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Adfree Cities

adfreecities.org.uk

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Re: Adfree Cities

#221

Post by lancesells »

ponector wrote: post #167
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False dichotomy. The alternative is to have a cheap popular bikeshare system supported by taxes. [Edit to reply to okr, because I'm rate-limited: Well, then, make the users of the bikes pay the full cost of the bike service. As it is, you're pushing ads in everyone's face, whether or not they use the bike. Also no thanks.]

In theory. But in real life you'll pay more with taxes for poor service. My big city in Poland tried several times to get public-private bike sharing. It ended the same: company ceases operation after few years and take all bikes from the streets. People get nothing while millions already spent.

I live in NYC and I wish bikeshare was a part of public transport. Kids get to use them with their pass, low income gets them, they get the same importance as the train or bus, etc. All part of one system instead of having to use the Lyft or any other app.

Re: Adfree Cities

#222

Post by matheusmoreira »

helen___keller wrote: post #12

I understand why people hate advertising but if I’m honest, I don’t agree with having an “adfree city”. I personally like the aesthetic of visual overload that you find in ad-laden cities (let’s say in Tokyo). It makes the space feel living, breathing, and alive, which a city should be. And then the visually quiet spaces, like temples and parks, feel much more sweet. Also at a conceptual level I disagree with the jus…

Ads in commercial buildings aren't actually ads, they're just information. You walked into a store to see products so the store is merely showing you what you want to see, organized so you can find what you want. Nothing wrong with a sign showing people the name of a business on its own building either, those are actually useful, even for navigation and orientation.

Advertising is when they bombard you with noisy information while you're crossing a street or waiting for the bus. Nothing but pollution.

> We can’t make ads disappear.

We absolutely can. Make it straight up illegal and start applying some serious fines. I guarantee they will stop.

Re: Adfree Cities

#223

Post by franga2000 »

dantyti wrote: post #197
franga2000 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have something similar and it was a terrible deal. The city still had to pay a boatload of money to set up the system, but it's proprietary so we can only "buy" more stations and bikes from the same company. They, of course, refuse to sell at a reasonable price, so for every new station, more ad space is created and given to them. The term of the contract, which is 25 years, is also insanely long and far longer th…

The same thing in my city with jcd bikes: no new stations in a decade, only a handful of bikes available, bike stop density nowhere near anything I've seen in a large city in Southern France. Meanwhile, every bus stop, every street corner or prominent billboard is owned by jcd. Your comment has encouraged me to dig up anything I can find about our municipality's contracts with jcd during the upcoming holiday break an…

I've been meaning to do the same. I'm currently trying to get information on the number of billboards and when they were put up through FOIA requests so I can run some numbers and I already made some interesting visualizations of how badly the stops are located from JCDecaux's API.

Our capital got these bikes 10 years before us and had similar issues. A small news outlet made a pretty good report on the "secret costs of city bikes" and that's kind of what I'm going for: https://podcrto.si/skrita-cena-izposoje-koles-v-ljubljani-og...

Re: Adfree Cities

#225

Post by matheusmoreira »

okr wrote: post #78
helen___keller wrote: post #12

I understand why people hate advertising but if I’m honest, I don’t agree with having an “adfree city”. I personally like the aesthetic of visual overload that you find in ad-laden cities (let’s say in Tokyo). It makes the space feel living, breathing, and alive, which a city should be. And then the visually quiet spaces, like temples and parks, feel much more sweet. Also at a conceptual level I disagree with the jus…

To be honest, i have experienced socialist and communist countries, and i never want to go back to this cold, adfree world with its purely functional esthetics. I can understand the aversion for the Ad-Overload, but no Ads, nah, i want it colorful, shiny and blinking. :)

You can have beautiful architecture, street art as big as buildings. Literally anything is better than advertising.

Re: Adfree Cities

#226

Post by JAlexoid »

bondarchuk wrote: post #116
legitster wrote: post #69

I'll be the contrarian here and say that I actually like certain advertisements and billboards. If you are stuck in traffic or on a bus in an ugly urban hellscape, is a billboard really that bad? I'm sorry, they are not going to plant trees in Times Square to replace the billboards. Even in their own press photos, they are showing several billboards that are covering up even uglier buildings! Maybe you are an enlight…

> Maybe you are an enlightened individual and want to put an end to consumerism and society. In the meantime I personally still buy things and shop. Do you really see the removal of advertising from public space as this much of a threat to your way of life? Your sarcastic remark about ending consumerism and society sounds quite hateful towards people who don't want to see advertising, whereas (speaking from myself at…

If you don't want to see X, you just have to no look. Being offended by X, doesn't mean that you have an inherent right to ban X.

