Radar creep
This is a description of the insidious tightening of the state’s grip on France via radar on the roads. The process is a goodly part of what the yellow vests are protesting.
Things like this often start with something that may seem innocuous, maybe even beneficial. And then they escalate.
And escalate:
The first radars were installed in 2003 under President Jacques Chirac and his interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy and, in the beginning, drivers were always warned by a road sign when a radar could be expected ahead (which brought about exactly what allegedly was the desired goal, to get cars to slow down)…
Eventually—in spite of the insistent promises of then-interior minister Sarkozy—new radars were installed without road signs announcing their presence.
The schemes to make the rules harsher have at times been so far-fetched and outrageous that push-back was inevitable and led to their demise. For instance, the ludicrous attempt to have cyclists who break the law (running a red light, for instance) lose points on their driver’s licenses; or the plan to require all vehicles in the nation to be equipped with a breathalyzer. (Not surprisingly, it emerged that a breathalyzer manufacturer who, naturally, was a close friend of a number of politicians, was behind the bill.)
Recently came the news of mobile radars, as mentioned above, meaning unmarked cars loaded with a radar-installed contraption driven by gendarmes dressed in civilian clothes.
Meanwhile, crony capitalism has given rise to a side economy whose only purpose revolves around the punishment of citizens with cars or motorcycles—not least with thriving law firms specialized in little else but road infractions and blossoming (and very expensive) driving schools for drivers to recoup at least some of the points they have lost on their driver’s licenses (again, for violations of a rather arbitrary malum prohibitum rule), taking off a day from work in the process. If and when they have lost all their points (the driver’s license starts out with 12 points) and are thus down to 0, they are barred from returning to the schools and they lose the license itself for a year or more—the licenses of some two million Frenchmen are currently suspended—which leads in turn to job losses for some 80,000 drivers every year, since they can no longer commute.
Much much more at the link. Part of it involves listing the creative schemes people employ to get around the law. The government has responded with various ways to thwart this;
The ingenuous solutions, in turn, lead the deep state to respond—this is standard Milton Friedman—by creating even more laws, such as saying that a car owner claiming not to have been behind the wheel must denounce the person who was allegedly driving the car with his address and license number; making it compulsory to contest a ticket by registered mail only; or creating EU-wide laws making sure that tickets from foreign cars get sent to the driver, French or foreign. Most devious of all, it has become almost impossible to contest a ticket in a French court unless you hire a lawyer, which, given the amount of a ticket versus the price for hiring an attorney, guarantees that most fines will not be challenged (it happens mainly in extreme distress, when a driver is on the verge of losing all his or her points).
The old ways—warning people with signs—seemed to work pretty well, so why this ever-tightening grip? One goal is to raise revenue. Another is to discourage driving, one of the last bastions of liberty in France.
Excuse me, liberté.
[NOTE: I noticed a milder version of this last summer when I was in Italy. I hadn’t been to Europe in over ten years, and I hadn’t been in a car in Europe since 1993. Cars are now banned from the central parts of cities except for vehicles belonging to residents, and radar was everywhere to enforce this.]
In Switzerland, drivers must obey the speed limits because radar is everywhere. It’s a pretty small country. I can see how peripheral France would really resent this.
I was a member of the traffic commission in the city where I lived for 40 years. We had a hearing on red light cameras a few years ago and decided not to install them. The red light problem was only at two intersections and it was easier to station police there intermittently. What we learned about the cameras was the most interesting part of the whole process. The cameras are owned by a company and they split the revenue with the city. One city in Orange County was caught reducing the duration of the yellow below the state minimum of 3 seconds.
A judge ruled they had to refund fines for violations during the period they had violated state law. What they did was to refund only those paid by drivers who had pleaded not guilty, about 1% of those charged.
We also learned that increasing the duration of the yellow by 1/2 second, reduced violations by 80%.
Arizona, when Janet Napolitano was governor, used vans with camera masts mounted on the roof, to cite speeders. When she left, the cameras were discontinued. There has not been a Democrat Governor since she left.
