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Vancouver is not alone in its battle over light: The anti-light pollution, anti-digital-billboard revolution is going strong

January 28th, 2012 · 25 Comments

BC Place and PavCo have no idea what they walked into by putting up three digital billboards on the side of the arena when it re-opened after renovations last fall.

We’ve tended to look at the flashing signs — and the local resident complaints about it — as just some local piece of whininess or outrageous and insensitive behaviour, depending on your point of view.

But, as I discovered when I got the exceptionally fun job of checking into the issues of urban light, this is far from a Vancouver-only issue. Digital billboards and digital signs are the new frontier of urban debate in cities all around North America, as I mention in my Globe feature here. I mentioned the anti-digital billboard fight in Los Angeles, where activist Dennis Hathaway told me all about his group’s opposition to a deal that LA city council cut with CBS Outdoors and Clear Channel Outdoors to allow them to convert 840 conventional bill boards to digital.

I didn’t get to squeeze in the fact that Denver and Tacoma, among several other cities, have banned digital billboards. That Arizona went to court to prevent them along highways and, I’ve been told, won the most recent round. That people in LA are also fighting the creation of new “sign districts” — commercial strips where advertisers can put up any number of corporate logos and digital advertising signs on buildings.

So the BC Place wrangle is just the beginning of what could be more fights over digital advertising, because the outdoor-advertising people looooove these signs. They allow for much more advertising in the same space, since the ads change constantly. They can be controlled from a remote computer. And they attract more attention.

And this, as I note, is coming at a time when cities are actually trying to minimize light pollution, by putting caps on streetlights, dimming them, trying new light technologies and so on.

 

Categories: Uncategorized

  • George

    Frances,

    I would be very interested to know exactly how much the hydro costs are for these digital signs.

    I’m assuming Telus pays this bill. Is it on a smart meter? Is it billed at 2 different hydro cost levels, due to day and night use?

    Since the sign is for advertising, are the costs of hydro deductible on Telus’s corporate tax bill? Tax break?

    I’m really surprised that environmentalists haven’t become more involved on this issue as it appears to be an incredible waste of resources.

  • Chris Porter

    @George – Go ahead and google for “digital billboard electrical use” and you’ll find a few good articles answering your questions. Yes, digital billboards use more energy – it varies quite widely depending on the size and maker – anywhere from $5000-$25,000 per year for the new ones vs $700 to light a conventional billboard. But the electrical costs are offset by labour savings and you can charge more for ads, so economically it’s a huge win for the owners.

    Are they an environmental waste? Sure, but small potatoes compared to almost every other form of waste (enviros should focus on the Northern Gateway pipeline, not a few billboards at BC Place). If anyone is going to take them on, it will be by arguing about light pollution and the constant bombardment of advertising.

  • Brenton

    I’ve often wondered where Vancouver was at in terms of light pollution compared to other cities. Anyone know? I’m thinking street lights, etc.

  • George

    @Brenton street lights have been on a system of dimming for several years…my neighborhood gets really dark because of it.

    @Chris Porter, I’m curious about this issue at the moment, the pipeline is something entirely different.

  • Michael Geller

    I recently read an article about Neon Signs in Vancouver. It noted that the city was once quite famous for its neon signs, especially along Granville Street. However ‘progressive’ public officials and politicians passed by-laws making them illegal and soon they were removed.

    How many of us lament the removal of these colourful signs? I certainly do.

    So this brings me to the illuminated billboards. In my house is a painting of Picadilly Circus which was once covered with wonderful illuminated signs (Bovril, Schweppes, Max Factor, Gordons Gin….) When I first started travelling to Japan and other Asian cities I was fascinated and delighted by the extravagant illuminated signs…billboards…giant TV screens on the outside of buildings…and wished we had them here.

    Now we have a few billboards and people are getting very upset.

    Yes, I can appreciate that if the sign was right in front of my living room or bedroom I might have a different attitude. But I do look out over the lights of the airport that light up the night sky and I have no problems with this.

    I am sure you are right Frances in observing that this may well be a growing problem..but just as I love seeing Christmas decorations, I also like the illuminated billboards and would like to see many more, along with more colourful lights and artwork on buildings.

    They have been a part of urban life for many decades…and I for one have no problem if they become part of a more colourful Vancouver.

  • Richard

    @George

    Have no idea which is less bad for the environment. To figure out, you would have to figure in the environmental cost of manufacturing, printing, transporting and disposing of the paper for billboards. I suspect in the end it is a wash over which is worse for the environment.

  • George

    @Richard I appreciate your opinion, but I was staying on topic…I wish to hear more about the billboard issue.

  • George

    Sorry@ Richard just reread your post… I didn’t realize what you said at first… humm need coffee..

