The effect of billboard design specifications on driving: A driving simulator study

Research on the effect of advertising billboards on road safety has accumulated over the past seven decades, but has led to inconclusive data, which prevent clear-cut conclusions. To enhance road safety, it was suggested that researchers should shift their efforts to exploring which billboard characteristics are distracting by nature. This line of research may promote the establishment of concrete guidelines for the least distracting permissible billboards. A previous study classified billboards into three clusters: 1. Loaded (colorful billboards with small quantities of graphic elements and large quantities of text); 2. Graphical (colorful billboards with large quantities of graphic elements and small quantities of text); and 3. Minimal (billboards with few or no graphic elements, few colors, and a small amount of text). The current study systematically explores the effect of these three clusters on drivers’ performance in a driving simulator. Eighteen participants drove in scenarios which systematically manipulated the following variables: the perceptual load on the road, the perceptual load on the sides of the road, location of preplanned critical events, and the presence of billboards from each one of the three previously identified clusters. The findings show that the presence of billboards from the Loaded and Minimal clusters significantly compromised road safety in various experimental conditions. However, the presence of billboards from the Graphical cluster significantly affected drivers’ performance only in one experimental condition. The conclusion, for the time being, is that Graphical billboards, which include a large quantity of graphic elements with few or no textual elements, are the least harmful while driving.