City hall has backed away from plans to outlaw those flatbed trucks that circulate downtown carrying nothing more than big advertising panels. It's the right thing to do, but it doesn't need to be the last word on the issue.

It's easy to understand the urge to ban these beasts. We're all for advertising, but Montreal's commercial streets were not exactly ad-deprived before these trucks started rolling. The idea that we need more vehicles polluting the air, melting the ice-caps and clogging the streets, with no purpose except to attract attention is, shall we say, counter-intuitive.

True, some companies in this business use bio-diesel, but that's not enough to tip the scales in their favour. And some of the larger-than-life-size visuals on these ads, depicting firm and under-dressed human forms, could even be an extra source of traffic accidents. Who needs this?

However, an hour with a lawyer - or for that matter five minutes with a law student - should have been sufficient to get the city to stop tilting at this particular windmill. City attorney Gaetane Martel conceded to La Presse last week that a bylaw banning the ad trucks would plainly be unconstitutional. We have free speech in this country. Every commercial vehicle carries advertising. The Societe de transport de Montreal makes a nice profit from the sale of advertising on city buses.

And yet the city has spent the better part of two years giving the companies tickets for violating a bylaw forbidding such ads. Now all those charges have been dumped.

So how do we get these monstrosities off the road? There's a simple solution: Consider all the Montrealers who are unhappy about air pollution, or greenhouse gases, or traffic tangles - pretty much all of us, in other words. If we all simply resolved to stay away from the clubs, goods and services advertised in this annoying fashion, how long would this business survive?

Operators of these trucks say they have a legal business providing a service to advertisers willing to pay - that they are, in short, within their rights. That's exactly true, and what's more, entrepreneurship is an admirable trait.

But Montrealers individually are within their rights, too, to make buying decisions that serve to discourage a form of advertising with such obvious drawbacks.