Friday, January 11, 2019

Now that's a protest I could support!

I note with pleasure that the "yellow vest" protesters in France have come up with a tactic that will delight many motorists.

Members of the "yellow vests" protest movement have vandalised almost 60% of France's entire speed camera network, the interior minister has said.

Christophe Castaner said the wilful damage was a threat to road safety and put lives in danger.

The protest movement began over fuel tax increases, and saw motorists block roads and motorway toll booths.

Some protesters feel speed cameras are solely a revenue-generating measure which takes money from the poor.

The BBC's Hugh Schofield, in Paris, said evidence of the vandalism is visible to anyone driving around France, with radar cameras covered in paint or black tape to stop them working.

But the extent of the damage - now believed to affect more than half of all 3,200 speed cameras in the country's network - was unknown until Mr Castaner's statement on Thursday.

He said the devices had been "neutralised, attacked, or destroyed" by members of the protest movement.

There's more at the link.

I entirely agree that "speed cameras are solely a revenue-generating measure".  All the pontifications about their being a safety measure are so much hogwash.  How many accidents have they prevented?  Count them, and let me know the total, will you?  One can't, of course, because it's impossible to prove that claim.  On the other hand, they've provided massive revenues to municipalities - and, more importantly, to the companies that install, maintain and operate them.  It's become a self-sustaining industry, paid for by hapless motorists.

If the protesters shut down every speed camera in France, I'll be delighted.  If that particular form of protest spreads to other countries, I'll be even more pleased.  It'll satisfy my inner vandal (and H. L. Mencken's famous dictum).



Brad_in_IL said...

I pass through no fewer than five "red light" cameras during my morning commute. Those foul pieces of shit have dinged me twice in the last 8 months, at $100 a pop. As you correctly assert, they're nothing but a total revenue grab. In fact, I'd argue they create a road hazard as I've seen a significant number of drivers misunderstand them and actually cause traffic to backup up, creating driver aggravation, etc.

C. S. P. Schofield said...

I've been following the Speed Camera and Red Light Camera saga in the US for some years now. I find it particularly delightful that, in many places, pissed off citizens have used State laws about speed limits and road engineering to invalidate millions of camera tickets and make the programs sufficiently unprofitable that they go away. And while many localities (including - no surprise here - the Peoples Republic of Massivetaxes) have altered their court procedures to protect the camera revenue, many failed to do so and found that A) the camera tickets were unenforcible for procedural reasons and B) now that the citizenry was already annoyed by the cameras it was far too late to try to sneak in a change.

HMS Defiant said...

on line with CSP above, I remember the dramatic video of a state cop beating the hell out of an old lady for not signing the speeding ticket he was giving her. He literally beat her up for failure to sign because, he said, the ticket would not be valid without her signing it. And then they thought they could put in speeding cameras..... srsly?
When I lived in San Diego they had to kill their stupid red light cameras because, law. They hate to be on the wrong side of law.

Aesop said...

The mayor of Rome once related the attempt to place such cameras in his precincts.

Within three days, all of them had been destroyed or stolen.

That was the end of that experiment.

Vive les vilets jaunes!

Will said...

Similar problem with red-light cameras. The problem with them is two-fold. People jamming on the brakes to avoid entering the intersection, causing accidents. And, the .gov invariably shortens the yellow light interval to generate more revenue, which further aggravates the first problem.

Rick T said...

The shortened yellows were the reason many red-light cameras were removed and the tickets revoked here in CA. State traffic engineering requires 1 second per 10 mph (IIRC) AND it isn't a violation if you don't enter the intersection on a red light (you don't have to be clear by the red).

With widespread understanding of the two traffic rules the tickets weren't standing up in court, especially when drivers could show a short yellow cycle.

MadMcAl said...

While I think most of the speed traps are a pure cash grab, I know of at least one where it was truly installed for safety reasons and worked for that.

Here in Germany, we have one special section on the Autobahn A3, the so called Elzer Berg, where the road has a relatively steep decline and is relatively straight, followed by a (for the Autobahn) sharp left curve.
That had the result that several times a year the inhabitants of the small town Elz had to get tractor trailers from their roof (or more likely, out of the roof), with a result of several deaths per year.
The speed trap build at the decline has reduced THAT to near zero. Of course it helps that nobody even tried to keep this speed trap secret. It is probably the best known speed trap in Europe. So anybody who gets fined is at fault him or her self.
Another good place where the safety fig is not so much a fig is construction sites (also mostly on the Autobahn) where the necessity of the construction make it really, really unsafe to speed.

C. S. P. Schofield said...


You remind me of a problem the City of Baltimore encountered when they started to use what was then called The Denver Boot. It worked well enough to collect from ticket scofflaws....except near the Johns Hopkins Homewood Campus. Boots deployed near the campus tended to vanish. The Hopkins engineering students viewed them as a neat challenge, and once they had it off the car would keep it to play with.

Francis Turner said...

Some of the first French speed cameras were placed at accident blackspots. There was one at the end of a tunnel on the A8 behind Nice that was clearly placed there for that reason because just beyond it was (is) a junction with a short on ramp and crashes due to people being rearended were notorious there.

Having said that it also generated several million Euros in its first week of operation because until word spread of its presence it was flashing a few times a minute all day.

People who got caught by it whinged but mostly accepted that there was a good reason for it.

It's gone now, instead they have cameras on other parts of the A8 which are dead straight but where they've deliberately reduced the speed limit from 130/kmh to 110. I suspect those cameras are some of the ones have have been destroyed