Billboards to Move from Roadside
Traffic Police Chief Viktor Kiryanov committed subordinates to apply in part and in whole the GOST P52044-2003 standard to billboards. Of country’s 200,000 billboards, over 80 percent don’t correspond to requirements. In Moscow alone, Kiryanov’s order will reduce the billboards by one third, fueling prices by 30 percent to 40 percent, the analysts forecast.
“Take notice that the award of Moscow Arbitration of November 23 deemed binding for execution the standards of GOST Ð52044-2003,” Kiryanov wrote in a letter that the chiefs of Moscow and regional traffic police and interior departments received late past week.
From now on, the traffic police will refuse to agree on the advertising places should they fail to be in conformity with the GOST, said Sergey Sobolev, who heads the traffic safety department at Russia’s Interior Ministry. Moreover, the officials will set to delivering to local bodies the documents specifying termination of permits for billboards that have been installed already.
GOST P52044-2003 took effect in July 2003, setting forth very stringent requirements to placing billboards along the highways. The billboards, for instance, could be installed at the distance of no less than 5 meters from the roadside. Executing all requirements would mean pulling down 90 percent of billboards, the analysts calculated, while the ad community lobbied the bill’s suspension. As a result, a softer bill took effect in September 2005, but even its execution would mean the end for 70 percent to 80 percent of billboards.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of May 08, 2007
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