Survey: Are Bike Billboard Ads Green?
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 08.21.08
New York City banned billboard trucks in 2002, (why hasn't every city?) so Ariel Fefer came up with AdBikes, calling it "mobile green advertising. The custom designed AdBike is a quadricycle with a fiberglass pod that contains the ad, as well as lighting, a sound system and a compartment that easily fits premium items and brochures for easy sampling. The AdBike is even equipped with refrigeration, if necessary. "
While what's not to love about putting cycles to work, Roads are for transportation and these things are clogging a limited public resource for advertising, which some might say we have too much of in our cities.
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They are not green. They have to be manufactured and transported, to start with. Then they slow down traffic which lowers the MPG for vehicles around them. The poor people operating them inhale fumes all day. Eventually, the billboard cycles have to be hauled off and disposed of. Think life-cycle cost, folks.
I also agree that the public commons of the street should not be abused by advertisers.
Visual pollution is still pollution.
Maybe the extra traffic will push more people to ditch their cars. In much of New York, the only vehicles that really need to be on the road are trucks making deliveries, and that is hard enough in the city without lots of cars around. And maybe extra volume on mass transit will push the city to make an already extensive and reliable transit system even better.
Has anybody seen an advertisement on going green issues. Now that would be worth the effort.but not tying up traffic.Stop the airplanes that advertise. GLOBAL WARMING! Nobody really cares what they say.Half the time the writing is to small.
The question is confusing apples for oranges. While the bikes are green, and the additional jobs for the city are beneficial, the answers provided have more to do with the ethics of utilizing public roads for commercial purposes. So yes, the bikes and jobs they provide are green, but the use of public roads for commercial gain, without paying the road taxes that commercial transportation pays annually, is a slap in the face to the city/state/federal organizations that work to maintain those roads for public conveyance.