X throughout the times were/are ads, black people, campaign billboards, crossdressing and Pride parades.

Every time someone says "it should be banned, because I don't want to see it in public" is eerily reminiscent of the arguments of homophobes that I hear all the time.

"I don't want to see" or "it offends me" must never be a reason for banning something. It's not sufficient.

Re: Adfree Cities

#227

Post by digging »

legitster wrote: post #183
digging wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But if you are stuck at a light or in a massive traffic I'd rather you look at them than your phone. Billboards don't only appear when traffic is stopped though. It's not worth the increased danger. Also, I really don't think the presence of billboards is a common deciding factor in whether or not someone is looking at their phone. Maybe if they're driving in an otherwise featureless void, but I think people are ei…

No. But billboards are generally placed in areas of higher traffic. And I don't necessarily see why they are implicitly more distracting than the myriad road signs, bumper stickers, car decals, etc that drivers already navigate. Regardless, your DoT or local authority probably already has a lot of rules in place about how visually distracting billboards are allowed to be, and which section of roads they are determine…

> But billboards are generally placed in areas of higher traffic.

Great. High traffic areas are the most dangerous places for distractions.

> why they are implicitly more distracting than the myriad road signs, bumper stickers, car decals, etc that drivers already navigate.

I'll list the reasons:

1. Road signs are standardized in a given state, and they're designed to be extremely easy to understand at a glance, so their meaning can typically be understood without the driver having to actually read anything on them. They're also pretty close to where you should be looking already.

2. Bumper stickers and car decals are necessarily on the objects you're supposed to be watching most of the time. (But, yes, they can still be distracting.)

3. Billboards are often not in line-of-sight of the things you're trying to avoid crashing into, and can be wildly distracting. The fact that they're regulated for levels of visual distraction is hilarious news to me, having seen billboards in real life. Calling them "fairly highly regulated" feels disingenuous; others might say "barely regulated."

4. Having fewer distractions is less dangerous than having more distractions, so we should try to reduce distractions. We're not going to get rid of road signs, because that would be insane. We could get rid of bumper stickers, but they're orders of magnitude less common than billboards and they're less distracting and they typically don't have all the other negative effects of advertising that billboards do.

Re: Adfree Cities

#228

Post by JAlexoid »

dantyti wrote: post #206
JAlexoid wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> noise to signal ratio of information out in public is way too high Even if you remove ads, it's not going to change significantly.

I've read your comment and looked at some photos of Times Square and the Piccadilly Circus. Hard disagree.

Both exist as a thing explicitly because of the amount of ads. No one goes to Time Sq to have "authentic Italian" meal at Olive Garden.

They aren't a proof of ads being too much noise. Not any more than a lion at a zoo is proof that lions have overrun the city.

Re: Adfree Cities

#229

Post by JAlexoid »

marssaxman wrote: post #207
JAlexoid wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems that so many here think they're above being manipulated by advertising. Don't trust your brain - it's soft and malleable. It seems that you think that banning some ads will make any difference. Ads are really poor at actually convincing you to do anything in the first place. We had to employ multitude of media formats to reduce smoking... and even then, it's not at 0 today. You will not want to go to McDon…

If advertising has so little effect on our behavior as you suppose, surely there can be little harm done by forbidding billboards, as this would force the companies who purchase those ads to save money they are currently wasting.

Way to completely miss my point.

Re: Adfree Cities

#230

Post by JAlexoid »

digging wrote: post #227
legitster wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. But billboards are generally placed in areas of higher traffic. And I don't necessarily see why they are implicitly more distracting than the myriad road signs, bumper stickers, car decals, etc that drivers already navigate. Regardless, your DoT or local authority probably already has a lot of rules in place about how visually distracting billboards are allowed to be, and which section of roads they are determine…

> But billboards are generally placed in areas of higher traffic. Great. High traffic areas are the most dangerous places for distractions. > why they are implicitly more distracting than the myriad road signs, bumper stickers, car decals, etc that drivers already navigate. I'll list the reasons: 1. Road signs are standardized in a given state, and they're designed to be extremely easy to understand at a glance, so t…

You can surely provide some kind of research, that can support your argument... right?

It's not just your opinion based on...

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