5/3/2009
French, UK Vigilantes Grow Tired of Speed CamerasFrench activists plaster speed camera in tire stickers while UK activists burn a camera.
In Paris last week, vigilantes disabled the most notorious speed camera in the French capital, Radio Europe 1 reported. Activists took about two dozen of the bright orange stickers that are used to identify freshly manufactured Continental tires and plastered them on the face of the automated ticketing machine located in front of the Ministry of Finance building. Officials there are likely to be dismayed at the loss of revenue from 430 tickets each day the device is out of service. The speed camera issued a total of 157,000 citations last year.
Vigilantes in England generally prefer to use the actual tire to fuel the destruction of speed cameras. This happened last Thursday at around 2:30am in the village of Fernhurst in West Sussex, according to the West Sussex Gazette. The torched device had been located on the A286 Haslemere. A similar attack last July took out a camera in the same area.