Sharjah
I would like to raise my concerns over something I noticed while going to Sharjah from Dubai over the weekend. We were travelling on the Al Ittihad Road, which is the highway between the two emirates. There are new digital billboards installed for advertisements on both sides of the road.
Shockingly, some of the advertisements were really bright and really strong lights kept shimmering. These aren’t small advertisements, but huge screens, and the lights are too powerful (as seen in photograph).
Such advertisements could contribute to an increase in the number of road accidents, as they are really distracting to the eyes of the driver. As a passenger, I found it quite troublesome to view them, so imagine how the drivers would feel, especially those using the highway during the evenings.
I asked my older sister, who was driving the car, how she felt about the lights. She, too, agreed that these lights were very disturbing.
I do agree that advertisements are necessary and a major way of promoting products, but these advertisements that flash brightly on such screens, with colours changing in a fraction of seconds, are definitely distracting and could cause accidents. Additionally, they could be a health risk for many people.
I hope that advertisement companies take this concern seriously and at least consider changing the power of the lights being used, to make them less distracting.
— The reader is a pupil based in Sharjah.
FACTBOX:
A survey conducted in 2014 by global insurer Zurich and RoadSafetyUAE.com revealed that one in three drivers in the UAE are distracted on the road. A study conducted by Virginia Tech for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the US, found that anything that takes a driver’s eyes off the road for more than two seconds greatly increases the risk of a crash.
Digital billboards have a singular goal — to get your attention. A report published online by US-based news aggregator The Huffington Post states that digital advertisements are getting bigger and brighter. They display a new advertisement every ten seconds — flashing thousands of times each day. The human eye is hard-wired to look at bright, moving or flashing objects.
Though there is no information on a limit on sign energy usage, many states in the US prohibit the use of digital advertisements. In 2009, the Swedish government ordered the removal of all digital billboards, too.