  • Lewis N. Villegas

    There seems to be an inherent tension in this discussion. On the one hand, trying to keep the markets free and open, and giving business an opportunity to show its wares.

    On the other, there is an obvious case to be made about managing the “aesthetic quality” of our streets and neighbourhoods. There are precedents for both.

    The nostalgia about Granville Street and Pender Street as Neon Strips is understandable. I never saw it, but I am interested in those ideas and the images they convey. However, one has to keep in mind that “neon” is not “flourescent back-lit signs” and it is not “LCD billboards”. Additionally, we should consider that “neon signs” might in many cases may be “preservation of historic landscapes”.

    As with the towers, the best solution from the urban design playbook is to think in terms of districts as a whole, rather than on an individual site-by-site basis.

    Places that I have seen, like Piccadilly Circus and Times Square, have very clearly identifiable limits. From that footprint, then, one might begin to make policy that addresses all the issues, including the residents of that “district” or residents in windows adjacent that are impacted by sources originating in the district.

    However, I sense that the tension is based more on the passing of the Modern planning paradigm, and the hesitancy in the established culture to change the rules for fear of losing market position, or competitive advantage.

    I’ve sketched out the outlines of this cultural shift in our sense of ‘modernity’ here:

    http://wp.me/p1mj4z-tp

  • Guest

    While the City is protesting the electronic billboards at BC Place – it is allowing the installation of electronic billboards at Telus Garden – 2 on the corner of Robson & Seymour (across from a condo tower) and also on the office tower.

    Pics of open house presentation boards by Built Form at the SSP forum here:
    http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=186381&page=27
    The red/orange rectangles are the electronic billboards.

    Hmm. Is this really about light pollution or a pissing match bwteeen the Province and the City (for not consulting)?

  • ThinkOutsideABox

    Guest, at Telus Garden the developer Westbank is set to create an additional $240 million in real estate value with the newly rezoned 17.59 FSR. That’s likely providing the city the proceeds of a sizable development cost levy. Whereas Westbank and the city had nothing to do with Pavco billboards, so free and clear to make political hoopla.

  • Joe Just Joe

    The Telus project will provide enough CACs to pay for a new park at Richards and Smithe.

  • mezzanine

    @TOAB,

    I think guest’s point is that the city (or really, Geoff Meggs) by taking a hard line on the LED screen at terry fox plaza seems to contradict their support of LED screens at telus gardens. the condos that were there before telus gardens may have large screens directly across them on robson street.

    if anything, the CoV believes that light has a role to play in nightscapes within vancouver – look at the recent renovation of granville st.

  • Michelle

    When everyone is crying out loud, Global Warming, Climate change, save the Rain forest, blah, blah, blah, it is completely hilarious to see this huge light signs, where are the enviro crazies on this one? Saving penguins in the Arctic? LOL!

  • Guest

    Yes, I’m pointing out contractictory positions on the part of council – i.e. if it panders to the electorate they’ll jump on the bandwagon(?)

    If you’re suggesting that Council can be bought-off with Community Amenity Contributions, is that “ok”?

    It’s about $15 million ($10 million plus buying $5 million in heritage density)
    See here:
    http://vancouver.ca/ctyclerk/cclerk/20110920/documents/p3i.pdf

    And as to contributions, I’m sure BC Place adds much more to the downtown economy through sporting events, concerts, trade shows and spin-off hotel and restaurant business than a one time CAC contribution. About $100 million per year in economic spin-offs (not “land lift”):
    http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2011/09/28/bc-place-facelift-retractable-roof_n_986203.html

    Or maybe City Hall better responds to a direct cash payment?

  • Lewis N. Villegas

    “The Telus project will provide enough CACs to pay for a new park at Richards and Smithe.”

    JJJ 12

    While I support this argument in the downtown tower zone, the same argument is being used to put towers everywhere else, where towers clearly don’t belong. This is what I’ve termed using the tower as the “Default Option at City Hall.”

    If we follow JJJ’s point to its logical conclusion, and apply it everywhere in the city, then it is my contention that we will wreak havoc in our neighbourhoods and give away all that we, along with everyone else, loves about Vancouver.

    Laying the tower on its side to build human-scale, hi-density brings the same density, the same incremental increase to the tax base, but none of the tower woes that areas outside the downtown will always be ill-equiped to handle.

    If we can’t collect land-lift from rezoning to (the still illegal) urban houses from single family residential, but we can rezoning to towers, then that’s just something that we have to get the Provincial Legislature to fix.

    It could be the occasion for a lovely tea party on a waterfront Victoria lawn.

    Thus:

    (1) New taxes from growth is new revenue to the municipal purse—this is why it is so important to shape the growth to our advantage.

    Targeting growth revenues for neighbourhood improvements—and collecting the CACs from human-scale intensfication— is a cogent strategy for paying neighbourhood improvements, including higher levels of service, and new facilities.

