My Glacial Journey to Awareness and Aesthetic Warrior

I wasn’t always so zealous about scenic conservation.

Even though I was an early adopter in my field when it came to understanding the overall significance of sense of place, some related realizations took decades for me.

They dawned on me as more of an ooze than a lightning bolt.

So if my journey to the realization I will share in this post is still unfamiliar to anyone, especially as it seems to many in my former field, maybe my journey to awareness could be useful.

When I was recruited to North Carolina 26 years ago, I too, soon took its vaunted forests and tree canopied streets for granted, including those along roadways crisscrossing the state.

Even though they had been constitutionally banned at statehood in Alaska, my previous community marketing post, I still also really hadn’t given the desecration that billboards cause much thought back then.

It would be nearly another two decades before my conversion took hold as a passionate defender of scenic preservation and character against the forces of blight.

When I arrived in Durham to jumpstart community marketing in 1989 at the recommendation of a colleague in another community I even considered using one or two local billboards as exaggerated welcome signs.

That is until I learned that less than five years earlier, local Republicans had spearheaded a ban here too.  It was enacted just as the last billboard was removed from Maine following a ban enacted by voters there in 1977.

But North Carolina had just begun rolling out business logo signs at freeway exits here that had been authorized by the U.S. Congress in the mid-1960s.

Along with color-coded wayfinding signs for visitor centers and cultural attractions, these signs are part of what are known as TODS (tourist oriented directional signing) which are far more effective for our community marketing purposes anyway.

There is an irony to the Durham ban on huge, roadside commercial billboards.

A hundred years before Maine voters banished them, their first widespread use along wagon and horse trails and railroad tracks emanated from Durham in 1877.

Julian Carr, a partner in “Bull Durham” smoking tobacco was ahead of his time with marketing.

The renamed product’s fame took root in 1868 when it was re-branded following its newfound popularity among Confederate and Union soldiers bivouacked here during the surrender that ended the Civil War.

Billboards were hand painted back then, often on rocks or barn roofs and siding and Carr deployed four teams of painters across the country securing the rights from property owners.

Today, “Old Bull,” the brand’s original 1874 headquarters and factory is a National Historic Landmark in Durham, adaptively reused for apartments, but as part of its authenticity, vintage billboards there have been preserved including one on its roof.

Until Carr’s innovative campaign in 1877, billboard companies had limited their desecration to cities, “brawling” with one another over telegraph poles, ash barrels and fences as well as wallpapering entire houses and blocks of commercial buildings.

In the words of Dr. Catherine Gudis, author of Buyways: billboards, automobiles, and the American landscape and a professor at UC-Riverside, back then “advertising space was not yet construed as real estate” but as “public spectacle.”

She notes that billboard companies at the time that “few paid regard to the inviolability of private and public property.”  The desecration of roadsides today is obviously in their DNA.

But 16 years after Carr sent his billboard painters across the nation and around the world, Americans rose once more in rebellion and mounted a hundred-year-long “sense of place” revolt.

It was, as documented by Professor Gudis from her research here in Durham in Duke’s outdoor advertising archives, a “battle for aesthetic rights to the roadside environment,” a picket engagement of which had been fought in Durham a few years before my arrival.

Americans fought in this rebellion, skirmishes of which continue today, to reclaim the roadsides created with their tax dollars from the forces of blight.

Meanwhile in another ironic twist, billboard companies recast themselves as simply private property owners.

Losing to aesthetic revolutionaries in the court of public opinion, they have posed as poor victims shelling out tens of millions across the country to sway lawmakers.

Lost on those who fall sway today in North Carolina is that billboard companies don’t own the property they use.  They lease it, and the laws they pursue are intended to harm the real property owners.

Only 3% of the billboards in North Carolina are locally owned by small independent companies.  More than 97% are now controlled by a handful of huge out-of-state companies, a cartel of sorts owned by REITS as vehicles to avoid paying taxes and by a revolving door of private equity firms.

They actually own property for only 3% of the thousands and thousands of billboards they have erected across the state.  Yet, they have successfully hoodwinked some lawmakers into thinking otherwise.

But it is something else that led me to join the roadside rebels.

These large out-of-state billboard companies are bullies, a realization that finally led to my belated conversion as a champion for scenic preservation and aesthetic rights as a civil right for all Americans.

Having divided up North Carolina among themselves, this billboard cartel not only bullies local communities to override the interests of their citizens, they throw their weight around to bully state regulators away from defending the public interest.

There are many reasons to despise the state laws they have recently pushed through including clear-cutting exorbitant view zones and soon even the once protected forest at interchanges.

