Around 450 pieces of advertisement equipment have disappeared along motorways10/4/2018|Press releasesAlmost 446 advertisement facilities were removed from motorways and their vicinity. The outdoor advertisement providers removed 400 of them either following a call of the Road Administration Authority or based on their own will. About 500 advertisement facilities were then removed by the staff of the individual Motorway Administration and Maintenance centres. Only around motorways 900 illegal billboards are still to be removed. Most advertisement equipment is being removed from the D1 motorway, but also from the D2 and D5 motorways. There are significantly less billboards along the D8 motorway. "If the owners and operators themselves wanted, there would not be a single illegal billboard left around motorways now," says the transport minister Dan Ťok. The owners were supposed to remove illegal billboards until September 2017 – they had the whole five years for this. After that, the Ministry of Transport started with the big red tape process: calls for the removal of advertisement facilities along motorways and their close proximity in accordance with the roads act. Regional Road Administration Authorities started sending calls for category I roads and their close surroundings. "The law says that nobody can just come and simply cut off the advertisement. A number of papers need to be provided for each piece of equipment, so that its removal cannot be legally questioned or challenged as damage to a foreign thing," says the transport minister and adds that the biggest help would be if the billboard owners removed them at their cost and so fulfilled their legal obligations. Some owners obstruct the billboard removal for instance by deliberately changing the owner or registered office of the company operating the respective billboard. During the actual disassembly they will call the police, saying that the motorways maintenance workers are destroying their property.