Roadside advertising and, in particular, digital billboards are becoming more and more prevalent and can be an important source of economic benefits even for road authorities. However, roadside advertising can present a safety risk, as it is explicitly meant to attract attention of passers-by and is therefore by definition a source of distraction. Hence, it is very important to ensure that any negative safety effects of roadside billboards are minimised via appropriate legislation and/or recommendations.
ADVERTS, which stands for Assessing Distraction of Vehicle drivers in Europe from Roadside Technology-based Signage, aims to provide a guideline for road authorities on how to minimise distraction from roadside advertising. The main outcome of this project is a set of 10 recommendations along with nine promising actions for road authorities to address the issue of driver distraction from roadside advertising.
The 10 recommendations are available as:
- A visualised summary
- A recorded webinar of the project and its main results (duration 15 minutes)
- A full report which includes the scientific justification of the recommendations
This output as well as the results of a literature review, an inventory of current practices in CEDR countries and other documents are available on the ADVERTS website: www.cedr-adverts.eu/en/
The ADVERTS project was carried out by SWOV (NL), in collaboration with TRL (UK) and Vias institute (B). It was funded under the CEDR Transnational Road Research Programme – Call Safety 2016.