Now they are seeking seek to overturn local zoning ordinances including democratically enacted and popular billboard controls and bans.

They also hope to transform thousands of illegal billboards to legal status as well as gaining the ability of turning them digital and capable of being relocated anywhere they please.

They also seek now to hold taxpayers hostage for millions of dollars for each billboard when roads are widened, something even the Texas Supreme Court rejected last week.

But the real reason they are bullies is what they are trying to do to the true local property owners who own the land leased by these billboard companies.

They also want to put small independent companies out of business so they can bully land lessors at will.  “Agree to our terms, or we will move one of our other billboards to block yours, rending it worthless.”

But my slow conversion to aesthetic warrior began much earlier.

Durham was forced by a large billboard company to take its right to ban billboards and remove them by providing a seven year window for the company to amortize its value all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

It was declared valid in 1992, less than three years after I arrived.  Over the next nine years, a grand compromise was shaped among billboard companies, public agencies and scenic character advocates regarding window-framing to protect trees, reforestation and view zones.

But within two years, the billboard companies were back at it, persuading Democrats in the legislature to outlaw the tools for removal endorsed for communities by the U.S. Supreme Court, preferring it seemed to let the forces of nature remove them.

Then five years later, just before I retired, neighborhoods in Durham were forced to defend the community’s ban as one of the out-of-state giants strapped a business organization to the bumper in an attempt to bully Durham into reversing its ban.

Unsuccessful, they turned again to the legislature as recourse, this time to Republicans for refuge in their continued war of desecration.

By then I had joined the small bands of rebels still fighting the aesthetic rights roadside revolt that began 122 years ago.

I’ve learned that this revolt has had many victories: promoting roadways as parkways, sparking the City Beautiful movement, empowering communities to establish billboard controls and pioneering community destination marketing organizations.

That rebellion as it continues today is a reaction to the road and rail-side desecration Americans saw as tourism took off after the Civil War.

The revolt was not only in defense of tourism but because tourism related businesses often fail to understand that people are drawn to destinations - not to hotels or mainstream amusements or pursuits they can do at home.

Aesthetic rebels such as me know that without this insight, tourism usually kills the very things it loves.

And that is why I have become a zealot for aesthetic rights.

In Just 48 Months

People who skipped over a recent post entitled 7 Truths may not have realized that they pertain to the spectacular shift Americans have made in how they access information while on the road.

Take maps for instance.  By far, the way Americans now access maps is online, and according to a survey, 90% do it on the go via a smartphone where they are useful not only for navigation but to pinpoint travel services such as restaurants, lodging and fueling stations.

According to Michelin, which has produced old fashioned static paper maps and guides for more than 100 years, 39% of Americans still keep one in the car as back up.

Less than 2% apparently continue to use roadside billboards.

Although these days, my back up to GPS is a “large print” AAA map, I still have a 1967 Michelin map of France from my first passenger airplane trip of any kind when I had just turned 19 years old.

That is also the year before Michelin started publishing maps and guides for destinations in the United States.

North Carolina first published a state highway map in 1916 when federal aid became available, and then annually or every other year since 1924.  The 1930 edition even showed motorists how to do hand signals for stopping and turning.

The first one printed in color was the 1936 edition, which included a guide to what were then considered the state’s major attractions (shown in the image below,) one of which was in Durham.

Of course settlements had been mapped here beginning in 1590.

It wasn’t until three years after I arrived in North Carolina to officially jumpstart visitor-centric economic and cultural development for Durham in 1989, that city and regional insets began to be added to the state map.

That was the year the World-Wide Web (WWW) was created to enable onramps to the Internet.  By the time the state map added those city insets, the first online maps were created by the Xerox innovation lab, PARC (Palo Alto Research Center.)

By 1994 when we began the shift to moving all Durham information to that platform, Canada and Scotland had put their entire atlases there, the latter being the first interactive maps.

Our organization was one of the first in the nation to incorporate the responsibility to determine or relay “impedance” data to online map companies.  This is what permitted these maps to recognize one-way streets and navigational turns.

Whenever your GPS misleads you - and 63% of us have had that happen - don’t blame online maps, blame the community and/or state that has neglected to update its data which is even more contaminating to static paper maps.

Even venerable Michelin is going online.

Most Americans first learned about online maps through MapQuest beginning in about 1996 but codes written and adapted by that company go back to its origins in the 1980s.

Then along came Google Maps in 2005 built on that company’s acquisition of the work of two Danish brothers in Sydney.

Apple launched the first iPhone less than 24 months later, although smartphones had been conceptualized in 1971, just before I graduated from BYU, and were offered for sale in 1993, on the heels of that first digital map created by Xerox.

