Ridding the city of lethal billboards

WHILE welcoming the High Court directive in response to a writ filed by a human rights and peace body to remove all unauthorised billboards in the capital city one can quite see it's just the beginning of a process that is being marked. It can't be a one-off step but has to be regarded as part of a process that must be completed if the intervention is to be comprehensively effective and meaningful.
With the DCC and the police being directed to work in tandem to carry out the clean-up act, we also need to take into account the roof-top hoardings carrying stay orders since 2007 which await an expeditious disposal to complete the cycle of attempted redress.
The whole city landscape and skyline are sorely filled with a dense concentration of billboards and hoardings as a shameful marker of crass commercialism. It is totally unmindful of aesthetics and minimal safety consideration for pedestrians or vehicle users.
The roof-top hoardings on high-rise buildings raise a fundamental concern over the texture and strength of the perpendicular or cylindrical structures themselves and particularly those of the pillars they stand on. These are engineering nightmares enacted almost overnight without any authoritative supervision with whatever material could be put together having no regard to whether these could withstand wind velocity in different weather conditions, especially in gales. Even the pillars are pitched in parts of the pavement. Under whose authority such an impingement occurred on the pavement blocking the view of the road users, apart from school boys or girls risking dangerously tripping over, nobody knows!
The motorists, bus riders, motorcyclists and pedestrians alike are held hostage to the ubiquitous billboards and edging out advertisement placards. It is impossible to see any tree, any greenery, it's all a passage, as though, through a tunnel with sides of ugly dimensions.
All said and done, it is a form of business to put up advertisement and earn revenue from it. If there is a code of conduct for newspaper and television advertisers and advertisements, it is all the more necessary that we have a book of rules for billboards and hoarding stipulating do's and don'ts for the space giver and user in view of the mounting evidence of lawlessness engulfing the sordid business of billboards manifest at every busy traffic intersection of the city.