"I think you could see a marked decrease in the amount of postering if you spent a little money on a small ad campaign letting business owners and residents know that they are fully encouraged to tear down posters in their neighbourhoods. I think people right now tend not to touch them because they're not sure what constitutes an illegal poster."
I don't really care whether it's legal or not, if I see an ad and I can take it down, it comes down. In any given week during my neighbourhood walks I take down at least 200-300 posters, virtually all of them of the .com spam variety, such as junk haulers, language schools, driving schools, contractors, and all other sorts of businesses. Amazing how much one can get done with a box cutter and a plastic bag. The problem really is that bad, and most of these are placed along residential streets, not main streets like Yonge or Mount Pleasant, which makes it even more disgusting in my mind. Lost cat ads, or garage sale signs, those I leave up, anything else is gone.
And without exception, every time someone sees me doing this, they thank me. Not once has someone said I'm depriving someone of their livelihood or freedom of expression or whatever other bullshit excuse postering apologists use. There really is no excuse for this behaviour, and when you see the sheer mounds of paper that go into the trash, you realize not only what an affront this activity is on an aesthetic level and from the perspective of maintaining a respectable public realm, but what an environmental atrocity this is: I would estimate that, just on my own, about a garbage bag worths' of paper goes right to landfill every week. That's one small section of town, over one week. Take all of the thousands of ads plastered along Queen, King, Bathurst, etc. (to say nothing of plastic signs and such) and there are easily hundreds of tonnes of this junk going to landfill every year. In a digital age this is inexcusable. Only pure, base, naked greed motivates companies to engage in this behaviour, and no one, not the city, not individuals or BIAs, should apologize for doing whatever it takes to remove this material.
Postering cheapens whatever it touches, and if Rob Ford imposes Draconian fines for this practice, he will have an easy time of it. I really do think people have reached an end point, as more and more people go to other cities, see the complete lack of postering that occurs, and then come back and are assaulted by the wallpaper of shit placed everywhere. It's commercial vandalism, full stop.
And as to the question of how to pay for ad cleaners, we have an excellent model in the Downtown Yonge BIA, where a private company sends workers everyday out to clean ads off of street furniture. If that model can be replicated across every BIA (perhaps even legally required to do so) then postering will disappear within a year. Coupled with fines, name-and-shame campaigns, and people like myself doing what I do, then I think this practice can finally be broken.
This site is enlightening, and depressing:
http://www.causs-canada.org/index.html