Adoption of smartphones by Americans has been at a blinding rate of speed.  From just 35% four years ago, the fraction of Americans now using a smartphone has reached two-thirds, 75% of all mobile device users.

This means that within just 48 months, the percentage using these devices flip flopped to the percentage not using them.  The aftershocks of this seismic shift are just now becoming apparent.

And its substitution by users as the primary means of navigating to businesses as well as learning about new products has been even faster.

Smartphones are also the primary or only means for nearly 1-in-5 Americans to access the Internet including 13% of those making less than $30,000 per year.

Half of smartphone users have their devices to access help in emergency situations and 17% to report neighborhood problems.

Marketers, as a group, can be extremely slow to shift gears with a few even still using roadside billboards, earning a reputation for desecration marketing.

But laggards notwithstanding, it appears that devices such as these have already becoming the salvation for restoration of scenic character along our roadsides.

Thoughts From A Roadside

Several thoughts raced through my mind yesterday while viewing the roadside of a freeway interchange in Durham, North Carolina, where I live.

These parcels are very park-like when well-maintained, as members of a public-private coalition called Durham Appearance Advocacy Group (DAAG) is trying to do by forging alliances between local governments, businesses and groups such as garden clubs and Scenic North Carolina.

The one we discussed yesterday is meant to serve as a template for every interchange in Durham.

But ironically, regressives in the State Legislature have been working at odds, filing bills to disable state management of these roadsides and permitting out-of-state billboard companies to wantonly deforest them in order to prop up an obsolete technology few Americans use now.

Now they have even filed a bill, with an innocuous misleading intro, meant to override wildly popular democratically enacted bans on this form of desecration marketing and blight that have stood in communities such as Durham for more than three decades and ruled constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.

This tyranny by representatives not from Durham reminds me that revolutionaries founded our democracy not in opposition to taxes but due to corporate loopholes granted by the feudal systems of governance then in place.

In opposition at the time and ever since stood regressives trying to pull the country backwards.  One wonders, will another revolution soon be sparked?

In the 1930s, roadsides such as those I was standing alongside yesterday were already battlegrounds between the forces of blight and the forces of scenic preservations.  Jobs, jobs, jobs was the mantra then too but it was both/and when it came to scenic preservation.

Highway 100 was one of the first, if not the very first beltlines in the country.  It patched together a series of existing roads south and west of Minneapolis but included new construction of a stretch of more than 12 miles including what we now call clover leafs.

It was deemed the “Lilac Drive,” lined with 30,000 plants including 8,000 Lilac shrubs and 7 roadside parks.  It became a recreational destination and living proof that Americans are drawn to scenic character over commercial blight along their roadsides.

It was in the middle of nowhere back then but had the support of development interests and billboard companies eagerly pushing for sprawling suburbs that would soon gobble up acreage at a rate many times the rate of population growth, as it still does today in Durham.

Emily Badger reported in The Washington Post this week about a new study that that concludes that sprawl costs the U.S. economy now more than $1 trillion a year.

The reason deficit hawks are not licking their chops is that $400 billion of this is pushed off on other people, something economists call negative externalities, which is a fancy word to describe when the free market doesn’t incorporate its true costs.

Only a portion is found in inflated costs for public services.  We absorb the rest sometimes in our lungs and often while stuck in traffic, but all in all it is very similar to the tax loophole that led to the original Boston Tea Party.

Billboarders and their legislative allies aren’t the only ones who want to shift even more of those costs onto unsuspecting Tar Heels including millions of us “hard-working taxpayers” we so often hear regressives talk about.

Over the last five decades (1960s-2000s,) the NCDOT has carefully reforested and afforested more than 5 million trees along the state’s roadsides, in part, to mitigate for many times that number which had been destroyed during road constructions.

The trees were also meant to bolster a signature ingredient of North Carolina’s brand.

This included lining the state’s roadways with spectacular understory trees such as native Redbuds and Dogwoods, the state tree.  Then, without thinking, another unit enabled private maintenance contractors to destroy most of them just for their convenience.

During our cross-country road-trip a few months ago for my mom’s funeral, Mugs and I took I-64 through Saint Louis.  This included a 10 to 11 mile stretch through the heart of that area that had recently been rehabilitated.

Some even call it that community’s front door.

The area is sea of concrete and buildings leaving almost no roadside.  But the Missouri DOT has carefully carved tiny slivers of planting areas where possible along this stretch and recruited businesses and organizations as landscape sponsors.

It too, I suspect is meant as a pilot project for a more strategic approach going forward.  An example of the discreet but very visible signs erected for sponsors is shown as the image in this blog.

