Pedestrian shares disturbing photo of dangerous vehicle on the road: 'They need to be outlawed'

When you think of a vehicle being for sale, you probably don't think of it in the sense of every square inch of it being on offer to advertisers.

A user on an anti-car subreddit was baffled after spotting an example of this in the wild and had a couple of questions: "How is a van with animated LED screens on all sides road legal? Is this not insanely distracting for other drivers?"

The van in the picture indeed has a massive advertisement for a gym membership on an LED screen completely covering the truck's loading bay. So, to answer the second question, it has to be extremely distracting for drivers.

"At least you're distracted by the LED screen outside of your car rather than the LED screen inside," one viewer quipped while acknowledging, "That's a low bar."

On the safety front, these sorts of highly distracting ads have started to increasingly make their way onto moving vehicles, or extremely bright billboards that can blind drivers. While there are rules around them in certain areas, seeing those actually enforced is another matter.

Another Redditor had other concerns about the inundation of advertisements.

"They need to be outlawed," they declared. "It makes me so angry to think of the environmental impact these things have."

They're correct on multiple fronts, as there's no question beaming out bright LED advertising is needlessly wasting energy. The excess advertising not only makes us more unhappy, according to a study by the University of Warwick, it also encourages overconsumption. 

That has a detrimental effect on the environment as it puts more strain for energy-intensive processes like production and shipping. It's all to create more consumer products to meet the artificially inflated demand. Unfortunately, it's become increasingly hard to escape these prompts to buy more things, as they show up everywhere from the gas station to the beach.

One Redditor did find a silver lining in the advertising world's fixation on motorists.

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"Pretty soon you will have to watch a 2-minute unskippable ad before you start your car," they predicted. "Probably a good thing too since it will make people want to drive less."

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