    (2) This fix is so obvious that, when it is used to float a municipal bond, it has a name: Tax Increment Financing (TIF).

    TIF puts a mortgage on the neighbourhood, or quartier, to do all those things that JJJ tells us the towers do. However, unlike the shadowed streets, and the congested streets that will never go away once the towers set up, the TIF is paid for, and gone in 10, or 20 year’s time.

    One could argue that by putting the tower on its side, we engage a greater amount of neighbourhood frontage, and thus bring the remedies of intensification to a greater share of the neighbourhood footprint.

    The mystery to me is why there is no interest shown in this approach. This is one we cannot put on the developers. In a competitive market place, the construction industry will deliver and make competitive whatever the market demands.

    Problem with saying that there is “no market demand for this product” is that the product I have just identified does not build in Vancouver, and never has. Of course, it builds everywhere else in Canada, North America, and the rest of the world.

    But never here. Not yet.

  • Glissando Remmy

    The Thought of The Night

    “One of these moonless nights, all that the downtown residents will be able to see, when looking up the greyish sky, will be the blinding lights, coming from the flying saucer’s reflectors , circling the West End, like blood thirsty vultures; interrupted rays of light coming from the scores of sparkling alien centipedes eyes… flying those enormous machines.”
    – H.G. Wells – The War of The Worlds

    No one will notice the BC Place jumbo-tron anymore. That would be a speck of light, something ironic, in your liquefied past.

    Lookie here, at what Lord Foster is proposing for Hong Kong’s “cultural quarter”…

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d-ipcRqOMA

    Observe the moving lights, the jumbo-trons … ten times the size of that at the BC Place, the night lighting design…
    In retrospect, Vancouver’s flashers are… innocent.

    We live in Vancouver and this keeps us busy.

  • Lewis N. Villegas

    Great video, Glissy—11 months old! Where have we been? Can we ever “ketchup”?

  • TtGSDN

    This giant video screen issue at BC Place Stadium isn’t about arbitrary opinions over urban lighting, it’s about the application of due process. When the City (collectively) decides the way residents want things, that’s one thing – However when a small group of elitist revenue-hungry executives in a small dark room at BC PavCo unilaterally decide the type of harassment they’re going to impose on a glass residential community, that’s an entirely different animal.

  • mezzanine

    @ttgsdn

    When the City (collectively) decides the way residents want things, that’s one thing

    Are you sure about that?

    Frank’s $400,000 light art work was approved by the public art committee, the urban design panel and the development permit board. Although all three civic bodies raised the issue of the neighbourhood impact of the art work, no one from nearby strata councils was included in the process.

    When the art work was turned on in July, it was a surprise for nearby residents whose units look on the south-facing concrete face of the tower. [1]

    Councillor Heather Deal, who is the council liaison for the city’s public art committee, said she felt the city has taken appropriate steps to deal with residents’ concerns.

    “Our public art process does not currently require us to have consultation with neighbours for public art, and we did follow our normal procedures for this, she said.

    http://www.straight.com/article-469716/vancouver/public-art-light-installation-angers-nearby-residents

    IMO i think Ms Frank’s work and the BC place screen are appropriate for the sites. I also think that the CoV and PavCo should and will be more careful in the future.

  • mezzanine

    http://blogs.vancouversun.com/2011/09/27/tamar-frank-negative-reaction-overwhelms-dutch-artist/

  • Andrea C.

    This thread is about light pollution in Vancouver, right? So, has anyone been serenaded by the artificial turf field lighting at Trillium Park? I’ve had to start using blackout curtains. They make it very unpleasant to look out my third floor window. I’m not that close, but the light is very harsh. The sound pollution coming off the fields is much harder to ignore. All year long until late in the evening I get to hear coaches and players screaming non-stop at the top of their lungs. The sound travels quite beautifully on a summer’s eve. For a an excellent, illustrated summary of who this public facility serves, on the whole, please scroll about halfway down this link:
    http://groundhoppingca.wordpress.com/2011/09/11/trillium-park-vancouver/
    How’d you like to ask the guy on the cel phone (and his boys) to simmer down? He’d be safely back in Surrey with his minions by the time you came to again.

  • Norman12

    Apparently there will be “acknowledgement of sponsors” but no “advertising”. Perhaps someone would explain the difference?

  • Norman12

    Why would we need a new park at Richards and Smithe when the whole English Bay waterfront is a park?

  • Norman12

    I can find nothing on the city website about the open house tonight. I called 3-1-1 and they couldn’t find anything either. Apart from small notices in community papers, I have seen nothing. Interesting. I thought the mayor committed himself to greater public consultation. Oh well, say anything to get elected, do anything after.