Research shows that less than a fraction of 1% of consumers still use billboards.  It takes less than six seconds to decipher one but consumers only give them an average of three, even when digitally flashing on and off intermittently to draw attention away from the road.

Yet billboard companies now want to deforest even interchanges in hopes that someone traveling past them or focused on exiting or merging onto the highway will have twice as long to look.

Yes, it is obscene and possibly the spark for another revolution, if not with torches, pitchforks or midnight rides, a roadside revolt.

When For A Shining Moment Tourism Became Patriotic

Less than two months after the Civil War effectively came to an end in Durham, North Carolina, 150 years ago next April, a newspaper editor headed out west publishing later in 1865, that region’s first travel guidebook.

Long before that war began, every line of my ancestors back five generations, (except three who died along the way) some northerners, some southerners, along with two sets of newly arrived immigrants, (Scots and Brits) had settled in the western shadow of the Rockies, all but four a decade prior to that internal conflict.

Samuel Bowles was traveling by stagecoach with the Speaker of the House of Representatives and future Vice President, Schuyler Colfax, on a journey requested by President Abraham Lincoln the day he was assassinated.

Along the way they would pass some of the last two dozen wagon trains of Mormons still heading west.  The subsequent guidebook was entitled, Across the Continent: A Summer’s Journey to the Rocky Mountains, The Mormons, and the Pacific States.

The Civil War was over but the route Bowles and Colfax traveled was anything but peaceful.

A general uprising by thousands of Plains Indians, Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho had been brewing for several years due to abuses by immigrants seeking fortune rather than a homeland, but warriors sometimes failed to make a distinction.

Nor did Cavalry units protecting the Overland Route, which burst into open warfare after the tragic massacre of peaceful Native Americans a few months earlier at Sand Creek, mostly women and children.

All along the stage route ranches, wagons, stagecoaches, telegraph wires and feed had been burned across Kansas and along the front of the Rocky Mountains midway through Colorado and Wyoming.

Narratives about the transformative exodus of 80,000 Mormons between 1847 and 1868 in pursuit of religious freedom are obviously heavy on sacrifice, perseverance, suffering, faith and grit.

But ironically, a new study by researchers at Brigham Young University looking into insurance rates provides some new perspective.

The mortality rate for Mormon pioneers, while a point higher than the U.S. population in 1850 was only slightly higher for male pioneers and slightly lower for female pioneers overall.

Showing that it may have been safer out on the trail away from cities, the mortality rate for babies on Mormon wagon trains was 9% compared to the U.S. population overall at 15%.  Of course, only white mortality was measured at the time.

Soon after Bowles published his travelogue, visitors began arriving to see Mormons, much as they do the Amish today, perhaps ironic to my Bowman ancestors who arrived in America as the latter and migrated west as the former.

The first true “tourist’s guide” to the West was published as a resource five months after the first transcontinental railroad was opened in 1869, less than a decade after my ancestors settled the first permanent settlement in Idaho and forty years before they would prove up on their last homestead.

Until then, tourism in America had been regional in nature.  In the early 1800s coastal planters seeking the climate and scenery of North Carolina’s mountains were primarily motivated by fear of disease.

Organized tourism took root first in New England by the 1840s just as my ancestors headed across the Great Plains.  It was viewed as healthful scenic relief from industrial cities and factories.

By the time a modest hotel clerk in Salt Lake City, a transplanted Virginian, first coined the term See America First, as the name for a three-day conference focused on tourism promotion, the first handful of community-destination marketing organizations had already been formed beginning a decade earlier with Detroit in 1896.

Attending were 200 business leaders, governors, heads of commercial associations, agents for railroad and trails/good roads groups, including representatives from Spokane, Portland, Seattle, Tacoma, Victoria, Duluth, Denver, Vancouver, Colorado Springs and several towns in the Midwest.

The meeting venue, now on the National Historic Register (the historic Oregon Short Track Building on Pierpont behind Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse and the Hilton, kitty corner from the Salt Lake Convention Center), at least deserves a plaque.

While the movement fizzled, the slogan was soon picked up by the Great Northern Railway to promote Glacier National Park and then to promote all national parks and monuments as national assets.

We are reminded by Dr. Marguerite S. Shaffer in her book by the same title, that this was the conference where speakers formalized the notion that had been emerging since the Civil War, that the West was emblematic of the “true” America, the ideal of America as “nature’s nation” and tourism as a “ritual of citizenship.”

Watch for her new book, a co-edited collection of essays entitled Entangled Environments: New Perspectives on Rendering Nature in American Culture, due out this year.

