go. I think most of the rest of the northeast still has billboards, but they are for, like, normal products.
Pretty much none of the country has billboards for "normal products" these days. They're either advertising a local establishment (i.e. "McDonalds! next exit!"), or they're advertising something that the TV networks/AdSense/Facebook wouldn't allow them to (i.e. CBD or sex shops or random religious nutjobmania).
No. The northeast has plenty of anti-abortion, sex shops, fireworks, CBD/marijuana (MM is legal in PA - any state with legalized dispensaries will have these billboards.
Don’t know what you consider a normal product but for truckers and people coming from NY adult stores and fireworks are “normal”
