Posted May 4, 2015, 12:32 PM
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New Yorker for life
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Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Borough of Jersey
Posts: 51,900
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http://www.capitalnewyork.com/articl...are-billboards
Federal act pressures city to remove oversize Times Square billboards
By Kelly Weill
May. 1, 2015
Quote:
Times Square’s iconic billboards might be on their way out.
A 2012 federal transportation bill had the inadvertent effect of placing some New York City streets under the jurisdiction of the 1965 Highway Beautification Act, legislation that restricts signage on the National Highway System. Times Square’s massive billboards exceed the Beautification Act’s size requirements, which limit signs to 1,200 square feet. Now the city Department of Transportation is under federal pressure to remove the billboards or pay up, D.O.T. commissioner Polly Trottenberg says.
Under 2012 transportation spending act MAP-21, a number of New York City roads, including Broadway and Seventh Avenue where they intersect in Times Square, were added to the National Highways System.
...as part of the National Highway System, these Manhattan streets must now comply with federal requirements, including the Highway Beautification Act, a Johnson-era regulation intended to reduce the presence of billboards on highways. Under the act, billboards over 1,200 square feet cannot be displayed within 660 feet of a highway. Failure to comply with the Beautification Act is penalized by a 10 percent reduction in a state’s federal highway funds.
“All these billboards, they no longer meet the Highway Beautification Act requirements, and so now we're going to have to go through kind of a complicated process with the state to yank them off because the feds are threatening to take away 10 percent of our money,” Trottenberg said.
The D.O.T. is determined to keep the billboards in place. According to D.O.T. officials, the agency is in talks with the New York State Department of Transportation, as well as the city Department of Buildings to determine a way to leave the billboards unchanged, but a solution has yet to be identified.
Times Square billboards are a massive revenue source for building owners, sometimes outpacing the revenue earned from tenants in these buildings. In 2012, One Times Square pulled in $23 million from billboard revenue, the Wall Street Journal reports. In 2014, a new eight-story-tall, 24-million LED pixel screen began renting for $2.5 million for four weeks.
Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban planning at New York University says the Highway Beautification Act was intended for rural areas, and is being misapplied to New York’s streets.
"I remember when the Beautification Act passed, Ladybird Johnson never wanted to touch the streets of New York, it was for rural America,” Moss told Capital. “This is a gross and heavy-handed effort by the federal government to undermine New York's vibrant street life. This is another example where the federal and state governments should stay out of New York. They have enough to do elsewhere."
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Ridiculous.
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