Posted on: Tuesday, September 23, 2003

EDITORIAL
Advertising on buses is not the way to go

The City Council continues to discuss selling outdoor advertising on city buses to help meet its obligation to raise $6.8 million to keep bus routes from being cut and drivers from being laid off.

This is a permanent solution, with broad and potentially disastrous implications, being offered for a narrow, short-term fiscal emergency. That's bad policy.

Among the possible implications:

• It's a threat to Hawai'i's prohibition against billboards, one of the strictest laws in the nation against outdoor advertising. Restriction of any sort of advertising, of course, is a restriction of the constitutional right to free speech. The law that was put together in 1965 has withstood numerous tests. To alter part of it is to risk all of it.

Before 1965, we were faced with the prospect of neon lights and giant billboards on the slopes of Diamond Head, among other places. If this law is "not broke, don't fix it."

Outdoor advertising is actually sort of fun in places like New York's Times Square or Hong Kong. But Hawai'i must hang on to the things that make us different.

• Once a new medium for advertisement becomes available, it becomes available to those with messages most of us profoundly don't want to see. We're thinking about the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, which already is displaying aborted fetuses on the side of a billboard truck and suing for the right to fly similar images in the sky above O'ahu with aerial advertising.

If it's legal to advertise manapua on buses, why wouldn't it be legal to post the Bio-Ethical Reform message?

Under the First Amendment, writes Advertiser Capital Bureau reporter Treena Shapiro, the city may not be able to write a bus advertising law that could restrict the content of the advertising that some might find offensive.

In other words, bus advertising, a long-term bucket of worms, is being offered as a solution to a one-time need for money. Our advice to council members: Just find the money. It'll be easier in the long run.