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French City To Use CCTV For Parking Fines
horza writes "The city of Nice, France is rolling out 626 CCTV cameras throughout town, giving it one of the highest levels of surveillance in the world (1.8 cameras per 1000 inhabitants). The usual rhetoric was given — that they will be used solely for reducing violent crime — but the city will now begin sending out parking tickets solely based on the CCTV video evidence."
This is not the first time I've heard "this is for your own safety" arguments only to have them turn out as thinly veiled guises of trying to make money at your expense. Details escape me, but not too long ago, somewhere in the US, a town added red light cameras which took a snapshot of your car and sent you the fine for running a red light. In a matter of months, it was so successful that very few, if anybody, ran red lights anymore. You think they'd be happy - after all, they probably DID save lives. So why did they take them down? Because the revenue from tickets (those types anyway) was reduced to a big, fat 0
This also makes you wonder what else is being done "for our safety", when in reality it's just a way to take your money. Surely at least speeding enforcement must be exempt from this. Oh wait...
Rothbard was right when he said that governments only have destructive ways of making money (of course, he was referring to taxation at the time, but a valid point non the less)
seriously have you ever driven in Nice? People are double parked everywhere and at any time. The entire city is constantly jammed because two lanes streets are turned into a narrow one lane street. People just stop their car and leave them in the middle of the street blocking traffic and those parked into the proper parking zones. They even double park in intersections blocking two streets for the price of one.
Cops in Nice are useless or never to be seen and only the gendarmes seem to care about traffic violation, but they can only operate on the highway. I live on the outskirts of Nice and never ever drive into the centre, I'd even drive miles to end up in Italy where things are quieter than going inside Nice on a Saturday afternoon.
What's the other stuff they've done. They've put cameras on traffic lights so that people stop running thru red lights because 50% of all scooters and two-wheelers just run thru red lights like it was only for cars. And guess what: people complain because they've been caught doing it.
Anyone who has learned how to drive in the US, Canada, UK, EIRE, Switzerland, Germany,etc... will have a heart attack driving here.