Consulting engineering firm Tantala Associates (Philadelphia) has released a new study that confirms no correlation between traffic accidents and digital billboards. The study examined nearly 60,000 accidents in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), OH, over an eight year period.
The study pinpointed accidents on specific stretches of road where digital billboards are visible for four years before the billboards were installed and four years after. Accidents in the county, as a whole, have decreased in the last four years. Accidents where digital billboards are visible have also gone down.
Additionally, the results for two subsets of drivers: young drivers and senior drivers — mirrored the results for all drivers – the number of accidents near digital billboards, like the rest of the county, decreased. The study also looked at time of day and found no increase in accidents at night near digital billboards.
This study reinforces two previous Tantala studies of the issue. In April Tantala published the results of its analysis of police records that documented 18,000 traffic accidents in, or near, Rochester, N.Y., over a five-year period, which also showed no statistical correlation between digital billboards and accidents. Two years before that, Tantala completed its first study of accident rates in the Cleveland metro area for the OAAA.
Around the same time as the first Tantala study, Virginia Tech completed a survey about the effects of signs on drivers. Conducted by the Center for Automotive Safety Research at Virginia Tech’s Transportation Institute, the study observed measures like eye-glance patterns, speed maintenance and lane-keeping, and found no substantial changes in behavior patterns in the presence of digital signage.
For the complete study, contact Jeff Golimowski, OAAA communications director, or Ken Klein, OAAA executive VP, government relations, at (202) 833-5566 or by email at jgolimowski@oaaa.org or kklein@oaaa.org.