Yellow Pages Deliveries Will Continue

By Katharine Mieszkowski, Bay Citizen

The towers of Yellow Pages piling up on San Francisco doorsteps won’t be disappearing anytime soon.

A 2011 San Francisco ordinance that created a three-year pilot program restricting the distribution of Yellow Pages directories has been shelved following a federal court decision striking down a similar ordinance in Seattle.

Under the San Francisco program, designed to reduce waste and blight, residents and businesses would have had to request a telephone directory in order to receive one. The books could have been picked up at distribution centers or hand-delivered to a person, but not simply left unasked for on doorsteps.

The pilot program never got off the ground and now appears unlikely to do so. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted last month to suspend the ordinance after a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the Seattle case that the distribution of Yellow Pages is protected under the First Amendment.

Read the complete story at Bay Citizen.