I once was acquainted with a man who had grown up in Langue d’Oc but had migrated to the United States ca. 1960, eventually landing in the Genesee Valley of all places. He was reminiscing at one point about a televised speech Richard Nixon had given ca. 1973 wherein he implored people to drive more slowly on the highways. “Eef de Gaulle or Pompidou or Giscard had done this, everyone in France would have been out on ze road ze next day driving a hundred miles an hour”. He said he was polaxed driving to work the next morning to see he was the only one on the road disregarding M. Nixon’s admonition. He himself was an inner-directed man, and one of his signatures was the view that traffic laws were someone else’s shtick nussing to do viz me, catch me eef you can, M. Flic. (His spoken and written English was absolutely fluent, but with an accent you could cut with a knife; you could sometimes get the gist better if he spoke in French). I’ve long harbored a suspicion that this man was a Frenchman of the modal type. Germans might be sticklers for rules and hierarchies (‘vere iz da chalk mark’?) and the British might so addled by social anxiety that they’re easily rolled by anyone they might have to be rude to and cannot speak plainly unless they’re sh!tfaced. The French respond to petty regulations with a Gallic shrug and don’t care what anyone thinks of them bar the members of their own household, and, contingently, someone who might truly injure them. N.B. cats are proportionately more popular in France than they are in Britain. The British prefer dogs. I kind of like the French the way they are, and hope they defeat the government with dose of massive indifference.
Fines, Pigou levies, and any kind of particular excise bar those on motor fuels should NOT be revenue generators. The point of these levies should be to change people’s cost calculations where you have externalities derived from productive activity. Ideally, such assessments would be collected in accounts which would be emptied at the end of the year with a check cut to each property taxpayer or each party paying state income taxes. Your municipality has 10,000 people paying residential property taxes and 800 business paying commercial taxes and your fund has $300,000 in it at the end of the fiscal year, everyone on the rolls gets a check for $28.
As for excises on motor fuels, they could be placed in dedicated funds which finance road repairs and amortization of bond issues for road building, and NOTHING else. Registration and filing fees ought be limited by law to what was necessary to finance the agency in question (e.g. municipal courts or county clerk’s offices). Tolls and fares (for things like limited-access highways, municipal parking, and water) should be set on a marginal cost or average cost basis.
Assessments to finance general operations or transfer income are properly limited to real property taxes, general sales taxes, value-added taxes, specialty income taxes, and general income taxes, and such levies should be as simple as you can manage and discriminate between economic sectors as little as can be managed. There’s room for some ancillary taxes (on corporations, capital gains, gifts and inheritance, and imports), but these should account for < 5% of all public revenue raised).
One thing we do need to avoid is the British system of public security cameras everywhere. The only place you should see a public security camera is at the county courthouse or the federal building.
One major point of the French traffic laws is that Parisians do not drive. Not in the city, anyway. Like so much of the left, these laws are written by people who have no intention, or often need, of obeying them.
The French Revolution was a revolution of Parisians and the French were plagued by revolts in La France périphérique
The Jacobins destroyed Lyons. Massacred a hundred thousand.
You will see La France périphérique in the stories of the revolt , which is far from over.
One major point of the French traffic laws is that Parisians do not drive. Not in the city, anyway. Like so much of the left, these laws are written by people who have no intention, or often need, of obeying them.
If it’s not an inter-regional thoroughfare, the vehicle-and-traffic law of the central government should never apply. France is witlessly centralized, for one thing.
Recently came the news of mobile radars
Do they know they can use lasers for this purpose?
Be careful in the UK. They have traffic cameras everywhere. They are posted so the driver is warned, mostly.
I just saw a news item claiming that driving a car in Singapore requires a $40K registration that lasts 10 years. Hardly representative of anyplace else though.
Also, the news had photos of pole mounted radar in France that were routinely wrapped in black plastic and duct tape by irate motorists; presumably to defeat the camera ID system.
Here is CA they’ve announced a substantial increase in auto reg. fees based on the value of the auto. Fortunately, our old Honda is close to worthless, and the newer Ford isn’t very expensive.
The trial balloon that I’ve heard here in the U.S. repeatedly, that worries me, is the scheme to tax all autos by the mile, replacing (or adding to?) the gas tax. So all cars must have GPS and a continuous connection to the internet? Just so the gov. can tax correctly, of course. They promise never to abuse that system for other purposes.
The San Jose pol that proposed legislation for the above made these two claims:
1) Autos are rapidly converting to electric or plug-in hybrid and the gov. is losing revenue. (So he obviously doesn’t care about maintaining an incentive for more people to convert to electrics, thereby helping the environment.)
2) Everybody already carries an iPhone around so your location privacy, and privacy in general, is already gone. So why worry about yet another location snooping system? He really said that.
My understanding is that all new Hondas have GPS and continuous internet connection as standard. Arrgh! (If I can locate the correct RF chip maybe I can just hammer a Philips screwdriver through it?)
I thought the Singapore item might be off, but it isn’t. Singapore dollar is about US$0.73. But keep in mind that Singapore is an island of 279 square miles, and apparently 2 bridges to Malaysia.
https://www.lta.gov.sg/content/ltaweb/en/roads-and-motoring/owning-a-vehicle/registering-your-vehicle/registration-of-cars.html
Speed cameras, mostly forewarned; mobile speed cameras, always forewarned; random roadside alcohol and drug testing…we have it all in Australia.
