27-01-2006

Vegas Advertising Rolling Along


Las Vegas is a town with a constantly changing landscape. As older casinos go down, ever larger casinos are popping up and breaking through the changing skyline every day. But one new addition to the Las Vegas strip is rolling along at ground level.

Ground level? I'm talking about the sudden appearance of advertisements being towed along by trucks, or pasted to the side of buses. The new advertising on buses isn't just in Vegas either, but in every major city one can find a bus pasted with scenes from a new TV show or store.

So what's so different about the advertisements rolling down the streets of Las Vegas, mostly the subject matter? Although in the United States the first amendment protects the right to free speech, many feel that a 14 foot sign rolling down the streets advertising the services of prostitutes are completely inappropriate, especially since Clark Country prohibits prostitution.

The Las Vegas strip, home to some of the largest casinos in the United States, is the major economic driving force of Nevada. If giant billboards rolling down the street in any way make the Vegas experience less desirable, than many feel that the Clark County commissioners not only have the right to do something about it, but that they have that responsibility.

Not only are the billboards slightly offensive to some people, but they also cause traffic jams. The billboards are not only very large vehicles, often giant boards pulled by trucks, but they drive slower than other cars in order to allow viewers to take notice of their messages. And besides the extra traffic they cause, the billboards block the views of the magnificent casinos behind them.

The billboards first appeared in 2001, and since then have jumped in number to an estimated forty billboards riding up and down the Las Vegas strip. The owner of Mobile Billboards of Las Vega, Marla Letizia, says that since its opening the company has grown from one to nine trucks.

Letizia herself notes that no more that 30 trucks should be allowed to operate on the strip, but if no one takes action to limit the numbers of such mobile billboards the numbers will soon spin out of control and the strip could see the appearance of 100 billboards rolling down the streets of Las Vegas.

It's not just that such a limit to mobile billboards would greatly help Letizia's business, the first to operate such billboards, but without any limit the number of billboards on the street could actually become a safety issue.

While Letizia's billboards run on safer fuel, many of the mobile billboards driving down the strip are lighted using gasoline generators, “If there's an impact with the generators, there's a bomb going off on the Strip,” said Letizia.

Letizia' company also uses single vehicles, as opposed to the towed trailers many of her competitors use. These can be extremely dangerous, especially in such a place as the Las Vegas strip with such a high level of pedestrian traffic. If the wind catches a trailer in the wrong way the vehicles trailer could be blown off its path right into other cars or humans.

For the sake of her own business and for the sake of those just plain annoyed by the visual advertising taking over the Vegas strip, many are pleading with county commissioners to regulate mobile billboards.

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