Philadelphia-based Tantala Associates [1], multi-disciplined, professional consulting-engineering firm, has conducted what is believed to be the largest survey of digital-billboard traffic safety ever conducted, and its conclusion matched several earlier studies: digital billboards are ‘safety neutral’ (ie. that digital billboards are not linked to traffic accidents.)
Tantala analyzed eight years of more than 60,000 traffic accident reports from the Ohio Department of Transportation [2] (for the same seven digital billboards it examined in a 2007 study). A separate survey released earlier this year for Rochester, Minnesota, also came to the same conclusion.
The studies were conducted for the Foundation for Outdoor Advertising [3] partly to reassure local governments that accepting digital boards in their cities and towns would not pose a safety hazard. The studies also noted that neither the driver’s age nor time of day played any factor.
PQ Media [4] recently forecast digital billboards to be the fastest growing of all digital out-of-home segments, forecast growth of 13.2% to $568 million in 2010.