I got the same lecture in driver's ed, but let's be honest: that was never accurate. It's perfectly fine to talk to someone while you're driving, or to adjust the volume on the radio real quick. I imagine that the lectures given to teens learning to drive are motivated by the fact that new drivers need to focus more, and are stubborn so they need to have the point driven home harder. For a responsible adult driver, neither conversation nor radio adjustments nor billboards are a dangerous distraction.
I do think that billboards are ugly and would prefer to not have them, but I don't think that there is a reasonable justification to ban them on safety grounds.
Road signs provide information for roads to function properly, so even if they are a distraction the tradeoff is worth it. Billboards provide no such utility, they only impose costs on drivers for the benefit of ad companies and their customers.
Then it would be easy for you to provide multiple studies, saying that billboards are distracting.
Not just your opinion, but a lot of concrete evidence. We have had billboards for decades now. There's tonnes of data on where accidents happen. Yet no one seems to be able to provide data based backing to their opinions...
I do think that billboards are ugly and would prefer to not have them, but I don't think that there is a reasonable justification to ban them on safety grounds.