Roadside Hoardings.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 20106, 9 December 1930, Page 10

Roadside Hoardings.

The discussion last night showed with what tenacity some members of the City Council cling to the belief that hoardings beautify the roads and streets. Yet there is at least the appearance of a case for the bill-board j that conceals an untidy section, while no one can say anything' for the hoardings that have been allowed to disfigure the countryside. Everybody is agreed that they are a blot on the landscape and a disgrace to a civilised community, and that if something is not done we may be as badly off some day as the American district in which a visitor who had been asked if he did not admire the scenic beauty of the country was compelled to reply that the " little he could " see between the - roadside hoardings " certainly impressed him as excellent." It is encouraging therefore that the Canterbury Automobile Association has begun to interest itself in the matter —to the extent at least of approaching Mr Sterling on the subject of dangerous hoardings on railway property. But Mr Sterling will do nothing to help it. Although roadside hoardings are a definite menace to the safety of the roads —partly for the reason that they obscure the view, but chiefly because the average driver is so wearied by signs advising him to buy somebody's pills or petrol that he neglects to look at road signs at all—the Railway Department will not give them up while there is revenue to be made out of them. We may sympathise with the feelings of the Dunedin doctors who were so exasperated with the signs spoiling the beauty of their district that they chopped them down, but sympathy is not enough when we find advertising firms persuading Government officials to give them long leases of the nation's property to enable them to perpetuate this menace. The trouble of course is that it is noljody's express business to stop them. In other countries much good hafe been done by the establishment of societies for the preservation of rural scenery, and if there is no other way of checking the menace to our own countryside, we shall have to form societies here also—numerous enough and strong enough to resist all spoilers. If a society were formed in Canterbury it would have many supporters, and if kindred societies were established all over the Dominion, and linked up and properly managed, they would be able to exert enough pressure- to force controlling authorities to give effect to public opinion.