Scenic preservation and “nature” tourism took hold before, during and after WWI.  From 1897-1915, most tourism was in the form of conventions and expositions because the idea of leisure travel would not emerge as mainstream until the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Good road coalitions argued for a system of highway routes true to the historic pioneer routes such as those my ancestors blazed to honor them as emblematic of what it means to be American.

Unfortunately, some cities didn’t get the memo when the proportion related to conventions and meetings began to rapidly decline by the 1930s, even battling until the early 1970s to prevent “visitor” from being added to the name of community marketing agencies.

Some still obsess with conventions today when meetings of any type now represent only 7% of business and 4% of leisure visitor stays and 10% of travel overall about the same as attending performing arts, not insignificant but hardly worth the high risk of over building for.

Increasingly after WWII, cookie-cutter development, franchise architecture, formula businesses and facilities, desecration marketing such as billboards, facility envy and mainstream culture have combined to demean tourism appeal, destroy sense of place and enable blight across the country.

But as I was growing up in the 1950s, kids collected stickers about the destinations they visited and often displayed them on the rear corner window.

Many reflected the colorized photographs made famous beginning in 1901 by Fred Kiser who was during his lifetime, the premier scenic landscape photographer in his day.   He called them “artographs.”

Along with others commissioned from artists such as the postcards at this link by railroads, then road associations, and for a time by airlines, they were used to promote tourism destinations.

Little did I know in the 1970s as I backed my way into a life-long career in community-destination marketing in Spokane where businesses put on an exposition to celebrate nature that much of tourism across the nation had or was rapidly becoming anything but patriotic.

Taking A Unique Opportunity To Evaluate Safety & Billboards

For several decades I’ve found useful research conducted at Ben-Gurion University in Israel.  The main campus is in Be’er Seva where Dr. David Shinar runs a research lab devoted to driver safety.

Be’re Seva (Beersheba) is significant to three of the world’s major religions as the home of the prophet Abraham 4,000 years ago.  But from even earlier it had long been a cross-roads for the spread of knowledge.

It has only been a university town for 45 years.

Dr. Shinar happens to be a graduate of Hebrew University from where I first gleaned research confirming that advertising is impotent as a tool for changing image because, unlike publicity, ads which now have an overall negative ROI, have the effect of equally entrenching both positive and negative views.

But Shinar’s expertise (beginning with a Ph.D. from Ohio State University) is at the nexus of both industrial engineering (human factors engineering or ergonomics) and behavioral phycology.

His award-winning work has delved into whether in-vehicle technology is distracting (pros far outweigh any cons) and what makes people pass aggressively even when the car they are passing is traveling faster (inability to hold a constant speed.)

Now he has produced ground-breaking research about the effect of roadside billboards on safety. Interestingly, he didn’t come at it from the usual, “how long were they glanced at” approach.

Thanks to a Supreme Court ruling that removed billboards from the freeway that dissects the Gush Dan/Tel Aviv area, Dr. Shinar was able to compare accidents rates over three years both before and after using 8 sites where billboards were removed compared to six other control sites.

He studied both the number of investigated crashes overall and those resulting in significant injuries and/or fatalities.  He also controlled for traffic volume.

An opportunity like this is very rare, similar to a ten year period where the value of tourism marketing was studied when the state of Colorado dismantled their state tourism office and “went dark” while other states continued promotion.

The results are visualized in the image in this blog and in a power point presentation Dr. Shinar was asked to make to his peers at the International Conference on Traffic and Transportation Psychology ICTTP.)

It isn’t as easy to study the impact of billboards are you might think. This is because they are viewed for only a few seconds—half as long as they take to discern—and because even fleeting or subliminal glances can have lethal consequences when billboards are placed in areas where optimum concentration is required on the roadway.

Dr. Shinar is an expert on overall driver capacity and when spare capacity is available.  Little is available along city streets or urban highway corridors where “the gap between driver expectation and reality” is razor thin.

This is why crashes happen so often on freeway exits, where North Carolina lawmakers recently made it legal for out-of-state billboard companies to mow down trees so they could be more distracting.

No science was behind that move, only a few whiners with misleading information falling on sympathetic ears, deaf to any other information, especially anything scientific.

This myopia to the consequences of billboards over the years has been bipartisan in nature, correlated to campaign contributions as much as whining special interests.

Israel is also not a place where scenic preservation, conservation and character are often at issue.  They are central to North Carolina’s brand and quality of place.

North Carolina would be better off without any billboards, but especially in urban areas.  Durham banned them just as I came here twenty five years ago to jumpstart the community’s official marketing agency.

Those that still remain have been repeatedly enabled by the state steadily trying to undermine “whatever it is we do in Durham!”