It is sad to see the correct reply grayed out.
This kind of regulation is known to breed corruption & abuse, tilting the field heavily towards the highest spenders. Can only be enacted when ideology trumps well established knowledge & experience.
Zürich resident here. In this specific case the abuse is even pretty openly stated :(
> The Supreme Court’s ruling cements a decision to remove more than three-fourths of its once-standing 172 billboards from the town, keeping the remainder available for culture and sports ads.
By "culture and sports ads" they surely mean adverts by the government for its own subsidized services. Local government is a huge spender on billboard advertising around here, often for its own state run sports or events (invariably stuff that's popular with lefty civil service types like obscure dance performances).
Lately they also love to paint trains and trams in garish colors, in an open advert for diversity ideology:
Die Farben und Formen des neuen visuellen Auftritts widerspiegeln die Buntheit und Diversität des gesamten ZVV-Netzes.
... and they don't seem to have a problem either with all the posters that get glued everywhere advertising May Day, Feminists for Anarchism and so on.
The idea cantonal governments have a problem with "visual pollution" is kind of absurd, really. If that's actually the motivation then step one would be to stop buying billboard space with taxpayer money, stop flooding the city with rainbows, clean up all the pro-Gaza graffiti and go entirely without any of that for a few years. Once they've proven they have the discipline to clean up the sort of visual pollution they themselves tend to like, then they might have a moral leg to stand on for banning other forms of advertising.
You might not be recognizing them as state adverts, because Switzerland has the largest amount of government advertising of any place I've ever been. By far. If you can't see that you're either unfamiliar with other places or not recognizing the ads as coming from the state. Recall that the definition of the state also includes government-owned companies like SBB, ZVV, EWZ, ZKB. Adverts by any of these companies is an advert by the state. That's a generously narrow definition: it's not including advertising for parties or referendum positions, which saturate billboards any time there's an upcoming vote, nor advertising by state subsidized industries like farming.
Here are some examples.
Walk down to Bellevue. Start to walk along the lake to the China Garden. You will walk past some of the most prime advertising real estate in the city. There are several billboard signs in a row right at the top corner of the lake. Highest footfall of anywhere in the city outside of Bahnhofstrasse itself. When I did this yesterday every single ad was by government, for government. For example, one of them is currently advertising the government-run Native American Museum:
Walk down the lake and you'll encounter more such billboards, all showing government ads. In fact I don't think I've ever seen a non-state advert on any of these places.
Go to a Filmfluss event. It starts with 10 minutes of ads. On Saturday when I went to a showing with my wife, I counted and around half of the ads were by the state. Amongst others: multiple recruiting ads for the Stadtpolizei, ads for ZKB, multiple ads for EWZ, ads for state-funded cultural events etc.
Get on the train or tram. Look at the billboards inside the carriage. Many of them will be ads for the SBB's own services or offers, or recruiting ads for drivers (especially popular at the moment), or the Gemeinsam Vorwarts campaign. These are all state advertising.
If you see all this and really think it's very little then I don't know what to say. Go spend some time in other places of comparable size and pay close attention to how many ads are by the state or state owned companies. It will be lower.
GP has several examples of the government itself contributing to visual pollution. Including for purposes that don't match the interests of many citizens.
I don't thinkg this should mean that ads can't be banned but the government should absolutely be called out for planning to continue its own ads.
Except that vast majority of Zurich is covered by commercial ads and they're massively visually distracting in a way the "government ads" they're trying to call out aren't.
I love the idea of acoustic and visual hygiene, fighting the acoustic and visual pollution. The flaw is in human nature and the attitude "but _we_ are allowed, _our_ case is different". If the enforcers will be local authorities, they will be unable to resist displaying out their message. If there is at least one CHF and one person in the promotion and marketing department, the idea will pop out. Hey look at the bright side, at least they didn't cover the tram's windows!
> Hey look at the bright side, at least they didn't cover the tram's windows!
They did though, if only partially. While the parts overlapping the windows are not 100% opaque, in my experience such ads do significantly worsen the viewing view from inside the vehicles.
