Driving Rapid City's main thoroughfares, billboards come into view most everywhere.
By the city's latest count, there are 248 billboards within city limits, in parking lots, railroad right-of-way, open spaces.
But it's the eight digital billboards whose glowing messages can be changed as easily as with a click of a button that are drawing the most attention.
A week ago, the Rapid City Council approved a 90-day moratorium on all new billboards and electronic signs to allow time for a review of the city's sign code in light of recent efforts to build more electronic billboards.
A citizen task force will have to decide whether sign companies should be allowed to convert traditional, static billboards into digital billboards that show multiple advertisements per minute.
Rapid City isn't alone in facing the question.
Communities around the country are struggling with similar issues as outdoor advertising technology advances beyond the scope of ordinances written before digital and LED sign technology even existed.
Regionally, a number of communities, including Denver and Minnetonka, Minn., have taken a strong stance against what opponents call "television on a stick," citing driver safety and community aesthetics in banning new digital billboards outright and strictly regulating the ones that already stand.
"It's an emerging issue. It really caught people off-guard," said Max Ashburn, director of communications for Scenic America, a nonprofit organization that advocates against billboard proliferation. "Once they're up, it's difficult -- borderline impossible -- to get them taken down or turned off."
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In the Twin Cities suburb of Minnetonka, community development director Julie Wischnack fields a lot of calls about what the city calls "dynamic signs."
Minnetonka banned all new billboards in the 1970s, but in 2006, Clear Channel, one of the nation's largest billboard companies, converted two static billboards in town to digital faces -- without asking the city first, Wischnack said.
"What they said they were doing is changing out the face of them, the structure. Which was inaccurate," Wischnack said. "They put in a huge digital billboard."
When the city found out, power was shut off to the billboards on an electrical code violation, igniting a court battle with Clear Channel.
Those two billboards still stand in Minnetonka, but under a settlement, they have to abide by certain rules.
Messages can change no more than every eight seconds, and Clear Channel had to sacrifice half of its existing billboards in the community, or two for every one digital sign it put up, Wischnack said.
As part of the litigation, in 2007, Minnetonka also undertook an extensive review of the city's sign codes and safety issues related to electronic signage.
The 42-page report, "'Dynamic' Signage: Research Related to Driver Distraction and Ordinance Recommendations," includes an extensive literature review and identifies the existence of a relationship between driver distraction and electronic outdoor advertising. The consultants suggested the city regulate the signs as a public safety issue.
"The purpose of dynamic signage is to attract the attention of people in vehicles, so a natural conclusion from that knowledge is that drivers may be distracted by them," the consultants wrote. "Professional traffic engineering judgment concludes that driver distraction generally contributes to a reduction in safe driving characteristics."
Under the subsequent ordinance changes, electronic business signs cannot have messages that change more than every 20 minutes, and those messages cannot be sequential in nature, or require drivers to watch more than one slide to get the full message.
"I get calls from all over the United States about the issue. It's usually about public safety, about concerns about driver distraction, how did you go about addressing it, researching it," Wischnack said. "I usually shoot them over to the report."
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Denver is home to 600,000 people and three digital billboards.
And while the population may grow, the number of LED billboards in the region's largest city won't, after the Denver City Council this month passed a ban on all new electronic billboards.
Miles Davies, president of Scenic Colorado, a network of residents and organizations interested in preserving the visual environment of communities, said the proposal came out of an unrelated effort to clean up the existing sign code.
And while his group wasn't happy with some of the other changes made, he said they supported the measure because they saw it as their best chance to ban digital billboards.
"Billboards are bad enough. You add into that, without any public process, to allow the outdoor advertising industry to just convert any billboard they wanted into an electronic billboard -- it was too great of a risk," Davies said.
"We felt if we didn't strike while the iron was hot, we thought it would be very difficult to raise the issue again."
Denver's sign code has long included a number of restrictions that make it difficult for any kind of billboard to proliferate.
The city revamped its sign code in 1988 to strictly regulate off-premise signs with what some call a "cap and trade" system, zoning administrator Michael O’Flaherty said.
Denver has about 550 billboards, and the three digital billboards only went up within the past year and a half.
Under the rules, the city does not allow any net gain in billboard square footage. So, a new billboard can only be built after the applicant takes down a billboard or billboards of equal size in an area the city doesn't want them, such as parkways, landmark districts or residential areas. Billboards are allowed only in certain industrial and business zoning districts.
Billboards are also subject to illumination and animation restrictions. No billboards can be lit internally or externally between the hours of 1 a.m. and 6 a.m., and digital messages can only change every hour. The industry average is closer to every six to eight seconds.
"We don't get an awful lot of applications," O’Flaherty said. "As a cap and trade, it has effectively limited the square footage of billboards in Denver."
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Local communities are not alone in their concerns about regulating the emerging digital face of outdoor advertising.
The Federal Highway Administration is in the midst of an extensive study into the safety of electronic billboard technology that should be completed by this summer. The study will use eye-trackers inside cars to see whether and for how long drivers look at digital billboards.
Current administration guidelines offer states interested in allowing digital billboards "certain ranges of acceptability" that pertain to duration of message, transition time, brightness, spacing and location.
According to a 2007 memorandum, digital messages should change every four to 10 seconds, with eight seconds being recommended. The transition time between messages should be between 1 and 4 seconds, with 1-2 seconds being optimal.
But some states, including Montana, have already exercised their option to ban all digital billboards from state roads.
Jim Lynch, director of the Montana Department of Transportation, said Montana has never allowed electronic signs, but the rules were clarified in 2008 to include digital billboards. The ban applies to all state routes and interstate highways within the state, about 12,000 miles of roadway.
Lynch said the clarification was necessitated by a sign company successfully arguing before the courts that the state's ban on electronic signs didn't apply to digital billboards.
"We had to change the words to continue to support the intent when the rules were put into place the first time," Lynch said. "The intent was for the state of Montana not to have any electronic or digital or flashing billboards."
All communities that don't want digital billboards have to stay vigilant as technology advances, Lynch said.
"Technology tomorrow isn't what we imagine it today," Lynch said. "If we're going to manage the electronic billboard system, we have to constantly look at our rules and make sure it meets the technology of today and the intent of what Montana residents want to see along our federal routes.
"We're going to have to keep doing that."