Network Rail’s plans to put two 12-metre wide video display screens at Cannon Street’s railway bridge have been blocked by the City of London’s planning authority.
TfL expressed concerns as the adverts would be above Upper Thames Street, which forms part of the Transport for London Road Network (TLRN), and is also part of Cycle Superhighway (CS3).
TfL has installed advertising at the underpass on the A3 at New Malden and the Euston underpass. In both of these cases there are no pedestrians or cyclists crossing the carriageway and no traffic signals or proposer accesses on the approaches, and in this respect the Cannon Railway bridge proposal is quite different.
However, having commissioned an expert analysis, TfL concluded that the safety risk from distracted driving was negligible at this location.
(c) Network Rail
In refusing planning permission though, the Common Council said that the proposed advertisements, “by reason of their location, height, illumination and size, would be visually intrusive”, and were still concerned that they would be distracting to drivers, and hence a danger.
Good. There’s a cynical game here where Network Rail (and TfL) say “there’s no risk because it won’t distract anyone” while the people who flog the advertising do so on the basis that it WILL distract people, after all that’s the entire point of having it. The factor they both share is that they both need to say what they say in order to make money. TfL are particularly good at this, they also manage to contradict themselves by arguing that moving ads on escalators are safe while at the same time endlessly banging on about ‘hold the handrail, keep hold of luggage, keep hold of children….’ [and most of us only have two hands] because ‘slips, trips and falls’ are the number 1 cause of injury on the Tube.
Rant over.
Ricky has a good point there. Like the old argument cigarette companies used that advertising didn’t make people smoke. Why did they advertise then?