Lots of revenue spinning there. How do you run a social-welfare paradise without other people’s money?
we have it all in Australia.</i
When I was there pubs had breathalyzers by the door. For a dollar you could test yourself before leaving. Also “drink driving” laws were draconian. Not as bad a Norway but bad. My last visit was 30 years ago.
Europe has been dying since 1914. It’s self-imposed idiocy.
What’s scary is that the ‘elites’ want to do the same here.
Very sad.
TommyJay,
My understanding is that all new Hondas have GPS and continuous internet connection as standard. Arrgh! (If I can locate the correct RF chip maybe I can just hammer a Philips screwdriver through it?)
I don’t know what kind of antenna this tracking-gear uses, but it certainly needs to have an unobstructed antenna.
The signal needs to be transmitted from the antenna to the electronics. This could be a small-gauge coax-type cable. The transmission cable must be properly connected to both the antenna and the electronics, for this system to work.
The electronics requires electrical power to work. It gets power from the vehicle 12v system.
I have a used laptop with a built-in camera. The camera software was activating itself, and the modem indicated activity at the same time. The camera must have an unobstructed view out the little hole its mounted in.
Robots taking over? Artificial Intelligence making us obsolete? Yeah well … here, hold my beer.
You can count on this sort of thing to continue until there is a really violent backlash against it, including, but not limited to, targeted assassinations. I’m unsure about how long this will take but this sort of thing always ends in guns, riots, and widespread violence. That or those people under the thumb of their government just become drones, and people once free are not easily turned into drones. Sad, but until the government agencies and employees and controllers learn to fear for their own safety there is nothing to stop the techno-creep of these creepy deep-state edicts and rules.
“Reason will not decide at last: the sword will decide. ” — Robinson Jeffers
All socialistic systems will gradually evolve toward ever greater authoritarianism, until ALL thought, speech and behavior has been catagorized as either forbidden or mandatory. That trend is today evident in every Western society.
Gerald,
You have the right of it. Armed force, naked violence is the only thing that will stop those who seek power and control because in the final analysis, they will resort to whatever level of violence is needed to secure that control.
Their lust for power and control is insatiable because power and control can never satiate the malady that ails their souls.
This is true for all who seek to rule over others. They are rabid dogs, pretending to be sheepdogs. Rabid dogs must be put down and cancers cut out of the body. The American Left is a societal cancer.
I don’t know why this seems such a surprise to everybody. We have all of those things here in the USA, some of them for quite a while.
Speed camera’s – check
Red Light cameras – check
Public surveillance cameras – check
Fixed traffic Radar, (in some places, yep.) – check
Mobile radar, (Absolutely everywhere, in every highway patrol car!) – check
We even had a universal 55mph speed limit for about 20 years! It even included places like Montana, Wyoming, and Texas. Remember that?**
So, we are not so much better off.
** I once heard it said that driving across Texas at 55mph wasn’t a trip, it was a career.
In Washington DC last year drivers received a total of 2,760,482 traffic citations. The population of Washington DC is 693,972. Traffic cameras are everywhere in DC.
In Washington DC last year drivers received a total of 2,760,482 traffic citations. The population of Washington DC is 693,972. Traffic cameras are everywhere in DC.
More than 4 million people live in the DC commuter belt.
So France is catching up on the Netherlands with traffic radar traps.
Netherlands has never had signs warning of them, and most of them are in unmarked cars or stationed in camouflaged positions by cops in unmarked cars.
It’s got to the point where people brake hard whenever they see something even remotely out of place along the side of the road, whether they’re speeding or not.
Road safety? It’s got worse, as the irregular driving this causes leads to accidents.
It’s all about revenue, as becomes apparent when seeing the distribution of cameras which are situated not in known dangerous areas (where people tend to be careful and not speed) but on long stretches of open road hidden behind overpasses and in treelines.
A couple years ago, my son-in-law’s father gave us a ride from Somerset to Heathrow. He, like most Englishmen, is not a timid driver. We zipped along, passing people on the wrong side of the road, whizzing around abundant traffic circles, etc. Everyone around us drove like that . . .
Until we got to the camera-controlled M3. Instantaneously, every vehicle slowed to the exact speed (which was then only 50 mph*). Every vehicle maintained the exact speed, and thus, its exact position. Like buckets on a conveyor belt. No one drove faster or slower than anyone else.
It was eerie. Chilling, even. Big Brother was watching.
* England was testing its “smart” roadway.
Mike K on January 15, 2019 at 3:08 pm at 3:08 pm said:
One major point of the French traffic laws is that Parisians do not drive. Not in the city, anyway. Like so much of the left, these laws are written by people who have no intention, or often need, of obeying them.
* * *
Gee, where have we seen that before?